Unsafe at Any Size

So my son doesn’t want to eat dinner, even though it’s chicken nuggets, usually a big favorite.  Is he sick?

No.  He had a snack at school.

What kind of a snack?

Cereal bars.

Three of them.

My son is 6.  Even given he’s a growing boy, three cereal bars is a LOT of food.

I told him so, and will tell the after school teachers that maybe unlimited access to the goody of the day isn’t such a good idea.  I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I wonder if I need to be concerned.

After all, I started fairly young, too.  My mother tells a story about the first time she gave me a peanut butter sandwich.  I liked it so much I begged for another, then promptly puked it all up.

Now, this story did not presage a life of bulimia, but I didn’t get to be so fat without relishing food, in large quantities, whenever I got an opportunity.  I was the kid who swiped frosting flowers off of birthday cakes–before we sang Happy Birthday.  Oh, and it wasn’t my cake.

I don’t want to give my kid a complex, but I also want to teach about healthy limits.  I’ve read about those crazy moms who are always after their kid to eat less, even though the kid is fine.  But I wonder what would have helped me find those healthy limits when I was a kid.

What would you do?

If it’s hard for adults to eat the right food, imagine how hard it is for kids.  They want to eat what other kids eat and fit in, and don’t have much in the way of impulse control.

Or at least I didn’t.  I guess I had an extended childhood in that I didn’t really develop any impulse control when it came to food until rather recently.

Frank Bruni’s recent article in the New York Times about how parents struggle to educate kids about food resonated with me as a parent trying to find health without turning my kids into diet freaks.  So far, neither of them are showing my early proclivities to eat excessively, but they treat vegetables like toxic waste.

I try to keep my program to myself, but every once in a while my kids will ask me how many points are in something they are eating, or ask me how much weight I’ve lost.

One of the reasons why I started on my journey was because I wanted to tell my kids how to eat and live more healthily, but knew that my actions would speak much more loudly than anything I said.  And I was being a hypocrite if I said they couldn’t have the cookies I bought for myself because I wanted them to be healthy, but wouldn’t do what it took to be healthy myself.

So now we don’t have cookies for anyone.  We do have some desserts, but none of us get desserts unless we eat our vegetables, or, in their case, a vegetable.  You’ve got to take care of business for your body first, before you get extras.

Sometimes, they actually do it and get that ice cream treat.  In fact, Sam waxed so euphoric about the virtues of green beans the other day he told me he would always eat them and never eat dessert.  I was concerned he was going too far the other way, and told him dessert was ok as a treat, but it wasn’t a treat if it was all the time.  I needn’t had worried; he hasn’t touched the green beans since.

But he is drinking orange juice again, so my fears of scurvy are assuaged for now.  And the boys are at least talking about what makes a healthy diet.  I can’t force them to eat anything, but I can provide healthy choices and a healthy example for them to follow if they choose.

Nana, feeding the baby munchkins

We started out so well!  I got a special baby food grinder so we could grind up organic fruits and vegetables for our lil’ dumplings.  They ate peas, and bananas, and yams, and oh so many healthy things.

But then the boys got older, and stopped eating all the wonderful, healthy food we made for them.  Spinich went away, yams went away, carrots bu-bye.  Despite our good beginnings, good example and best expectations, our kids were turning into junk food junkies.

Or at least one was.  Nate still eats apples and bananas, the occasional carrot.  But it seems like Sam decides he doesn’t like something new every week.  For a while, he was down to anything with sugar, peanut butter sandwiches, pasta with parmesan cheese, and the random chicken nugget (the healthier kind, but still).

Both of the boys are lean (but not really mean!), so it’s not their current weight I’m worried about. It’s more the habits they’re learning.  I started out as a picky eater myself, meaning I would only eat what I liked, which was mostly bread, chicken, peanut butter, anything with sugar… hm, a pattern here!

Nate, eating a cheese sandwich

I’m not fretting too much on their nutrition; I ate horrible foods growing up, and yet I’m still here. I don’t want to turn food into a power struggle, because ultimately that’s a struggle I can’t win unless I want to have them cursing my name in therapy years from now.

But I decided I can put my foot down on not providing the junk they would like to eat instead of food, or at least stuff that vaguely resembles food.

For example, dessert has gotten a bit out of hand here.  It started out with sugar-free popsicles and sugar-free pudding.  Healthy, right?  OK, artificial sweeteners, not exactly healthy but not terrible.

And then, for some reason, I went for the ice cream sandwiches.  Not the fancy ones, the rectangular ones with vanilla ice cream or, if you’re fancy, neopolitan.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and no, I wasn’t eating them!

Sam, not eating anything because his peanut butter sandwich was on the wrong bread.

The kids stopped eating dinner, saying they weren’t hungry.  But oh, they were always hungry for those ice cream sandwiches.  And the goldfish crackers.

The last straw was on the airplane back from our Hawaii trip.  They had eaten Burger King before we took off because of course they wouldn’t touch anything else.

On the flight, they provided a pretty decent meal-spinich lasagna.

And a chocolate cupcake.

Needless to say, they wouldn’t touch the lasagna (I thought it was pretty good, all things considered).  But they were starving, STARVING, and must have the cupcakes.

I had had it.  If they wanted those darn cupcakes, they could at least TRY the pretty decent lasagna.  If not, and if they were really STARVING, the bags of cheerios would have to do.

Now, before you think I was really brave, know, dear reader, that I wasn’t sitting directly next to them.  I was across the aisle, and it was my DH Joel who got to deal with the screaming.

But it was a turning point for me.  At home, the rule is now there is no dessert (not even the sugar-free kind) without three bites of vegetables.  You don’t get a treat if you don’t even try to give your body what it needs first.  They aren’t eating the vegetables, but they aren’t eating the ice cream sandwiches either.

Meanwhile, they won’t try new things at home, but are trying new things at camp.  Last week, Nate tells me that he likes bean and cheese burritos.  Well, it was a good thing I was sitting when he told me!  Now, these are the freezer burritos, but still, it’s the closest thing to a bean either kid has ever eaten.

And then they tried spaghetti with tomato sauce!

My!

Until this time, they would eat pasta but only with parmesan cheese or pesto on it.  So I made them pasta with tomato sauce (it was fettucini noodles and therefore Wrong, but we’re getting somewhere).  I showed them the Nutrition Facts label and showed how the pasta sauce had vitamin A.  We looked up what vitamin A does for the body online, then some other vitamins.  I pointed out to Sam he wasn’t getting any vitamin C, and he’d look funny without teeth.

And I got Sam to agree to try to start drinking some orange juice again.

Maybe I can teach them to take better care of themselves.

How are you teaching your kids to take care of themselves?

Staying positive in the face of bad things is never easy, and it’s especially difficult when it involves your own kid.

One of my boys, Nate, has a weakness on one side.    The technical terms make his condition sound much worse and much scarier than it actually is, but the technical term is hemiparesis, for those of you who like technical terms.  As long as I’m throwing around technical terms, the cause of this weakness is cerebral palsy, even more specifically periventricular leukomalacia.

As I said, the technical terms make it sound a lot worse than it is, and scared the bejeesus out of me initially when we got the diagnosis.  It seemed like a big diagnosis for a cranky baby who held his toe funny, and it held out the threat that he’d never walk or talk.

Fortunately, Nate is a very bright almost-6 year old kid who not only walks and talks but reads, runs, jumps and plays baseball at every opportunity.  Lots of early intervention means he’s doing great; most people don’t even notice anything different with him.

Due to the spasticity in his leg, he periodically has Botox injections.  Not only does it keep his leg smooth and youthful, it helps him get his heel down so his gait is more normal.  Fine-tuning his gait now means more normal growth and less pain as an adult.  We’re so lucky to have modern health care and the ability to access it.

As part of these injections, he also gets his leg casted to stretch his heel.  Yesterday, he started his casting.  His doctor is very upbeat and confident that these injections will help him.

But.  We also learned that Nate’s hip has something that has made the head orthpedist at Children’s want to see us and Nate.

There probably isn’t much we can be doing above what we are already doing.  And I’m trying to focus on the good things-active bright kid, good medical care, all of that.  If those sucky clouds would just stop getting in the way.

Last night was Not Good.  I had a bad day, and consoled myself by eating everything in the kitchen.  Fortunately, my kitchen is somewhat binge-proofed, so what that added up to was eating FiberOne cereal and one point bars.

Still, not what I was wanting.  So, here’s why I think I did it, and what I’m going to do differently next time.

1.  Frustrating day.  For some reason, my computer was slow as can be all day long, making it next to impossible to do anything.  I kept plugging at it though, and sat there and stewed and opened up even more programs to do something else while it was thinking hard on the first thing, which probably wasn’t helpful.

Music might have smoothed out the edges, but instead of walking out to the car to get the ipod I forgot there, or opening Pandora, I decided it was time to download Itunes and download Grooveelectric (which is an awesome music podcast) to my desktop.  Yes, that was a brilliant decision when my computer was already boggy.  Needless to say, the installation failed three times, I had to uninstall and reinstall blah blah blah.

What I’ll do differently next time: Take a walk.  Even if it’s down the hall.  Waiting and pushing the any key for hours wasn’t helping.  I couldn’t change my computer, but I could change my attitude.

2.  Meh workout.  The good news was I went to the gym, even though I Really Didn’t Feel Like it.  The bad news was that I didn’t really push myself as hard as I normally would, and I didn’t feel like I got as good of a workout.

What I’ll do differently next time: Commit to where I’m at.  I’m at the gym, so I need to fully commit to where I’m at and what I’m doing.

3.  Cruddy kids.  One needed everything RIGHT NOW.  Dinner, water, pencil sharpened, you name it, all at the same time.  Then the fight over what to do after dinner–video game or TV?  The last straw was the gum battle.  Sam wanted gum, and, beleaguered parent I was tired of fielding requests, I said no.  Well, that started a long confrontation where Sam yelled at me, pretended (but not actually) punched and kicked me, threatened to kill me, and all the other wonderful ways five year olds express their extreme displeasure.  I dodged all this while getting another 100 calorie bag of cookies out of the cupboard.

What I’ll do differently next time: Give him the damn gum!  He was already frustrated about not getting his way in the game/TV battle, and he wanted the gum to help regulate himself.  There was no reason for me not to let him have it other than being frustrated about all the other requests of the evening.

So that was my binge.  What are your binge triggers?  How do you deal with them?