The Heavy (9 page)

“I’m hungry,” she said.

I didn’t know what kind of fruits or vegetables our friends might have on hand, and I didn’t want to bother them with having to serve her any. Frankly, I didn’t want to bother myself with having to serve her any. She had just had dinner. And dessert. The adults had just started eating.

Bea’s request for food also seemed to take on a searing significance in the wake of what I’d just shared with the grown-ups. I suddenly felt like there was a spotlight shining on us. I imagined that while everyone was continuing to eat, they were also intently listening to see how I would react to this tricky situation.

“You had dinner already,” I reminded her.

“But I’m hungry,” Bea said. It was a routine we’d gone through many times, but never in front of other people.

“Do you want some salad?” the hostess asked readily.

“No, thanks,” I interrupted quickly. “She already ate dinner.”

“I’m still hungry,” Bea pointed out.

“Maybe you could have like a piece of fruit …,” I said, my eyes scanning the kitchen.

“If she’s hungry, she can have some salad,” my friend offered again.

“Okay,” said Bea.

I stared at the salad. I hadn’t yet calculated the traffic light content of the small bowl I had served myself. I figured that the tuna was a green light or a yellow light. The potatoes and eggs, another green. The olive oil, a green or yellow. Then there were the olives, and how many olives equaled a green light again?

“I’m sorry. Bea,” I interjected. “It’s got a lot of dressing on it, and—”

“Just olive oil!” my friend interrupted. “It’s super healthy!”

I forced a grim smile. “I know, but—”

“Just a little!” my friend insisted, and pushed the bowl into Bea’s eager hands.

I didn’t know what to do. My friend was being a hospitable dinner hostess, responding caringly to a child complaining of being hungry. I was trying to be a good mother, an advocate for my child’s health. But I also wanted to be a polite dinner guest. Bea happily devoured the salad as I sat silently.

Long afterward, my friend who’d hosted us that night and I discussed this incident. I described it as one of the many ways our food issues turned social situations stressful as I tried to navigate the triangle between what other people thought I should feed Bea, what I thought was best for her, and what Bea wanted to eat.

“I can’t believe how pushy I was!” my friend marveled in retrospect.

“You only did what any normal person would do in that situation,” I assured her.

Overseeing the diet of an overweight child is an uneasy position to be in. It is going to cause social strain. I readily admit that I am not the most socially adept person, and I don’t handle tension well. While I felt I had failed Bea that night by eventually capitulating to the Niçoise salad, there was certainly no blame to be placed on anyone else.

But I was mad at myself for not being more protective. I felt bad that I’d let her eat food we hadn’t planned on, just to avoid some social discomfort. It wasn’t the one bowl of salad that worried me. It was the very real fear that not sticking to our strategy 100 percent, all the time, left the door open for more such moments to creep in. I’d been on enough diets myself and had tried enough halfhearted measures with Bea to realize what was required. The salad incident served as a reminder that if we took our commitment to the rules of our program too lightly, the entire endeavor would collapse. I had to think like an alcoholic trying to stay on the wagon. One drink is too many, and a thousand is not enough.

So the next time, I spoke up. We were at Bea’s cousin’s birthday party. I saw her heading for the M&M bowl on the buffet table, even before lunch was served.

“Hey!” I shouted. And, though grinning, I widened my eyes and opened up my hands as if to say,
What the hell?
Bea caught my gaze, coyly slipped a few of the M&Ms into her mouth, and ran off.

When the kids sat down to lunch, each place setting featured a juice box. I replaced Bea’s with a water bottle.

“Aww, I want the juice!” she whined.

“I know, but it’s just
juice
,” I said with an exaggerated sneer, sending up its inconsequence, trying to forge an intimate camaraderie over the idea of wasting calories on a drink—like all the other kids were ignorant for mindlessly drinking what they were given, whereas she was the clever strategist. “We’re going to have cake soon! So let’s just drink water.” She didn’t argue. I knew she wasn’t really into juice anyway, so that was an easy savings.

When the cake was served, Bea literally licked her plate clean. David turned his piece over to me after a few bites.

“I don’t like it,” he said, as if it had been a dose of cough medicine.

“No?” I asked innocently, taking a bite as though doing so for verification purposes. I ate the entire rest of the piece just to be sure it wasn’t bad.

Amid the frantic goodbyes, goody-bag distribution, jacket-locating, happy birthday wishes, and general post-sugar-consumption mayhem, I saw Bea approach the buffet table again. She was staring at the cookie plate. I pushed my way through the crowd, calling out to her.

“Bea! What are you doing?” I said, raising my voice above the din.

“I want a cookie,” she said simply.

“You can’t have a cookie,” I said.

“Why not?” she asked. She knew why not.

“You just had cake! We had a whole discussion about what you were going to eat here. You could have had the cookies, the cake, or the M&Ms, but you cannot have all of them. You picked the cake. You’re done.”

I’m not sure anyone actually paid attention to us. But I understood that if they had, they might have found the exchange embarrassing. The high-strung mom nagging her overweight daughter about cookies and candy. I imagined their thoughts:

Jesus, lady, what is your problem? Just let her have the stupid cookies. She’s seven years old. This is her childhood. Childhood is cookies and birthday cake. Eating cookies is not a disease; it’s a small and simple pleasure. You are ruining her innocent years by making every treat a sin. Did you ever weigh the damage of your nagging eye against her buoyancy and joy?

God, yes. I considered that point of view every day. There were
countless moments of refusing, denying, questioning, and bargaining between Bea and me. Instances when she was asked to take responsibility for controlling her eating when other kids were reveling in the pleasure of not having to think about it. I persisted despite incessant doubts because, I told myself, the end result would be worthwhile, and that in its way, my pestering her was not just annoying, it was important.

To me, intervening when I saw Bea about to make a bad choice needed to become a reflexive reaction, like seeing her about to wander into a busy street. I didn’t know if this anti-obesity undertaking could really work, but I did know that it was sure to fail if I gave in “just this once.” Being the killjoy around food was not fun, and it wasn’t how I was naturally inclined to act. But it was a crucial part of the process for Bea. In order to keep her resolve strong, my will could not bend.

It called to mind when my kids were toddlers and I went to all those workshops their preschools offered on parenting. You know how it is when you’re a new parent: you read the books, scan the online message boards, and attend the lectures in hopes that someone will tell you how to raise your kids right.

The first workshop I attended was on sleep training. As with almost every other behavioral issue with children, including potty training, limit setting, and sibling relations, the parenting expert exhorted us to be consistent. If the child toddles out of her room when she’s supposed to be going to sleep, you wordlessly bring her back to bed. Make the mistake of smiling and greeting her and letting her play for a few minutes, and your authority is shot. Let her cuddle in your bed for one night, and you’re back to square one, having lost all credibility as a disciplinarian. Kids need to know what the limits are and that their parents will enforce them. It’s actually scary for a child, the expert told us, to feel there are no parameters.
They are not equipped to run your household, she said. So don’t let them.

When I make a deal with one of my kids, I expect that child to hold up his or her end of the bargain. If they promise to take their baths once they complete a round of Othello, I am not pleased if I walk in ten minutes later and find they’ve finished the game and started a new one. If a trip to the movies is contingent upon their not getting into a fight all morning, the outing is canceled the moment one kid provokes a sibling argument. Homework is done before computer games are played, period.

Every day our family engages in multiple tiny negotiations, and I take some pride in delivering on my promises and following through on my threats. Though sleep training may have been the exception to the rule (you’ll recall the ten or eleven o’clock bedtimes mentioned earlier), I didn’t just sit through those toddler-parenting workshops—I took them to heart. If I commit to something, my consistency is pretty consistent.

If all of Bea’s meals had been prepared and served by me and eaten in private, our weight-loss journey would have been a radically different experience. But food is public. Food is social. Ultimately I was going to have to let Bea eat with, and under the supervision of, other people. The prospect caused me some anxiety. I didn’t trust anyone else to understand her dietary requirements, let alone love her enough to protect her progress. So I didn’t let go of the apron strings easily.

But while these minor public scuffles over food weren’t fun, I don’t think they were so different from the mom-versus-kid limit-setting disagreements many other families engaged in over sweets. What did get significantly more stressful were the times when I had turned Bea over to the care of another adult and returned to find that bad choices had been made while she wasn’t on my watch.
At those times I felt frustrated and helpless that I couldn’t control everything.

Part of the problem was that communicating Bea’s nutritional needs to others was a delicate matter. At first I was up front about it. I clearly and forthrightly told whatever grown-up I was leaving in charge what the situation was, as though it were no big deal.

“What were you guys going to do for a snack?” I asked her best friend’s mom as Bea and her little pal prepared to go off on a playdate together one afternoon.

“I don’t know,” the friend’s mom answered. I should mention Bea’s best friend is a skinny kid.

“Okay, because Bea should pretty much just have fruit or some vegetables. Maybe a small snack, like under a hundred calories,” I said.

“How about a yogurt?” the mom suggested.

“Ehhh …,” I said, grimacing. Yogurt was one of those foods whose diet value was, in my opinion, overrated. A regular container of low-fat yogurt is a yellow light on our program—and Bea only gets one green light for snack. If she ate a 4-ounce container of fat-free yogurt, she could get it down to a green light. “A small one,” I allowed.

“Okay,” the mom said as Bea rolled her eyes at the indignity of the conversation.

“If you had a peanut allergy, I would be telling your friends’ parents that you couldn’t have anything with nuts,” I insisted later, when we discussed it one-on-one. “Your problem is that you are overweight, so you can’t have things with lots of calories. It’s not that different.”

Iron-clad logic, right? Bea didn’t see it my way. She thought I was being annoying, unfair, and a drag.

I understood her feelings, and I see how obesity
is
annoying,
unfair, and a drag. But guess what? Life isn’t fair. Imparting that wisdom to our children is an inevitable part of parenting. Obesity is a medical condition, not just an aesthetic one. It can be a life-threatening disease, so it makes sense that we would treat it as such. No one should be any more embarrassed by it than they are to have epilepsy or ADHD. Was the declaration of being on a diet an admission of being overweight? Was admitting being overweight any more humiliating (or obvious) than just
being
overweight? Wasn’t it less embarrassing to acknowledge it and let people know you were aware of the problem and doing something about it?

My MO has always been two-pronged: cover up my flaws as best I can, then lay them out on the table for discussion to expose my insecurity preemptively. Throughout all the years that I’ve battled with my weight, even as I sought to hide my body under layers of obfuscating clothing, I fessed up about my feelings to others. I was the girl you could overhear groaning, “Ugh, I am
so fat
,” as I patted my distended belly. In the same way, if I had an obvious pimple on my face, I would attack it with concealer, then find a way to work it into conversation, just so everyone knew that I knew that they noticed it, and they shouldn’t feel awkward about it.

I’m not saying this is the best way to disarm people’s judgment, but it was
my
coping mechanism. And there was something of a vigilante feeling about it. I was acknowledging the existence of potbellied, pimply people and identifying as one of them. I wasn’t going so far as to be out and
proud
, but at least I was out.

In Bea’s case, to allay the potential awkwardness involved in discussing an obese child’s dietary restrictions, I wanted to be very plainspoken about our predicament. But Bea wasn’t a fan of that approach, so I usually confined my dictates about what Bea could eat to phone calls, text messages, or emails with her friends’ parents or caregivers before the playdate started. The problem, however,
was that even when the information was communicated, parents of kids who were not overweight often failed to grasp the gist or strictness of Bea’s eating limitations.

The most common mistake was that the grown-up in charge would think,
Okay, I got it, Bea needs to eat healthful snacks
. Which all too often ended up in the land of 300-calorie snacks of yogurt and almonds. Almonds, like yogurt, have enjoyed some kick-ass PR over the past few years, emerging as an ideal, all-natural combination of fiber, protein, and good fats in a handy, portable size. The only problem is that at seven calories per tiny nut, a handful of them can easily reach 200 calories. A yellow light. Double what Bea is allowed for a snack. And it’s basically like bird food. So unless you’re really into almonds, I don’t know why you’d want to eat them as a snack if you’re a kid trying to lose weight. But nuts found their way into Bea’s hands on a few playdates.