The Heavy (8 page)

I asked about the unlimited fruit, knowing how my family could put away bananas and oranges. The associate nutritionist assured us it was very unusual for anyone on the program to consume so much fruit that it would impede weight loss. Jeff assured her he could easily do so. She said we should see how it went, and we could adjust if we found it was becoming a problem.

Back at home, Bea and I flipped through the nutrition doctor’s book, seeking inspiration among the recipes. I headed to the supermarket and stocked up on diet-friendly foods. I bought pounds and pounds of fruit: oranges, apples, bananas, strawberries, grapes, melon. I filled the refrigerator with carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers. I chopped up vegetables and cooked them in broth to make a “free” soup. It was time-consuming. And pricey.

I learned, for the first time in my life, what kinds of apples I liked and didn’t like. I’d eaten them infrequently and certainly never bought them, so it was interesting to learn that they offered so much variation. The green ones were too tart for me, but Bea loved them. I preferred the sweet Galas. Honeycrisps were David’s favorites, but they were hard to find where we live. Who knew that comparing apples to apples was so complicated?

In response to some consumers’ desire for portion control, snack manufacturers have begun meting out their cookies, chips, and crackers into individually packaged 100-calorie snack packs. Pleasantly surprised to see that any one of them was a green light, suitable for Bea’s allocated morning or after-school snacks, I began to rethink my lockstep disdain for foods that come in sealed bags within cardboard boxes. In a world where Bea was going to have to hear the word
no
a lot, it dawned on me that these little doctor-sanctioned doses of nutritional vice could help keep her from feeling
deprived. I threw aside my ingrained cultural shame about feeding kids processed foods and bought a wide array: fudge-stripe cookies, chocolate-covered pretzels, Doritos, Cheez-It crackers, Honey Maid cinnamon thin crisps. Packaged foods I would have been ashamed to be seen buying previously now held a certain uneasy place in my heart, and in Bea’s diet.

Here is how our daily meals started to evolve:

We all had two green lights to spend, and Bea and I generally invested them in high-fiber cereal and skim milk, a mini bagel with low-fat cream cheese, or, when we had time to actually cook something, oatmeal or an egg and whole-wheat toast. David continued to eat his preferred bagel and cream cheese, cereal and skim milk, or baguette slices with light butter. He insisted on being served a larger portion, which I acceded to since he always left some of it over, with the result that he ate the same amount we did. Jeff made himself eggs and toast.

Bea and I would have a 100-calorie pack and a piece of fruit, she at school and me at home. David didn’t have a snack period at school, so I applied his green light to his after-school snack.

An ever-evolving project, lunch for Bea tended to contain one serving of protein (salami, turkey bacon, chicken), reduced-calorie bread or a small tortilla, a piece of fruit, some raw vegetables, and
some little “extra,” be it a wedge of low-fat cheese or a few crackers.

David ate five pigs in blankets, an orange, cooked carrots, pretzels or breadsticks, and a 90-calorie Rice Krispies Treat. Every day. He’s a creature of habit.

I would eat a toasted light English muffin with melted nonfat cheese and a poached egg, with a slice of tomato and onion. Or a Smuckers Uncrustables peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Or a six-piece tuna sushi roll with no avocado, since the avocado jacked up the meal another traffic light.

Given that he was eating on the go at work, some days Jeff had a salad for lunch, and other days he ate a large restaurant meal. He claimed that either this diet would work for him or it wouldn’t, but given that we ate so many meals apart, he felt it was impractical for me to manage his choices too much.

David usually had a slice of pizza or a frozen fruit bar. For Bea, I innovated green-light s’mores, using two chocolate graham crackers, a marshmallow, and our toaster-oven broiler. They were delicious and she ate them almost every day. Plus fruit.

Dinner was a challenge. More so than ever before, I became a short-order cook to suit everyone’s needs. I needed to make two full and separate meals every night. I would carefully research and craft a diet-friendly entrée for Bea, her father, and me, then throw together a pasta-based dish with some protein and vegetables for David. David might dine on meatballs and spaghetti, chicken cutlets
with broccoli, or pasta and Brussels sprouts. The rest of us would enjoy something like chicken tikka masala, turkey meatloaf, or Korean barbecue beef in lettuce wraps.

I know it was a failure of my parenting not to work harder to force David to eat what everyone else was eating, but my duty was to provide all members of the family with a meal they liked that met their nutritional needs. Getting David to accept a wider variety of foods was a nice goal, but there’s no way around the reality that it took a definite backseat to the more urgent requirement of helping Bea get healthy.

I was exhausted by the arguments over food that came at me from all sides, so I tried to preempt at least some of them by not serving David anything that was “too spicy” (read: contained any seasoning other than salt) or in some other way didn’t meet the narrow preferences of his palate. It was easier to cook a second dinner. And he always ate a healthful, well-balanced meal. It was just usually a different one than the rest of us had. I told myself that once Bea’s eating was squared away, my focus could and would shift to addressing David’s pickiness.

I’m no great chef, but I did sort of enjoy finding recipes that Bea and her dad would like and that could be served in a reasonable portion size but still come in under 300 calories. As if food wasn’t taking up enough of my attention when I was at home, it was also the focus of my work hours, as I reviewed that unedited cooking show footage. I was often so taken with the recipe being prepared on-screen that I’d be inspired to make it myself. And I noticed that while the chefs would sometimes talk about how healthful the dishes were, they were never specifically trying to make them low-calorie. So I started doing it myself—scaling down portion sizes and substituting ingredients so that these meals would be appropriate for a family with an overweight child.

We tried some new recipes, with varying levels of success. Some things did not benefit much calorically from being made “healthful,” and the trade-off in taste was not worthwhile. The much-anticipated brownie recipe from the nutrition doctor’s book was a huge disappointment. It required pitted dates, which not only were nearly impossible to find but also gave the finished product the disturbing mouth-feel of what I imagine it must be like to eat roaches. So what if they were only one green light each? So were two Entenmann’s Little Bites brownies, which are far more yummy, or a small homemade brownie baked with the old dieter’s substitute of unsweetened applesauce for the oil. So why bother with the pitted dates?

I also didn’t see the benefit of making chicken nuggets breaded in instant mashed potato flakes, as the nutrition doctor’s recipe dictated, rather than, say, panko or bread crumbs. But some new things we tried were winners. The black bean burger was a revelation, with complex flavor from cumin and cilantro and a satisfying chew. The turkey sloppy Joes I adapted from an online recipe, inspired by something in the doctor’s book, became a staple that I cooked nearly every week.

Most of Bea’s dinners were about half the size of what they had been. And a difficult question came up that first official week on the program—one that would recur more times during the coming months. As I placed food in front of the children at any meal, Bea would regard the contents of her plate and compare it with David’s, instantly realizing he was getting twice what she was.

“That’s not fair!” she cried. “Why does Dave get [insert inequitable food distribution allegation here]?” He would get two pieces of chicken and she would get only one. David would have a full-size bagel, while Bea got a mini. He’d have pasta, she’d have only vegetables.

The obvious truth was, of course, that she needed to lose weight and he didn’t. They both knew that. And connecting food intake with weight gain and loss is a reasonable life lesson. If you want to lose weight, you have to eat less. But when you’re hungry and you love food and your brother’s plate has twice as much food on it as yours does, that answer isn’t entirely satisfactory. It explains the reasoning but doesn’t address the unfairness.

Sometimes I’d hide behind science and say, “Because you have different nutritional needs.” Sometimes I’d try to make it sound like she didn’t really get less food: “Dave only eats half of what we give him, so you end up eating the same amount.” And sometimes I’d pass the buck and say, “Because the doctor says you can eat that much, but David gets a little more.” I was happy to have someone to put the blame on, since otherwise I was usually absorbing all the resentment.

Whatever I said, though, Bea was right. It wasn’t fair.

I relocated my extra dinner green light to earlier in the day so that my plate looked identical to Bea’s. And my husband received double what we did. That way, I could ally myself with Bea and share in the unfairness she felt. The same way she looked at her brother’s plate, I could point to Jeff’s plate.

“I wish I could eat what Daddy does, but I can’t,” I commiserated.

“If you eat like me, you’re going to look like me,” her dad teased.

“I’m eating the same amount you are,” I told her. “I know it’s not a lot. But it’s enough. Eat it and see if you’re actually still hungry.”

She always was. Whereas my body was used to small portions and I could be satisfied after a tiny slider burger or a bowl of soup,
Bea’s body still had to adjust. It wasn’t an easy transition, and I heard about it plenty.

I also went a bit overboard at first, trying to make the program appealing by translating as many green lights as possible into junky, kid-friendly food. That first week, we never exceeded our green-light quota, but processed snacks accounted for three or four of Bea’s ten green lights per day.

I quickly realized this was my own pathology projected onto her. Bea has a far more varied palate than I do. Sugary snacks, while welcome, are not necessarily superior in her estimation to, say, hummus and carrots. I tried to remind myself of this as I planned out her meals. She didn’t always share my proclivity for indulgence over quantity, and it was incumbent upon me to instill good habits in her. But I would kick myself anytime she asked for a dessert after dinner and I had squandered a green light on some stupid salad dressing that I could have saved for a Skinny Cow ice cream bar.

I was pleased with how that first week went. There were no major meltdowns, no seismic shifts in how our household operated. All of us had eaten foods we liked, in quantities that generally satisfied us. Bea had been a champ at adhering to the program, eating what I gave her and grudgingly accepting my limit setting when she asked for more.

The kids and I headed in to see the nutrition doctor after that week. This was the first time they hadn’t had the privilege of missing school for the appointment. They were irked that this nutrition thing was impinging on the first hours of their weekend.

Are you coming to meet us?
I texted Jeff when he was a no-show in the waiting room. No response.

I had brought Bea a small snack bar to eat en route to the
appointment—something with little weight, so it wouldn’t show up on the scale. I couldn’t bring myself to look as she weighed in.

“Lost almost a pound!” the doctor announced.

It wasn’t a huge amount of weight. And secretly I’d been hoping for a full pound loss. But it was a decisive move in the right direction and certainly a faster loss than the projected one or two pounds a
month
. I felt relieved. The machine had been set in motion.

As our consultation with the doctor ended, my phone beeped with a text from Jeff:
Just got out of a meeting. Sorry. Can I join you now?

Never mind
, I typed.
We’re finished
.

As we left the office, I knew that the level of enthusiasm and privacy we’d enjoyed during the first week on the program could not last. We weren’t always going to feel so motivated, and I wasn’t always going to be able to control every meal. Things were going to get harder.

One night the whole family went to our friends’ house for dinner, joining a number of other couples and a large contingent of kids.

The kids ate first: pasta and vegetables. I carefully portioned out an acceptably small dish of penne with Parmesan and sparingly served Bea some vegetables, which had been prepared with oil and therefore were not the “free” vegetables we ate at home. While David ate a large portion—penne with Parmesan being one of his all-time favorites—Bea’s dinner was pretty tiny, because unlike David, she wanted to have dessert, too. Which she did, before running off to play with the other kids.

We adults hung out in the kitchen as my good friend prepared our dinner, Niçoise salad. She peeled and sliced hard-boiled eggs, spooned glistening tuna onto salad greens, added tender chunks of boiled potatoes, threw in some olives, and dressed it all with some great olive oil. It looked absolutely delicious.

With Bea safely out of earshot, I told the assembled friends
about our new food strategy and how Bea was understandably grouchy about it. I pointed out how she had complained about how much smaller her pasta serving was than anyone else’s, and how it was hard for her and tough for us to see her go through that frustration, but that it seemed necessary. Our friends were uniformly sympathetic and supportive. They all made Jeff and me feel like we were doing the right thing.

We sat down to eat. The salad was amazing.

A few minutes later Bea came into the room.