The Heavy (5 page)

When it came to snack food choices, I was woefully inconsistent. Bea’s school bus stop happened to be in front of an Au Bon Pain. On most days we stepped inside to find our after-school snack. Offerings ranged from small cups of watermelon to a 1,000-calorie corn chowder soup in a bread bowl, and I was never sure what to get her. A small tuna sandwich? A cup of chicken noodle soup? They seemed like wholesome choices, but were they more meals than snacks?

Some days I tried to do the right thing and insisted on fruit salad or a single hard-boiled egg. But occasionally I’d give in to her pleas for a square of coffee cake, mainly because I wanted to eat half of it. And every day I wondered, how much should a kid eat after school? And was the answer different if the kid was heavy?

Opportunities for treats on special occasions also elicited irregular responses. When cupcakes came out at a party, sometimes I gave her the go-ahead, and other times I grimaced with disapproval, depending on my mood and my anxiety about her weight
that day. And then I might even sneak one (or two) for myself while she wasn’t looking. Of course, unpredictability and hypocrisy are not parenting virtues.

Complicating matters was the fact that we were usually with David, who did not share Bea’s weight problem. David could have basically whatever he wanted for his after-school snack, from Italian ices to two slices of pizza. If he wanted an extra helping of breakfast or a snack at bedtime, I gave it to him gladly—because he asked for it so rarely, and because he was not overweight. But I had no rhetoric for justifying the double standard when Bea pointed it out.

While Bea never expressed concern about the food she ate, her body’s appearance was beginning to bother her. And I desperately wanted to say the right thing in response to the self-deprecating remarks she made about her size. But I had no idea how to respond to a child who complained of being fat if that child was, indeed, overweight.

Now that she was no longer a toddler and her weight problem had persisted for years, I charily decided that, instead of telling her not to worry about it, I should acknowledge the problem and offer help.

So when she called herself fat, I tried a new tactic. “You are beautiful,” I said (which, for the record, she is). “Yes, you are a bit overweight. And we can fix that by changing the way you eat. Do you want to do that?”

That conversation led to a discussion about how for her, achieving a healthy weight might mean, for example, eating less pizza.

“But I like pizza!” she replied in mock outrage.

“I know, but having a lot of it can make you overweight. And cupcakes …?”

“Mmmm!
Cupcakes
!”

“Yeah, they’re okay once in a while, but I feel like we’ve been eating them every week, sometimes more.”

“Cupcakes are
so good
.”

“I know.”

“Can I have one now?” she asked.

In my mind, I said,
Yeah, a cupcake sounds pretty good right now
. But instead I answered, “Unfortunately, no.”

“I want a cupcake,” she sighed.

Me too
, I thought, remembering our stolen moments together, sharing our favorite vanilla-frosted cupcake. Those innocent, delicious, spontaneous yeses in a world filled with nos. I didn’t want to give them up any more than she did. So things continued as they had.

One comment during that year broke through to me more than the rest. I was sitting down at lunch with an octogenarian friend, a warm, wise man whom I look to as a grandfather figure, even though he is not a blood relation. He’d known Bea and David all their lives but hadn’t seen them in a while.

We began catching up. I showed him a recent photo of Bea and David as I described their latest accomplishments.

He squinted at the photo, leaning in to examine it more closely. His smile slackened slightly.

“Is Bea getting heavy?” he asked.

“Um … yes,” I admitted.

He put the photograph down on the table and fixed me with his gaze. “Don’t let her,” he admonished.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.

“Don’t let her,” he repeated firmly.

And while on the face of it he was supplying no guidance, he
was actually providing a huge directive: it was up to me to stop this problem, which clearly wasn’t going away on its own. The words echo in my mind to this day:
Don’t let her
.

As for Bea, there was one comment that stuck with her, too. A mean kid in her class took to calling her “Fatty Patty.” Not always, not even often, and certainly not with any evidence of originality or wit. But when she related the story to me at home, I was at a loss. The knee-jerk retort “Well, you’re
not
fat, so screw him” would have been a lie. Nor did it seem as if I should turn it into a teachable moment and launch into a complex discussion of childhood obesity.

So I just hugged her. And she cried, and it broke my heart. I told her that boy was mean and jokingly promised that I would make him rue the day he ever opened his mouth to her. (He happened to move to Missouri shortly thereafter, never to be seen by us again. That was a happy accident, but to this day I still tell Bea it was my doing and ask whether there are any other classmates she doesn’t like who should be “moved to Missouri.”)

Another time, a classmate rather blandly noted, “Bea, you have a big belly.” Once again, the observation didn’t win any points for cleverness, but it hurt Bea’s feelings. When she told me about it, I asked how she’d responded. Tears rolled down her rounded cheeks. “I was just so humiliated, I didn’t say anything.”

Again I drew her close and hugged her tight but was uncertain as to what to say. This kid wasn’t even trying to be hurtful; he was just observing a plain fact. Bea’s belly was uncommonly large, and kids noticed.

It killed me to hear these stories. But I admit that a tiny part of me wondered if maybe they were useful for motivating us in some way. Being overweight is so blatant, so public, by age six Bea was already having to confront the embarrassment of it. While the
potential for future health hazards may have been enough to spur me to action, I wondered if perhaps Bea would be motivated by a desire to be spared the humiliation she was starting to suffer from her peers.

But after the tears had subsided, Bea asserted that these comments, while upsetting, didn’t nudge her to try to look different. She was quick to venture that the mean kids would likely just find something else to tease her about, and she’s probably right. To her, the insult was hurtful because it was meant to be insulting. The inherent judgment about her weight was less powerful to her.

Over the summer before second grade, Bea went back to the camp she loved from the summer before, which had the distinct disadvantage (to me) of featuring an all-you-can-eat cafeteria. While I’d throw a few pieces of advice at her each day when I dropped her off (“Hey, today’s pizza day—only one slice, okay?”), the freedom of making her own lunch choices took its toll.

When Bea returned to school, I redoubled my efforts to control her eating by packing her lunchbox with salads and fruit, which she loved. But for the first time, I didn’t see her belly get smaller. Having her take gymnastics class once a week in addition to her usual activity, encouraging more visits to the playground, suggesting we not let dessert be an everyday occurrence, offering to split a burger instead of each of us getting our own—even though I was trying, these changes weren’t making a difference.

I began referring to foods as “healthful,” “not healthful,” or “okay if you don’t have too much” as euphemisms for “low-calorie,” “fattening,” or “something really delicious and fattening that if you share with me won’t be so bad for either of us.” I was grasping at straws.

I felt incompetent because I had no idea really how much—or what—she was supposed to eat. I didn’t know whether to stop
feeding her, despite her protests, when I felt she’d had the proper amount, or let her eat a second serving in order to preempt between-meal snacking. Was it hypocritical to consider a slice of pizza a perfectly reasonable snack for David, yet a dangerous one for Bea? Or was my double standard appropriate?

The media provided me with no helpful role models. The only stories I’d heard about childhood struggles with weight—from
Celebrity Fit Club
contestants to reality-show stars—involved insensitive parents who subjected their children to derision and bullying for being fat at age five and are now being blamed for launching the child into an unhealthy relationship with food.

There’s also a staple sitcom character, the food-obsessed thin girl (see Monica on
Friends
, Grace on
Will & Grace
, Liz Lemon on
30 Rock
, et al.), who is often given the character detail of having been fat as a kid. Yes, isn’t it adorable to see such a skinny woman eat with abandon? And isn’t it great that she can do so without being fat, even though she is, according to her character sketch, genetically predisposed to being overweight? It’s funny to see a former fat kid stuff her face, assuming she can keep the pounds off through the magic of fiction.

Both of these characterizations bother me—the girl whose parents’ handling of her weight caused lifelong problems with self-esteem and eating, and the woman who somehow grew out of her obesity unscathed, transforming into a svelte swan despite her persisting appetite. In the first scenario, the child is made to endure too much pain for her weight problem; in the latter, she gets off too easy.

In the event that a child first needs to reach a healthier weight before it’s appropriate to encourage her to accept her body the way it is, I propose that a new role model evolve: one in which a child with an big appetite and the weight to match is parented by someone
who intervenes in a productive, healthy manner. Obviously, if I went around belittling Bea about her weight without providing any useful leadership, that likely would not have a positive outcome. But neither would saying nothing and hoping the problem just goes away, as it does on TV.

Given my discomfort with issues of food and weight, silence was the first path I chose. Knowing that I was going to have to open my mouth at some point soon was scary. When our kids were both a healthy weight, it was easy for Jeff and me to pat ourselves on the back for the food and activity choices we were making for them. Now, with Bea overweight, those same decisions had to be called into question. And while at any given moment I wouldn’t have hesitated to tell David to stop eating something if I felt it was appropriate, telling Bea the same thing seemed a much more fraught maneuver.

After confronting my failure at that pediatrician appointment when Bea was seven, I refused to let my incompetence, embarrassment, or hesitance be an excuse for letting Bea get heavier and heavier. Helping her was now a medical necessity. If she needed help, so did I.

Just before Bea’s seventh birthday, my husband and I received an email from a trusted friend. It was a forward of a newsletter she had received from a mom she knew whose daughter was a client of a pediatrician who specialized in child obesity. “Just in case you’re interested,” the email began gently, “this friend has really liked this program and felt it wasn’t stigmatizing at all—nor does it make kids nuts about food.”

I clicked a link in the email over to the nutrition doctor’s website, which explained her program and how it uses the metaphor of traffic lights to help kids make good food choices. Green-light foods are encouraged, yellow-light ones require a bit of caution, and red-light ones are reserved for occasional treats. It sounded reassuringly like the Weight Watchers Points system I found so sensible and effective for my own weight management. Food choices are assigned values, and aside from some reasonable nutritional
requirements, you could choose your own adventure within your personal food budget.

The nutrition doctor behind this program had literally written the book on pediatric and adolescent weight loss. On Amazon I could see that the slick volume featured colorful charts, sophisticated graphics, and gorgeous food photography. I was impressed.

The most convincing thing was the handful of before and after pictures of kids the doctor had treated. One girl looked remarkably like Bea. Many were of a similar age and weight. Despite the reported epidemic prevalence of overweight and obese children, I had felt quite isolated in my predicament, and it was a relief to see other kids like mine.

The decision about whether to call this doctor—and if so, when—fell to me. Jeff and I discussed Bea’s weight problem and agreed we needed to address it, but I had more time to dedicate to it. In order to spend more time with my kids, I’d put my career as a producer of Web and television content on hold a bit and was only employed part-time. My job at that time involved working from home, reviewing footage of cooking shows for a television production company in the morning and taking care of the kids after school. So my schedule was far less demanding than Jeff’s, whose job running a nonprofit requires late hours and frequent travel.

In most families I know, one parent takes ultimate responsibility for the day-to-day drudgery of childrearing, and in our family, that parent is me. I wake the kids up in the morning and put them to bed at night. I prepare and serve all their meals. I make sure teeth are brushed, homework is done, baths are taken, shoes are tied, medications are dispensed, and boots are worn on rainy days. I don’t mind it. I consider it part of my job description. I’m the
heavy. So I knew that a new food regimen, too, was going to be under my jurisdiction.

But Jeff strongly believed that the whole family should be in it together. It shouldn’t just be Bea who went to nutrition-doctor appointments and adhered to a new eating plan. It should be all of us. So that Bea wouldn’t feel singled out, we were going to present the endeavor as a campaign for healthful family eating, not a Bea-needs-to-lose-weight project. Each of us had some issue that could stand improvement—from Jeff’s need to lose weight to David’s starch-heavy diet to my juice-cleanse crutch—so we could legitimately argue that we all needed a nutritional makeover.