Authors: Dara-Lynn Weiss
But I was uneasy with the program’s permissiveness of certain foods in unlimited amounts—fat-free cheese, tomato juice, edamame, sugar-free Jell-O. As with the fruit, I felt that not curtailing the consumption of these foods was teaching a confusing lesson about the need for moderation. I couldn’t decide whether the benefit of letting Bea have unfettered access to these things justified the abandon with which she sometimes approached them.
On one of the weeks when the nutrition doctor herself met with us, she led a discussion about being aware of how much we’re eating, even if it’s healthful food. She told of a patient who ate low-fat cheese on reduced-calorie bread, but too many slices of each. This patient had skim milk and healthful cereal for breakfast, but too many cups. You get the picture. The point was, just because something is low-fat, low-calorie, or “healthful” does not mean it can’t make you gain weight.
This, in a nutshell, was Jeff’s problem. While my weight gains always had obvious sources in sugar, fat, and carbs, he actually loved and preferred healthful food. But volume was his main issue: tomatoes and cucumbers drizzled in tablespoons of olive oil, or wheat crisps slathered with feta cheese, or something involving a lot of chickpeas or nuts. There was no obviously villainous food
going into his body, but there was a lot of it, and many of his very nutritious choices were absolutely packed with calories.
I am aware of the irony that things such as hummus and olives made me nervous while I felt perfectly comfortable with sugar-free Jell-O. However, I reserved the right to call the shots and didn’t initially extend this generosity of spirit to soda.
I don’t like soda. Never did. As a kid, I found the carbonation unpleasant and the taste too syrupy. Regardless, I often drank diet soda, because it has no calories, occasionally water gets boring, and my preferred black iced tea is not always available. But I had never let my kids have soda. It seemed the pinnacle of completely unnatural, nutritionless, chemically engineered garbage. When other parents served their kids Coke, I was super judgmental. Caffeine, sugar, carbonation—why not just give them Red Bulls? Jeff and I let Bea have club soda, and that was it.
But one night we were out to dinner with Bea and David’s cousins, and they ordered Shirley Temples. Turning to Bea and David, the waiter said innocently, “Same for you?” I panicked. Not merely a glass of soda, but an additional shot of sugary grenadine and a maraschino cherry, just to rub it in?
David declined, requesting an orange juice instead. Soda is one of the many sweets he doesn’t care for. But before Bea could answer the waiter, I jumped in and tried to steer things to a “better” place:
“Would you like a Diet Coke?” I asked. The words felt strange in my mouth. Offering soda was weird enough; offering diet soda to a child seemed downright perverse.
“I want a Shirley Temple,” Bea said.
“You can’t have a Shirley Temple,” I said gently. “How about a club soda with a little splash of cranberry juice?” To tell you the truth, even offering the splash of cranberry juice felt like a concession,
but we were under pressure. The waiter stood by expectantly.
“No. A Shirley Temple,” Bea insisted.
“Bea, you can’t,” I replied. I laid out her options: “Diet Coke or club soda with cranberry juice?”
“Diet Coke,” she grumbled.
And from then on I let her order a diet soda any time we went out to dinner. I almost forgot how grotesque I had found the practice when other parents had done it before Bea started this diet. It wasn’t just that I wanted Bea to have a little calorie-free indulgence when we went out. A diet soda came to seem like a legitimately superior choice when compared with the sugary Shirley Temples and apple juices readily offered to kids in restaurants. I know how obscene it seems to health-conscious moms, but to cover up the lack of orange juice, milk, and smoothies in Bea’s life, I started adding six-packs of diet soda to my grocery lists.
And so we trudged along, my days mired in the monotony of maintaining a steady nutritional rhythm for each member of the family. Every morning Bea and I ate every crumb of our tiny breakfasts, while David got a larger portion but didn’t finish it. Each child headed off to school with a packed lunch containing about 100–150 calories of protein, 50–100 calories of carbohydrate, about fifty calories of dairy, and lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, with an added Rice Krispies Treat tucked into David’s lunch box.
Every night I continued to make two dinners: a bland protein with large side dishes of pasta and vegetables for David, and a carefully curated, prepared, and portion-controlled dish for me and Bea, with my husband eating the same thing in double the amount.
Every week we examined our schedule and strategized about how to avoid any potential stumbling blocks. Over and over again.
If it sounds like I did little else but plan and execute my family’s meals during this year, that’s sort of true. Yes, I worked and socialized and ran my household and had fun with my husband and kids. But my priority was Bea’s diet, and in the back of my mind, her needs influenced every decision. Kids need to be fed five or six times a day. It’s a rare plan that can be made for an activity, a vacation, a social visit, or even a simple day at home that doesn’t at some point involve food. Bea’s diet needed to be a constant consideration.
I tried to do most of this sort of planning behind the scenes, but I also brought Bea into the process so that she’d learn how to deal with food on her own. I tried to ensure that the decision making would be fun for her; we both did quite like talking about food. But I couldn’t imagine many other seven-year-olds were looking at restaurant menus online before going out to dinner, or brainstorming ideas for what they could bring to a class potluck that wouldn’t put too big a dent in their day’s allotment of calories. I wished Bea didn’t have the burden of always having to think about making “smart” or “good” choices, or sacrificing one desired food in order to enjoy another.
“I know doing this is annoying,” I told her one afternoon as we argued over what she’d choose to eat that night at a restaurant whose menu we were perusing.
“That’s my life. It’s always going to be my life, and I can’t change it,” she sighed. “It’s something I have to deal with.”
Oh, my
. “Does it make you sad?” I asked. I worried all the time that the requirements of this endeavor would damage my relationship with Bea. With food so prevalent in our lives, I felt like I was forever raising an eyebrow, questioning a choice, avoiding a tricky eating environment. Bea, in addition to being a great kid, is also just a fun person to hang out with. Food had so often been part
of the enjoyment of our special time together. What was going to happen now that our periodic giddy trips to the bakery for a cupcake had to become carefully orchestrated occurrences? When seeing a movie together no longer involved sharing a big bag of buttery popcorn? When we couldn’t spontaneously decide on a lazy Sunday afternoon to catch up with each other while baking chocolate chip cookies?
Was every restaurant dinner going to be blemished by an argument over the bread basket? Would every birthday party be made tense by a negotiation at the dessert table? Would every description of a school event she participated in devolve into an interrogation about what she ate?
Considering that litany also made me question our very lifestyle. Why is food involved in so many of our social events and recreational outings? Maybe the problem wasn’t just how we approached food in these situations but also that food was a part of them in the first place. I wondered if we were going to have to start looking at every event anew, figuring out ways to exclude food from it when eating had been an anticipated and enjoyed part of it previously. Maybe, instead of bringing lower-calorie food to a picnic in the park, we should just go to the park to play and
not have the picnic at all
. It was a whole new way of thinking, and it seemed a big shift to make.
I was proud of the relationship I’d built with Bea. I felt I had found a good balance of mothering and friendship, of leadership and silliness. I treasured our time together. I was scared that the role I’d now taken on had shifted the dynamic. Planning was replacing spontaneity. Fun was sometimes pushed out in favor of enforcement.
I was troubled by that change. I dearly hoped that what I believed in my heart—that the sacrifices we were making now would
be far outweighed by the long-term benefits to Bea’s health and happiness—was true. Even if this process couldn’t ensure that Bea would enjoy a healthy relationship to food in the future, at least we were talking about it in a frank and consistent way. While Bea certainly found my impositions annoying, I did not feel she loved me less for it. We still found ways to laugh and be close and spend special time together. There were just a lot fewer calories involved.
“It may actually sound sad, but it’s my life, you know?” Bea said. “Once you start going on a diet, it makes you feel great, but inside you know that you’re different from other people. And you’ll never be able to change that.”
Being like everyone else was important to Bea, as it is to most kids. And the hardest part of the diet for her was that it made her feel different. But she also knew that being heavy made her feel different, too. So while these discussions seemed to steal some of her innocence, making her think and act like an adult with a weight problem, we both hoped that doing so would save her from actually becoming that person.
For both Bea and me, the first thing that came to mind when we thought of a birthday party was cake. When we contemplated a visit to a new city, what we looked forward to was not the sights, not the shopping, not the hotel or the people, but the food. A visit to our friends’ house in the country? They always have that awesome natural peanut butter. That was our essential nature, and wasn’t going to change easily, if ever. It was important to plan our activities in such a way that we could accommodate some of the delicacies that were always on our minds, yet not allow them to be the central focus.
With that in mind, I prepared for our first big family vacation since we’d started the diet. And though to our family a “big” vacation is all of four days, we were going to a resort in Mexico where
we’d be eating all of our meals out. I was nervous. I had the hotel send me their restaurant menus in advance, and mentally planned out our meals.
As is my habit, I was trying, and failing, to pre-lose some weight before the trip. The idea, always, was that I’d drop a few pounds so I could enjoy the food at my destination and come back at a normal-ish weight. I don’t think I’ve ever really succeeded in achieving this goal, but I always try. Bea’s weight hadn’t gone down much the week before we left, either. I would have to be vigilant on our vacation.
We’d been to this resort before, and I knew what was likely to happen. We would have a big breakfast at the hotel buffet, then we’d get hungry around the pool midmorning and order a snack. Then we wouldn’t be hungry for lunch until about 2:00 p.m. But we’d need another small snack at around five, and then have dinner at seven-thirty or so. Not only were these quick little poolside or beach snacks neither quick nor small (we’d end up sharing a big cheesy quesadilla and chicken fingers, or getting a sandwich that came with lots of fries), they were also quite expensive. So my hope was that this time I could figure out a way to cut costs
and
calories.
The breakfast buffet was included with our room rate, so we went there every morning. Bea and I chose our breakfast very carefully—it was hard with all those amazing choices, including Mexican dishes and a table full of sweet baked goods, along with the usual bagels, cereals, eggs, and sausage. Bea usually chose a small bagel with peanut butter, and I had a couple of poached eggs and tomatoes. I asked for some to-go containers, which I loaded up with fruit (for Bea) and pigs in blankets (for David). That was our midmorning snack. We then had a proper but light lunch, and in the afternoon we’d have a snack from a stash of granola bars
and snack packs I’d brought in my suitcase from New York, plus a plum or apple from the in-room fruit bowl they refilled every day. Then we’d try to have a reasonable dinner, even though that was complicated by the fact that Bea discovered the existence of these little fried tortilla sandwiches called pork panuchas and wanted to order them every day (fortunately, they came in a reasonable appetizer size).
In this way, we were able to keep pretty much on track. Of course, there were obstacles. Homemade mango pops, pineapple smoothies, and other fruity frozen treats were handed out periodically at the pool. And one night was my birthday, so my husband arranged for dinner on the beach with bonfire s’mores and a smiley-face cake delivered to our room afterward (we each had a tiny slice, and then we sent the cake away with the housekeeping staff). I let Bea have all of it without so much as a significant glance.
My inflexibility at breakfast and strategizing around snacks made it possible for us to enjoy these excesses. And that was kind of the point: because I was willing to be the unyielding enforcer every meal of every day, we could sip a smoothie at the pool or have unforeseen s’mores on the beach. Whenever I questioned my own insistence on counting every calorie, tracking every bite, this reality would soon rear its head. Hardly a day in life goes by without some unexpected food being proffered. It was important that I maintain a Draconian level of rigidity so that we could sometimes say yes to these little surprises.
For people like me, Jeff, and Bea, the enjoyment of food is a big part of what vacation—and life—is all about.
I had found that while Jeff supported the general initiative of helping Bea get healthy, he was considerably less rigorous than I was with the execution. If it seemed fun to nibble on a few french fries at lunch with Bea, or take her for frozen yogurt on a Saturday afternoon, he did it.
I appreciated that he got her yogurt instead of ice cream, but not when she’d already had her afternoon snack. And it’s good that they only ate a few fries (if their unwavering account is to be trusted), but they really should have had zero.