The Heavy (12 page)

I knew that the scale was waiting for her and that it would either reward or disappoint our efforts of the preceding week. Bea had, as ever, worked hard to stick to the program. There had been the daily arguments over desired snacks I refused to provide, portion sizes she deemed insufficient, or treats given out at school that she had neglected to mention in time for them to be deducted from her after-school snack. But she had been a trouper, and I knew her willingness to adhere to the program wouldn’t continue for long without the satisfaction of seeing a decrease in her weight. If she had another snack—even a piece of fruit—we were adding water weight that was going to cloud the results.

“Please, Mommy, I’m starving!” she pleaded.

We had arrived at the nutrition doctor’s office building early. I couldn’t deflect the request with the “we’re running late” argument. We had plenty of time to spare to get something to eat.

“Can’t you just wait until after the appointment?” I asked Bea. “Twenty minutes? Then I’ll get you something?”

“No. I’m
starving
!” she implored me.

I felt deeply torn. My child was in distress, and it was within my power to help her, but I was withholding relief because I wanted her to have a gratifying weigh-in a few minutes later. It felt heartless, but was it so ridiculous to want to get an accurate and encouraging read on her weight? There was one occasion a week on which we could gauge how we were doing and be reminded
that all our hard work was leading us steadily to lower weight and better health. Giving in on a snack now meant jeopardizing our weekly affirmation that we were making progress. I saw Bea’s face as she stepped on the scale every week. I knew that what it said mattered to her. Was its readout this week important enough to ask her to hold out another half hour? To me, absolutely. To her? Obviously not.

I gave in. We popped into a deli across the street from the office. I was happy to see they had a large array of cut-up fresh fruit. David selected a container of mango. Bea opted for a large container of watermelon.

It was probably about two or three cups of watermelon—maybe twelve ounces. Which is three-quarters of a pound on the scale. It’s not fat weight, it’s water weight. But if you step onto a scale holding a box of watermelon, you’re going to weigh more than if you aren’t holding the watermelon. Putting the fruit in your stomach is just another way of carrying that weight. That’s just physics.

After Bea polished off the watermelon, the nutrition doctor came out to greet us. She first measured both kids to see if they had grown—their height was unchanged—and then put Bea on the scale.

“She just had some watermelon,” I blurted out as the numbers settled on the scale. Bea’s weight had gone up about half a pound.

“We’re going in the wrong direction,” the nutrition doctor said, not unkindly.

“I think it was the watermelon,” I noted.

We took our seats.

“So what happened this week?” the doctor asked.

Now, it’s very possible that those were the words she used to start every appointment. But this week I took it as an accusation.

“Nothing happened this week,” I snapped. “Bea’s been great.
She was just really, really hungry, so she just had a giant thing of watermelon. That’s why it looks like she gained weight.”

Bea was sitting quietly in her seat, looking downcast. I couldn’t bear for her to think her efforts weren’t being acknowledged, that her dedication was being questioned.

“You know, Bea and I have been talking about how the scale isn’t always going to go down every week,” I continued. “That sometimes it will go up because of how she eats, or sometimes it will just go up for no reason, and that that’s part of the process, and she shouldn’t feel bad about it. Can you maybe talk a little bit about that?”

As the nutrition doctor explained the vagaries of body weight, I continued to interpret her every word as a response to some sort of presumed weight gain. Maybe I’m projecting here, but I felt like she was telling Bea not to worry about the fact that she had overeaten this week and gained weight. It was bound to happen. It was part of the process. From Bea’s expression, she seemed not quite chastened but definitely disappointed.

I, however, was sure she hadn’t actually gained weight.

As the appointment wound down, I asked the doctor pointblank how much weight Bea had to lose before she reached a healthy weight. I had been eager to know, of course, but had resisted asking because I knew it wasn’t a politically correct question. I’m not supposed to be focused on pounds, first of all, but rather the more obscure metric of BMI. And I felt like I was supposed to perpetuate some kind of modern charade that even though they weighed her every Friday, the scale didn’t matter—that how we felt, how our clothes fit, and how many miles we could run were the true barometers of physical health.

But I’m extremely number-focused. To me, weight
was
numbers: what the scale said, how many pounds I wanted to lose, how
many calories I could eat. I know I’m never going to look like a supermodel. So I have to take the subjectivity out of it, just pick a number that I think is attainable and maintainable, and go for that.

As for Bea, I wasn’t trying to make her slender. That wasn’t my job. I just needed her to be healthy. So I wanted to know where that category began for her. I was concerned that, without a number as my finish line, I wouldn’t know when to stop, and I’d end up trying to make her thin instead of just not overweight. Or that I’d get tired of the process, and give up before we’d gotten to a truly healthy weight. I was fine with replacing calories with “green lights,” but the lack of a concrete, numeric goal for Bea’s weight made it difficult for me to grasp what we were in for. I wanted some kind of understanding of where we needed to end up.

The nutrition doctor explained that she doesn’t like to talk about numbers. People become too fixated on them, she said. And anyway, with kids, they’re always growing and so the goal is constantly moving. She told me that it was better to concentrate on making positive changes and not think so much about the numbers. She was absolutely right. I totally got it. I still couldn’t stand it.

“Makes sense,” I said. “I guess I just wanted a sense of how long a road we should expect this to be.”

She looked down at her chart and waited until Bea was looking away before catching my eye conspiratorially. She mouthed one word to me: “Long.”

It was a lighthearted way of communicating a difficult piece of news, and I wished at that moment that my husband were there to help provide some support and levity. When Jeff used to come to these visits with us, we’d sit in the waiting room with me grumpily deflecting the kids’ demands that we go home and never come back, and he was able to lighten the mood by cracking just the right
joke. He was able to add just enough silliness to get us through with a smile. Just by his being there, the appointments felt a little bit like special occasions.

But we’d excused Jeff from these appointments after the first few weeks. I felt it was ridiculous for him to leave work early every single Friday so he could sit with us for twenty minutes in the nutrition doctor’s office. It was causing too much upheaval to his schedule, and other than comic relief, he wasn’t really contributing all that much to our time there. We’d agreed I’d take the kids on my own.

Jeff remained engaged in Bea’s progress and supportive of the plan we’d adopted, but around the same time he stopped coming to the appointments, he also stopped following the diet himself.

After we’d been on the program for a week, he had stepped on the scale at home and he was heavier than he’d been at our initial weigh-in at the nutrition doctor’s office. He was not pleased.

“It’s the fruit,” he said, blaming the program’s permitted late-night binges on grapes and oranges for the apparent weight gain.

At that time, Bea had taken off almost a pound. I didn’t want Jeff’s disappointment to throw us off course. “Give it a little more time,” I said.

“It’s the fruit,” he said definitively.

He wasn’t explicitly giving up, but he did not follow up that reproach with a plan. I felt pressure to keep him on board, but I had nothing constructive to suggest. I just hoped he’d hang in there and that results would be forthcoming. But after another week or so, even though the scale did indeed start heading downward, he gave up counting his traffic lights.

Jeff and I often approach parenting as a divide-and-conquer proposition. For example, I have never once cut my children’s nails. It’s just something that he does, so I don’t even think about
it. Now, surely Bea’s health and diet are more important and complicated than her nails. So it made sense that Jeff had been an integral part of acknowledging her issue and setting the family off on a path to address it. But in terms of the day-to-day management, he felt confident that if I had things under control, he didn’t need to be very involved.

I didn’t expect otherwise. But it did sometimes get problematic.

For example, Jeff had no idea how many green lights Bea was allocated at any given meal. And if he was, say, making her a pork chop, I’d have to remind him to weigh it, look up the calories in an ounce of pork, and do the math. Only then would he realize that he needed to cut the chop in half for it to be the right size for Bea.

“I don’t translate food into calories, and certainly not into ‘green lights,’ ” he explained. “It’s a pork chop. It’s protein, it’s good, it’s ‘the other white meat.’ That can’t be bad.”

But too much of a good thing could be bad. He himself had greeted our doctor’s permissiveness of fruit with much suspicion. And I couldn’t disagree with him. I still very strongly suspected that the amount one ate, more so than what one ate, was of paramount importance to weight. While the Atkins revolution had taken an impressively persuasive stab at my long-held axiom—claiming as it did that you could basically eat any caloric amount of proteins and fats as long as you eliminated carbohydrates—I was still fearful of any program that allowed unlimited consumption of anything, even fruit.

The ability to offer Bea fruits or vegetables to eat at any time was useful, however. I appreciated having an option to provide when Bea complained of being hungry right after finishing lunch, or having something with which to answer David’s demand for a snack right before bed. But Bea’s appetite for fruits and
vegetables—mostly fruits—was seemingly endless. She could put away several bananas in one sitting. At around 100 calories each, that’s not nothing. And they weren’t exactly carb-free. Although I understood we were supposed to care less about the carbohydrates in fresh fruit than about the ones in chocolate cake, hadn’t Dr. Atkins revealed to us how sinister most fruits could be? That even though they have vitamins and fiber, they’re otherwise basically just sugar delivery mechanisms? So were fruits good or bad? It was hard to sort out the conflicting wisdom about these kinds of things.

Even oranges and apples had seventy to eighty calories each. And on more than one occasion I realized that Bea had eaten five servings of fruit between dinner and bedtime. I permitted it, because the nutrition doctor said it was okay, and because Bea was being so amazingly compliant about the reduction in food in other areas. But it was worthy of notice. Shouldn’t I be teaching her moderation, even where healthful foods were involved? And she wasn’t the only one liberated by the all-you-can-eat fruit rule: One weekend morning at a friend’s house, Bea, David, and I collectively managed to put away two pounds of strawberries over the course of a leisurely brunch. We could really pack it in.

One night, Bea herself acknowledged that she had taken too much advantage of the all-fruit-you-can eat policy.

“I think I just ate too many apples,” she admitted. “And it makes me feel stuffed. And it makes me feel like I overate, even though I didn’t.”

I asked her what that feeling was like emotionally for her.

“I feel unhealthy,” she said. “Because I feel like when you stuff yourself, it’s not good for you. Even when the food is good for you, it’s not good to stuff yourself every night because you don’t
feel well in the morning and you don’t want to go places and do anything. It’s better to be nice, healthy, quick—like quick to do things, ready to do things.”

I was pleased by Bea’s take. She wasn’t accusing herself of having eaten something “bad,” and her regret was not “Now I feel fat” but “Now I don’t feel so well, and I’m not in the mood to do other things that are part of life.” The lesson was certainly superior to how I’d learned restraint. It was better to feel a little stuffed from apples than to suffer crushing guilt after a bonanza donut binge.

My friend does a funny riff on how women in her social circle act around the cake at a party. She describes how they stalk around it for a while, checking it out, seeing who else is eating it. They visit it a couple of times, often striking up a conversation with another woman about how good it looks, and whether they should try it. Those who do dig in often do so from a position of apology or explanation: how they’re going to pay for it later by going to the gym or skipping dessert for the next few days, but it’s worth it. And every bite they take seems to tell a self-conscious story of longing, gratification, and guilt. Then of course, there’s the hostess’s panic when the party winds down and she confronts the thought of being alone in the house with the leftovers. She entreats her guests to have another slice, to take some home—anything to avoid being left alone with it, like the cake is an axe murderer or something.

Splurging on fattening food is an emotionally mixed proposition
for most women. Now that cake was no longer the staple food it had been in my younger years, when I had happily sacrificed healthful fare to allow for it, I shared the popular feelings of anxiety around such excess. But I wanted Bea to understand that it’s not realistic or even ideal to turn down a slice of her aunt’s wedding cake even though we had already eaten the big steak and cheesy potatoes we’d been served for dinner. Sometimes—and only on rare and truly special occasions (a wedding being both)—I let us both go for it. And I would always take a moment to make sure Bea was mindful that it was okay to do so once in a while.