The Heavy (4 page)

My older sister, with amused faux formality, referred to my approach to eating as “the Theory of Food Mass Consumed.” Basically, I was challenging the idea that calories matter all that much, and paying no attention to fat versus protein versus carbs (just to orient you, this was still during the era when fat was bad and carbs were good). Instead, I believed weight maintenance was all about the mass of the food you ate.

For example, your egg-white omelet with spinach and my ice cream sundae of similar density and weight were equivalent. If you ate a little bag of carrot sticks and I ate a slightly bigger bag of
potato chips, we were pretty much even, even though my meal’s calories far outstripped yours. I posed a question to myself: if I could somehow take a pill containing 10,000 calories, would it make me gain three pounds? My guess was no, since its mass was only equivalent to that of a peanut.

I developed the Theory of Food Mass Consumed with a suitable level of irony. But frankly, the medical health-and-nutrition establishment hadn’t exactly done much to earn my faith in the decades during which I struggled to figure out what to eat to lose weight. In the 1980s, fat was the villain. In the 1990s, it was carbs. In the 2000s, it was junk food and inactivity. In the 2010s, all charges were leveled against insulin-processed sugars and starches.

Each theory made perfect sense at the time, and I briefly tried to incorporate each into my habits, only to have it debunked. With so many conflicting messages, it’s nearly impossible to figure out how to eat. And while the nation has gotten fatter and fatter listening to these experts, I successfully employed my Theory of Food Mass Consumed for many years. So is it ridiculous? Of course. But it worked for me.

I maintained my weight in this way through my twenties, although I always pitied myself that I was “dieting.” All week I’d deny myself any excess, and then on the weekends, I’d splurge and undo all the progress I’d made. The moment I let myself eat without restraint, my weight headed upward, and come Monday, I’d rein in my consumption in order to bring it back down.

What I didn’t realize was that my “diet” was a diet in the true sense of the word: not a temporary weight-loss effort, but a continual,
habitual way of eating. If I wanted to maintain my weight, yet eat with abandon several times per week, I was going to have to be on what felt like a “diet” the rest of the time.

Then I got married. To a guy who also struggled with his weight. I found him adorable, attractive, kind, funny, brilliant. And I still do. So what if he had—and has—a belly? I didn’t care.

Together, Jeff and I went on various diets, joined a gym, visited a nutritionist. Nothing helped.

Then I got pregnant with Bea. I was excited for many reasons, most of all because I wanted a baby; I was looking forward to being a mother. But a little bit of my joy stemmed from the promise of nine-plus months of pregnancy and the attendant freedom from food guilt and body image shame. Back in the late 1980s, as a seventeen-year-old intern at a Madison Avenue advertising agency, I had watched a pregnant woman in my department hobble in every day, grumpy and frumpy, and feel pangs of jealousy.
She can eat whatever she wants!
I marveled.
She can get enormous, and no one will judge her for it!

Yes, I know, it’s totally pathetic that as a pre-college woman starting her life in the big city, the object of my envy was a decidedly unglamorous, midthirties pregnant media planner. But the idea that I might one day be able to spend nearly a year not having to hold in my stomach was thrilling to me.

My weight gain during that pregnancy was exactly as I had anticipated: swift and significant. I gained sixty pounds before Bea finally made her debut. And just as I was getting around to thinking about losing that weight, when Bea was about four months
old, I got pregnant with David. That happy (if surprising) event forestalled any further thoughts of dieting.

After David was born and my body settled down, I joined the army of postpartum moms who turn to Weight Watchers for help losing the leftover baby weight. I stuck to the program devotedly, and attended meetings every week. For five months, my weight went slowly down until I’d lost twenty pounds.

It’s a reflection of how far I had come since my twenties that I was genuinely satisfied with my new weight, even though it was higher than any I had tolerated before having children. It didn’t hurt that, for the first time in my life, my age had caught up to my body. The physical attributes that to me had seemed sort of pathetic on a teenager—slack stomach, muffin top, cottage cheese butt—were normal for a thirty-five-year-old woman. Plus, my lifestyle no longer involved miniskirts, and the current fashion was for long T-shirts instead of cropped ones, so I was in a good place.

Further evidence of my healthier approach to food and my body was the fact that I didn’t fall off the wagon in some dramatic way once I reached my goal weight. I stayed at or near that weight for several years until suddenly, randomly, I lost a few extra pounds without really trying.

I got used to my new, lower weight quickly. When those pounds tried to come back, there was a new solution that had just hit the scene: juice cleanses! Men and women, fat and not, were undertaking these “cleanses,” which ranged from fancy six-bottle-a-day delivery services to homemade concoctions of cayenne pepper, maple syrup, and lemon juice. A masochistic penance for overindulgence.

A few days of drinking only juices would bring my weight back down, for like five seconds. At this point Bea was in first grade, and
David was in kindergarten, and they were for the first time aware of what I was eating (or not eating). When they asked what I was drinking from those weird bottles, I tried to extol the nutritional value of the kale-spinach-romaine-cucumber combo I was forcing myself to ingest. But of course, that wasn’t really why I was doing it. I didn’t care about the “detox” aspect—I was just in it for the weight loss.

Like a get-out-of-jail-free card, the promise of a juice cleanse was allowing me to slip back into yo-yo dieting habits that I thought I’d given up after I’d become a mom. I was disappointed in how I was eating and feeling about my weight. I also didn’t like that I was so publicly and stupidly wrestling with these insecurities just as Bea was becoming self-conscious about her own weight. One had to trip over a digital scale to get into my bedroom, and I would grunt in self-disapproval and kick off a juice cleanse when the number it displayed got too high. I wanted Bea to be receiving more positive, less confusing messages about body image and healthy weight maintenance. I knew I was letting her down in that department.

But the fact was: for the prior three decades, I had not attended a party, sat down to a meal, gone to the bathroom, or been physically ill without, on some level, silently calculating how that action would affect my weight. I’d be miserable from the flu, but a little voice inside of me would see the silver lining that the loss of appetite I was suffering meant I might be losing weight.

I recall the day over a decade ago when a slim, cool co-worker of mine came into my office and gruesomely described the food poisoning she’d fallen victim to over the weekend. Then she confessed that as she was vomiting, it had brought her some comfort to realize doing so was probably taking about a pound off her weight. I laughed with relief and recognition, glad that someone else had
those thoughts. If only I’d known how many other women shared my experience.

I had avoided addressing Bea’s problem for fear of projecting these kinds of thoughts about food and weight onto her, hoping that I could spare her the fate of wasting years disliking and vainly trying to change her body. But the worst-case scenario was not that Bea would end up like me. Distressingly, her situation stood to be much more dire than my own.

You see, I don’t come from an overweight family. I’ve explained how strong a role I believe genetics plays in determining who we turn out to be. So, for example, it’s no surprise to me that I’m short—so are my mom and dad, and so were their parents. And in my heart, I knew it was unlikely I would ever really become morbidly obese because of that genetic predisposition.

But the same isn’t true of Bea. The same healthy weights that characterize my side of the family can’t be said of my husband’s side. Jeff loves food as much as I do, but unlike me, he has been overweight or obese all his adult life. His parents and grandparents have struggled with their weight, too. His size, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels are sufficient to require the concern and monitoring of his doctor. Bea has a genetic predisposition for obesity.

Jeff didn’t become heavy until his late teen years. Now here Bea was, exhibiting the behaviors and size of an overweight person, and she was only six years old. Further, her world featured far more temptation from food and weight gain pitfalls than had been available even a generation before. More damage could be done.

I had worried that if Bea took after me, she would suffer the physical and emotional ups and downs I had gone through regarding my weight. But I began to realize that Bea was on a much worse trajectory. Issues aside, I’m a healthy woman at a healthy weight. While the occasional peculiarities of my diet weren’t causing
me serious physical harm, Bea’s way of eating was legitimately dangerous. She was on track to spend her life being overweight and battling the problems that come with it: high blood pressure, diabetes, difficulty moving, heart disease, poor self-esteem, social isolation, depression.

With that recognition, I couldn’t continue being silent and being absent as a role model any longer. I didn’t feel responsible for engendering Bea’s problematic relationship with food, but at this point I felt I was definitely enabling its continuation.

As a mother, I try to imbue my kids with self-esteem and instill in them a positive body image despite my own body dissatisfaction. It’s a challenge. I had come of age in a time of enormous body-image pressure, and it was hard to shrug all that off in order to set a positive example for my own children. How can a woman who steps on the scale religiously, diets regularly, and won’t consider wearing 99 percent of commercially available clothing because she thinks they make her look fat parent an overweight child? I wanted to help Bea get healthy while also passing on sound eating principles and body image positivity, neither of which I possessed myself. In order to navigate with Bea through this issue, I knew I had to change. I had to be better.

If my own history with eating had left any question as to my ill-preparedness to deal with Bea’s weight problem, all doubts were erased during the year I tried in vain to help her myself.

It began after Bea’s checkup a few weeks after she turned six. Finally acutely aware that Bea ran the risk of turning into the worst possible hybrid of my husband and me in terms of eating habits, body image, and obesity, I promised the pediatrician that I’d address her weight. I tried to institute some new habits. Taking a cue from the widely disseminated professional advice on how to treat childhood obesity, I thought the changes we needed to make would be easy—give her more fruit and whole grains, sneak carrots and spinach into her smoothies, limit screen time, get her up and moving—and the results decisive.

Lack of physical exercise is always one of the factors blamed for why today’s kids are overweight. I understand how frustrating it must be for people to look at the epidemic of childhood
obesity and to think,
Why aren’t these kids just getting more activity?
It is normal to assume, if your child is a healthy weight, that your family’s food and activity choices are responsible for that fact, and that if other families did as yours did, their kids would be healthy, too. But the fact is, Bea was no less active than her healthy-weight peers: she took dance class, ran around with her friends during recess and gym at school, and went to the park when weather permitted. But she didn’t come close to engaging in the kind of consistent, calorie-burning activity required to make a dent in a child’s weight.

Let me start with the easy excuses. My family lives in a small apartment in the city. There’s no backyard to run around in, no school teams practicing sports every weekend like my suburban elementary school had. My commitment to help Bea began during a harsh winter, and playground visits were impossible when temperatures were in the twenties. Justifications notwithstanding, I felt that eating adjustments were going to have to carry most of the burden of the lifestyle changes she needed.

We tried portion control—if we got bagels, I’d encourage Bea to eat only a half. As city dwellers in a neighborhood where dining out can be cheaper and quicker than cooking at home, we found ourselves eating lunch or dinner in a restaurant at least once a week. On those occasions, I offered to split an entrée with her. But she rightly complained that it was unfair that only she be subjected to these limitations when her brother and her friends were under no such constraints. There is something demeaning and infantilizing about having your mom lop off half of your burger and grab a big handful of french fries off your plate before you can start eating. Fair enough. So sometimes we shared food, sometimes we didn’t.

We tried substituting better foods for the least healthful ones
in our repertoire. I grilled the kids’ chicken cutlets instead of pan-frying them. I forced David to try whole-wheat pasta instead of the regular kind (he hated it). When someone suggested ice cream, I’d jump in and offer to make fruit-and-yogurt smoothies instead. But we had been eating pretty nutritiously to begin with, so there really weren’t many changes to make in that area.

I did notice that when Bea was on a regimented school-year schedule and ate only the food I gave her for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, her weight gain slowed a bit. I could tell by how much her stomach stuck out: similar to my own weight, the stomach was the leading indicator of where the entire body was trending. When her schedule wasn’t as structured and she had more free time to eat, her weight went up.