Authors: Dara-Lynn Weiss
Other parents took my request for a “small” snack to heart, but missed the mark. A “little” ice cream cone—which a mom fully aware of our weight-loss effort once bought for Bea—doesn’t quite cut it. Indeed, what passes for a small snack to most parents—frozen yogurt, an individual-size bag of Pirate’s Booty, cheese and crackers—seems totally legitimate until you break down the calorie content and see it’s two or three times what Bea is allowed.
I understood then and I understand all the more now that no one other than someone deeply involved in this kind of effort can easily grasp the specifics: how few calories an overweight child is allowed when she’s trying to lose weight, how controlled portion sizes need to be for a child who is inclined to overeat. Bea’s allotted calories could be squandered and exceeded so easily. I knew that if everyone who provided Bea with food let just a few extra bites slide, that would add up to a whole lot of excess food over time.
I know, generally, that parents and babysitters genuinely thought they were giving Bea something that was healthful and diet friendly. Certainly they shouldn’t have to deprive their own children of ice cream, almonds, or anything else they’re used to, just because they’ve been nice enough to invite Bea over. But for me, as a parent trying to manage every snack, it’s an understatement to say it’s a challenge.
For Bea, who was there to play and who would no doubt much rather join in fully while there, all this could be confusing and burdensome. What was she supposed to do when presented with a snack she coveted, which her friend was eating, and which a grown-up entrusted with her care had chosen for her? Of course she accepted the snack every time. And then I would show up, and a little hell would break loose.
One day I came to pick Bea up from gymnastics class. She’d gone there with her friend and her friend’s babysitter, who’d provided the girls with a snack en route. I’d texted the babysitter earlier in the day and asked her to limit Bea’s snack to 100 calories, plus any fresh fruits and vegetables. She’d confirmed that was what she’d do.
When I showed up, I watched the last few minutes of class. After having found a succession of leotards too uncomfortable at the beginning of the semester, Bea had opted to wear a T-shirt and leggings to every class. As she stretched and jumped alongside a dozen normal-to-underweight girls in sleek gymnastics outfits, their images reflected in the mirror that spanned the wall of the studio, I wondered if she felt different. Was her decision to forgo a leotard truly a comfort-driven decision, or was there some element of wanting to hide her body?
My heart swelled as I watched her gamely execute her calisthenics,
occasionally tripping over her feet but recovering with a big smile. As class ended, she ran over to me, and I enveloped her in a proud hug. As I helped her put on her shoes, she resumed eating the snack she’d apparently started before class: a cup of ramen noodle soup.
I know it seems like a total overreaction, but at the time I was so thrown by the sight of this cup of noodles that I almost couldn’t focus my eyes on Bea’s shoes.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
“It was my snack,” Bea said, pausing from her slurping.
“You cannot eat that,” I said, quietly but sharply. “Why are you eating that?”
“Okay, okay,” she said, putting down the noodles. We stood up to leave, and I mumbled a distracted thank-you and goodbye to Bea’s friend and her babysitter.
“Sorry,” Bea said as we walked down the hallway lobby.
And then I felt totally stupid. It wasn’t Bea’s fault she had eaten some noodles her friend’s babysitter had given her. It wasn’t the babysitter’s fault that she had incorrectly surmised it was a reasonable snack. Maybe it was my fault for not having sent Bea to class with something to eat. Maybe it wasn’t anybody’s fault.
Moments before, the fact that Bea had sucked down a 300-calorie soup seemed to upend everything we’d been working for. But Bea’s sweet, totally unnecessary apology made me realize I couldn’t make her feel bad about it.
“I shouldn’t have gotten so upset,” I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m sorry.”
We walked past a table where a couple of young students were hosting a bake sale to raise money for their gymnastics team.
“Oh,” Bea said, gesturing to the baked goods for sale. “I also
had a cookie. I had a dollar in my backpack. And I asked the girls, ‘What on this table costs a dollar?’ and they said,
‘Everything
is a dollar!’ So I got a cookie.”
It makes me laugh when I think about it now, but at that moment it sure didn’t seem funny. I felt defeated. The cookie bumped her snack up to a red light. She’d exceeded her snack allowance by the same amount of food she was allotted for dinner.
I didn’t make her feel bad about the cookie, but I had to account for it somehow. I felt the day starting to crumble nutritionally, and with it, the week. It was like when I was in high school and worried about blowing an exam. I rationalized my panic: that one test would affect my grade that quarter, which would affect my annual report card, which would affect my grade point average, which would affect my chances of getting into the college of my choice, which might affect my future career. These mistakes had a way of snowballing in my mind. I had to figure out how to correct our course.
So back at home, after a brief hesitation, I scraped the pasta off her dinner plate, leaving her only a small piece of chicken and vegetables to eat. I didn’t do it as a punishment—I believed she ate those noodles innocently (the cookie was another story, but I let that count as her afternoon snack). I had to be the tough one and enforce the rules. Ramen and cookie for snack equals no pasta with dinner. It was an important accounting, not just for her as the eater of the food but also for me as the server of the food.
I vowed to make an effort to be understanding about her occasional errors in judgment. I had to remember she was a kid and that I was asking for adult-size levels of maturity and responsibility from her. But I did feel it was important to teach her that she can’t go through life expecting grown-ups to make all her food decisions
for her. She needed to take all she had learned about herself and food over these months and say no when it’s appropriate, or be willing to trade out something else later.
But tension could arise even when I was the one making the food choices. Because, quite simply, our family’s decision to make Cool Whip Free and Diet Coke part of our children’s diets rubbed some other parents the wrong way.
During one of my early reconnaissance missions to the supermarket, I discovered sugar-free whipped cream, which, at only five calories for two tablespoons, seemed like a minor miracle. It turned our boring bowls of strawberries into towering parfaits for a scant ten or twenty additional calories.
When I needed something with a little more staying power—something I could send to school with Bea’s lunch so she could dip berries into it—I graduated to Cool Whip Free, which didn’t melt after being dispensed from its container. This preternatural tendency probably has something to do with the confection’s synthetic composition. I confess I found its hardiness a little spooky. But it jazzed up Bea’s lunch bag so much, enhancing the prospect of eating berries—
again
—while the kids sitting next to her scarfed down candy or snack bars. It wasn’t a staple of her diet; she ate just a dollop of it every couple of days.
And each tablespoon of this
unmeltable substance had only 7.5 calories, so I welcomed it into my home. It served a purpose.
Cool Whip Free became part of a dessert I devised in which I plopped a spoonful of the stuff into a mini phyllo cup (17.5 calories each), with a juicy blackberry, pair of blueberries, or section of strawberry on top as a pretty and colorful garnish. I called these “mini fruit tarts,” and they looked really cute and tasted pretty good. Sweets-averse David showed his typical lack of interest in them, but Jeff admitted they were decent. Most important, Bea liked them, and, perhaps absurdly, I was quite proud of them.
Late one afternoon, Bea and I decided to make a batch so that she could bring them in for a celebration they were having at school the next day. I knew there would be lots of tempting, fattening offerings available, and preferred Bea to have a lower-calorie option. We were out with Bea’s friend and her mom, and we stopped in at the grocery store to get the necessary ingredients. Bea picked up the Cool Whip Free. I couldn’t find the mini phyllo cups.
Time was ticking, and we still had to make these little tarts (admittedly quick, but time-consuming in volume enough for the class). With an inflexibility born of my intense focus on getting this task done, I couldn’t imagine coming up with a similarly diet-friendly alternative at that point.
“Okay. We have to go to the other store,” I decided. I was pretty sure they’d be in stock at the giant supermarket many blocks away.
I was trying to get Bea on board with the plan to leave her friend in order to pursue mini phyllo cups when the friend’s mom intervened.
“What is it you guys are making?” she asked. She took the Cool Whip Free from Bea’s hands and started selectively reading off the ingredients. “Water, corn syrup, hydrogenated vegetable oil, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavor, modified food starch, xanthan
and guar gums, polysorbate 60, polysorbate 65, sorbitan monostearate, sodium hydroxide …”
“Okay, thanks,” I said, allowing a hint of my annoyance to seep through my smile. I had an hour to concoct a low-calorie snack for Bea’s entire class and didn’t appreciate the health lecture.
“Bea, why would you want to eat all these chemicals?” she asked. She was being playful, but she was definitely trying to impart a nutrition lesson that I figured she felt I had failed to teach. Maybe she was even implying that she resented my foisting these unhealthful ingredients on her child, who was Bea’s classmate and who would be present at the next day’s event where my mini fruit tarts were to be served.
I said we had to check another store for the missing ingredient. I took Bea’s hand and we left the supermarket for the judgment-free aisles of the other store, where we bought our mini phyllo cups, Cool Whip Free, and berries in peace.
I understood where my friend was coming from. And though I was irritated that she would try to make Bea (or me) feel bad about what we were eating while knowing full well that we were on this weight-loss program, I had to remember that just a few months before, I had not been that different from her. I had made food purchasing decisions based partially on the healthfulness of the product. If I could get something organic at roughly the same price as the non-organic, I chose the former. If there was a whole-grain version of something that looked about as tasty as the more processed variety, I went with the whole grains.
No doubt, processed foods are a worse choice nutritionally than whole foods. And I am not immune to concern about the possibility of long-term health risks associated with our population’s consumption of preservatives and artificial sweeteners and coloring agents. I did not actively seek to add artificial ingredients and
fat or sugar substitutes to my children’s diets. But I also didn’t shy away from them when they showed up in foods that made Bea’s journey a bit easier and more kid friendly.
No normal child can entirely avoid being exposed to junk food. It would have been unrealistic to ask Bea to follow a diet devoid of carbs and processed foods. I mean, where would we have drawn the line on “processed” anyway? White rice? Grape jelly? Canned tuna? Hummus? It’s hard to know, as an average consumer, when things really start to get ugly from an ingredients standpoint.
Based on our lifestyle, Jeff and I chose a weight-loss program that allowed Bea to eat everything in restrained amounts, because that was a way to teach her how to manage real-world eating for the long term. It would not have made sense to try to exclude the kinds of foods that a growing number of parents look down on as “bad” or “unhealthy.”
Since beginning this diet, I had found my priorities shifting. Instead of looking for whole grains and organic ingredients, I now compared calorie content, fat grams, and portion sizes. I paid some attention to fiber, but only because I knew it would keep Bea fuller longer, and possibly aid in the process of getting the food out of her body once it was digested. The 80-calorie all-fruit frozen pops I had previously bought (and continued to buy for David) seemed hulking and ignorant compared with the slender 20-calorie sugar-free Popsicles I now purchased for Bea. I wasn’t happy that the reduced calorie content also brought with it maltodextrin, aspartame, artificial flavors, red 40, yellow 6, and blue 1. But I accepted them because the snack better served the purposes of our larger goal.
In the stumbling-across-information-that-will-prove-your-own-hunch department, it was around this time that I found an
article that had been published a few months earlier on CNN’s website with the headline “Twinkie Diet Helps Nutrition Professor Lose 27 Pounds.” It described the ten-week, 1,800-calorie-a-day junk food diet undertaken by Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University. He not only lost weight and body fat, his “bad” cholesterol went down, and his “good” cholesterol went up. He ate some healthful food and took vitamin supplements, but two-thirds of his calories came from snack cakes.
In the article, Haub was careful not to advocate this diet as any kind of model others should follow in the interest of health. It did, however, illustrate the importance of portion control and calorie reduction when seeking weight loss, and that fewer pounds on an overweight body will improve overall health.
A spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association was quoted in the article as saying, “When you lose weight … even if it’s with packaged foods, generally you will see these markers [such as cholesterol and blood pressure] improve.”
Haub also said that he didn’t think dieters should seek a “total removal” of junk foods from their diets in favor of fruits and vegetables. “It may be healthy, but not realistic,” he said. I loved this guy in that moment. I had lived by these tenets in my own life, and had, over the long haul, maintained a healthy weight. Bea had become obese on a healthful diet. Her father struggles with his weight, even though he almost never eats highly processed foods. This article confirmed my confidence in the proposition that it’s better to lose weight by eating some junk food than to eat only healthy foods and be overweight.