The Heavy (22 page)

For many months I’d gamely acquiesced to these requests. Now, with my nerves more frayed and my faith in the continuing success of the diet shaken, I wasn’t quite so receptive. I began to find her endless requests for food insupportable, not to mention exasperating.

My kids are not above exaggerating or perhaps even inventing physical symptoms to get attention. On a stroll in our neighborhood, David might out of nowhere claim his leg hurts and he can’t possibly walk. I’ll fuss over him for a minute, and then he’ll forget about it and run ahead when I tell him there’s a package from Amazon waiting for him at home. Random-onset stomachaches and
headaches come and go with suspicious convenience, especially when it’s time to go to school. When they’re actually suffering from illness, which is rare, both Bea and David are admirably stoic about it. But sometimes they will insist they’re not feeling well or are in pain when I suspect they’re really not.

I think I have a pretty good ability to detect when one of my children is actually sick or hurting and when he or she might be inventing an ailment in hopes of getting out of going on a boring school field trip. But one can never be sure. So it was with Bea’s hunger. It strained credibility for her to claim to be as hungry as she was as often as she was. But I couldn’t really say with complete certainty that she wasn’t.

My first step was to ask her to really think about whether she was hungry.

“Lunch was an hour ago, and you just had a bowl of soup and a banana as a snack. Are you sure you’re hungry right now?”

“I’m sure,” she replied.

Instead of sighing and giving in, as I had done previously, I introduced a new and controversial concept: hunger appropriateness. I told her she might well be hungry, but she shouldn’t be. She’d had enough to eat. She was going to eat again soon. Now was not an acceptable time to be hungry. If she was, indeed, truly physically hungry, perhaps it was best that we teach her body not to be hungry when she’s had enough to eat.

Thus I’d refuse her the requested snack—even the heretofore permissible-at-any-time fresh fruit or vegetables—and tell her to have some water instead. She’d just have to wait until the next meal or snack which, I reminded her, was never that far away.

This is what throngs of well-meaning parents do for their children every day. “Don’t eat that now,” we might say. “You’ll spoil your appetite!” Or “Save room for dinner.”

But once again, the idea of hunger appropriateness seemed like a spiteful invention when I applied it to Bea. I went over and over it again in my head: Was I right to try to teach her new, more healthful habits, including the idea that one shouldn’t just eat constantly throughout the day? She had demonstrated an inability to regulate her own food intake. Weren’t limits in order? Or should a young, growing child have the right to need to be fed constantly, and should I adapt to that demand instead of fighting against it?

I’d remind myself for the umpteenth time that these questions are at the heart of the discomfort so many of us feel about how to approach overweight kids. On one hand, I want to give Bea a pass about her weight, let her be a kid. I don’t want to overwhelm her with concern about her health, her body, or food at such a young age. I worry that doing so will have adverse long-term effects, making her insecure or obsessive or saddling her with lasting eating issues.

But on the other hand, childhood obesity is a clear and present danger—and not just nationally but in my own home. Whatever steps we as a nation—and I as a mother—may have taken previously to try to combat it have failed. My efforts had been misdirected, too gentle, too erratic, or too late. This is a problem that needs to be confronted forcefully, immediately. There’s no room for partial measures. I wasn’t trying to slim Bea down a few inches—I was treating a disease, potentially saving her from diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, even early death. When I told myself that, I’d feel better momentarily.

“It’s not your fault,” I was careful to assure Bea when we hit a rough patch. “You’re doing great. It’s me. I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.” At that point, the idea of writing any sort of book on this issue seemed like a joke. I was grasping for solutions to a problem that was bigger than I could tackle alone; Bea’s
weight had flatlined, and I was clueless. At a loss, I decided we should return to the dreaded nutrition doctor. But Bea was saved by the scale. On October 1, her Saturday-morning weigh-in displayed a drop from the previous week’s 80.0 pounds to 79.2. And the week after that, she was at 78.6!

It’s impossible to know what jump-started the downward trajectory. Maybe it was the crackdown on abusing sanctioned snacks. Maybe Bea had been on some giant plateau that she finally broke through. Maybe it was very simply just how kids grow.

In any case, we were both happy to finally—finally!—see Bea’s hard work rewarded with a lower number on that scale after so many weeks of sticking to a program that seemed fruitless. Things were making sense again. The feeling that we had control over the situation returned.

Bea’s eighth birthday arrived at the end of November, and she was so close to seventy-seven pounds that we began to discuss how to celebrate when she finally reached a healthy weight. Predictably, she asked for the hair feather. I considered all the sacrifices Bea had made, the moments she’d suffered from feeling different from other kids. What the hell, it wasn’t a tattoo—it was a temporary hair feather.

One day, as we passed by a cheesy salon on Broadway that was advertising feather hair extensions, I asked her if she wanted to go in. She hadn’t yet reached the target weight we’d set, but she deserved a moment of recognition and celebration.

She chose a thin, dark green feather, and the stylist hot-glued it into her hair. It was kind of icky, but also not that noticeable. I hated it. Bea loved it.

As the end of the year neared, Bea’s weight stayed under 78 pounds. While it dipped as low as 77.2 in November, it never quite hit the magic 77.

There was certainly no failure in Bea being seventy-eight pounds instead of seventy-seven. But since we were in this and were on a roll, I wondered if we should stay on track until she was safely into “healthy weight” territory. Was I wimping out by letting her scrape the floor of the “overweight” category and declaring that was good enough? If we stopped and relaxed the regimen, wasn’t the only place to go back up, into the unhealthy zone?

Or was I just being overly dogmatic? I’d established the numbers as my guide and authority, and I was scared to use anything else as a gauge of Bea’s progress. I decided I would let her pediatrician decide the issue. It was primarily her directive that had prompted this effort, after all.

I took Bea for her eighth-year checkup on December 21, and,
of course, the first thing the nurse did was take her height and weight. Right away I saw a problem. There was a new scale in the office. The familiar and seemingly irrefutably reliable metal Detecto scale with its double row of sliding weights (gravitas embodied!) was gone, and in its place was a slick digital scale. Rationally I knew that there were probably good reasons for the change, but I was not happy.

A digital scale seemed as likely to provide an accurate weight as my microwave oven’s clock was of displaying the correct time. I’m sure it would be close, but it could easily be off by a half pound or so, and no one would know. I’m not sure why I felt like those Detecto scales were so rock solid, but it was what the pediatrician had used to conclude that Bea needed to lose weight and it was what I’d always seen in my own doctor’s offices. A digital scale was fine for home, even for the nutrition doctor’s office. But at the pediatrician’s, I expected something with a little more authority than this newfangled device. My willingness to declare our mission accomplished now pivoted on what numbers would appear momentarily on its silvery screen.

Bea stepped on the scale, and I had a moment of reflection. I recalled the previous year’s weigh-in at ninety-three pounds. I remembered the worry over whether I could help her, of my determination to help her, of the effort of helping her, of the frustrations and triumphs and surprises and disappointments. All, it seemed, leading up to this moment.

The digital scale displayed her weight as … seventy-seven pounds.

There it was. The magic number we’d been working toward, finally appearing on the scale. Granted, I immediately distrusted it, because it was a chunk lower than what she’d weighed at home
just days earlier (and less than she would weigh when I next put her on the scale at home days later). But this was the pediatrician’s office. That gave the number superior authority. The number 77 was being inscribed on her permanent health record, along with her height, which was …

“Four feet six inches,” the nurse chirped.

If this were a scene in a movie, the mother would nod distractedly and then the information would sink in and you’d hear a loud screeching noise as her head whipped back to confront the nurse. Four feet six inches? That was the same height she had been eleven months ago, when we’d first visited the nutrition doctor’s office.

Um, yeah, about that … It turned out that I’d misread the measurement of Bea’s height that first day in the nutrition doctor’s office. Her height then had been 52.6 inches, or 4 feet 4.6 inches, not 4 feet 6 inches. As a result of this inch-and-a-half discrepancy, all my concerns that Bea’s height hadn’t budged that year had been unfounded. She had grown nearly two inches!

The nurse was slightly perplexed. “Did she lose weight?” she asked, considering that a clerical error might have caused the unexpected decline in number.

“Yup,” I answered. Proud, I smiled and winked at Bea, who sat on the examining table. She smiled back.

“That’s great, good for you,” she said to Bea. And then, to me, “If she stays at this weight, even if she goes up a little bit this year, she’ll be in good shape.”

The pediatrician came in. I was eager for her approval. It would be gratifying to have the same authority figure who’d prompted us to action a year earlier and who knew our long history with this issue confirm we’d done a good job. I recalled the time back
in high school when I’d lost weight at Weight Watchers and then gone back to the hair salon where the stylist had told me I’d gotten too heavy. Prompted by my mother, he acknowledged my transformation. And that had felt good.

But hearing the pediatrician tell me Bea had reached a healthy number was even sweeter. “She lost weight, that’s great,” she said as breezily as she’d declared Bea’s weight problematic the year before. “She doesn’t need to lose any more.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “She’s not technically at a healthy weight yet, according to the chart. I’m worried about stopping too soon.”

“She doesn’t need to lose any more,” she assured me.

There it was: the final word. As a mother, you can’t ask for a better endorsement than that. We’d done it. Mission accomplished.

Or was it?

I hadn’t known how Bea would respond to the momentous occasion of her successful weigh-in. I considered the possibility that she wouldn’t care that much. She’d gotten what she’d wanted out of the weight-loss process: she was no longer heavy, had eating habits we could all agree on, and had a hair feather. Still, I guess I’d hoped she’d take a moment to mark the official recognition of her accomplishment by her pediatrician.

When our appointment ended, Bea got dressed and we stepped outside of the office. I looked at her, beaming expectantly as we walked down the street. But she said nothing.

It occurred to me I’d experienced something similar before. I realize that breast cancer is not the most apt comparison to obesity, but when a friend of mine afflicted with the disease sought treatment and was declared cancer free, I had said the wrong thing.

As soon as I saw her, I’d given her a giant hug. “Congratulations!” I squealed.

But I could tell that wasn’t the right thing to say.

“What?” I asked, backing off. “You’re not feeling celebratory?”

She explained her feelings indelibly. “You know, people want to feel like, ‘Oh, boy, now we can really put that behind us and move on,’ when instead it feels more like my relationship with life has fundamentally changed and there is now a level of anxiety and loss that will be with me forever,” she said.

She said that being happy didn’t feel right. “I am a different person because of this experience. I have a new understanding about my fragility.”

I thought of her words now, when walking with Bea. She, too, was different because of what she’d gone through. She was less carefree, more responsible, more knowing, perhaps even more aware of her fragility. She didn’t possess the feeling of invincibility about her health that most other kids her age had.

“How do you feel about all the weight you lost?” I asked her when we got home.

“Good,” she said, blandly.

“Do you like the way you look now?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said definitively.

“Do you feel different?”

“No. That’s still me,” she said. “I’m not a different person just because I lost sixteen pounds.”

The tone had become unexpectedly heavy. I felt a small pit in my stomach. I pulled her onto my lap and pressed my cheek against hers.

She went on. “I’m not comfortable with saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve changed everything and everything’s going to be perfect for the rest of humanity,’ ” she said. “I think I’ve changed half of the way, but not that I fixed my entire life. Because that isn’t true. Who can fix their entire life when they’re eight?”

“Well, no, of course you haven’t changed your whole life. But you’re not overweight anymore. You did fix that. That part of you is in the past.”

Her body tensed in my arms. She began to tear up.

“Just because it’s in the past doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” she said.

Like my friend with the cancer diagnosis, the outcome of Bea’s diet was, to her, not a victory, or even really an ending. She understood, even though I hadn’t, that it was glib and reductive to act like her experience was one worthy of glee. Her maturity in realizing this, and her intelligence in articulating it, filled me with pride and sadness in equal measure.