On Weigh-In Tuesday, weighing in on Cleveland's obese foster child

I'm weighing in today, with the number on the scale, and with my opinions.  Specifically, my opinions about what makes weight loss harder, what makes it easier, and how my experiences relate to the case of Cleveland's obese foster child.

First: Hormones & The Long Haul
When I hopped on the scale last Tuesday, I was up.  By a pound.  Again.  I hadn't eaten terribly, but I still wasn't logging what I ate, and my exercise had slowed a bit.  It's very frustrating to confront my challenges again and again and again.  I try to remember that this is a life-long journey, not a race. I remind myself that so long as I'm committed to taking care of me, speed does not matter - only persistence.  It's hard not to feel frustrated.

Aware of my frustration, my mother-in-law recently pointed me to an article in the LA Times.  Apparently, a medical study found that "subjects who shed weight on a low-calorie diet were hungrier than when they started and had higher levels of hormones that tell the body to eat more, conserve energy and store away fuel as fat."  Even a year later, the subjects' appetite hormones hadn't returned to normal.  The good news is that perhaps the study will help scientists find a way to help those who've lost weight maintain their loss.  The bad news is that until then, those of us who are struggling to maintain or lose more after an initial loss... we just have to fight what our bodies are telling us, keep active, and stay on our journey as best as we can.

Second: The Team Approach
Tom's been home since last Wednesday night - for Thanksgiving plus a week of work hiatus (he goes back next Monday - and I'm reminded what a difference it makes being one of a team on this journey.  While he's working, we're still a great team... but I'm alone in making our dinners, planning our menus, doing our grocery shopping, cooking for myself.  I go to the gym alone.  To Slimmons alone.  (I see dear friends there, but it's not the same as arriving with my best friend.)  And since I'm a freelance writer, I work at home alone.

But since Wednesday, it's been much easier to do everything I was struggling to do.  We've cooked together.  We've exercised together.  We planned our meals and grocery-shopped and discussed our plans.  We've also done a lot of work together.  It supports the very first thing that Richard Simmons ever said to Tom and I.  He said, "you have to do this together, or it doesn't work."

Together with Tom, I was able to come back down a pound - even on Thanksgiving week.  Soon I hope to be back to my 70 total lost, and move on from there.  But I have to be patient with myself, and I have to be pretty vigilant, thanks to hormones that are constantly telling me I'm hungry.  I never used to feel this way.

On the Cleveland Situation
Perhaps you haven't heard yet, but there's a debate swirling around a Cleveland social worker's decision to remove a child from his parents' custody because he was obese.  The child was an honor student and involved in activities at his school, but he is now staying with foster parents.

Apparently, the state worker was trying to work with the parents, but claims that they weren't following doctors' orders.  The parents dispute that claim, that they bought him a bicycle and were working with him. 

The Cleveland Plain Dealer article includes this quote from the mother:  "Of course I love him. Of course I want him to lose weight. It's a lifestyle change, and they are trying to make it seem like I am not embracing that."

The article also states that the mother is overweight herself, and that when she "found out that other kids and a sibling might be giving her son extra food, she tried to put a stop to it."

It sounds to me like the family was torn.  I don't know the specifics of the situation aside from the story, but all I can think about is how the Team Approach helps everything.  And if a sibling - or a struggling mother - isn't doing everything they can to help their loved one (or worse, actively sabotaging them), then it's going to be that much harder for their loved one to succeed. 

One other quote from the article stuck out to me - it flashed like a blinking red light.  "Last year, the boy lost weight but in recent months began to gain it back rapidly." 

It sounds to me like the foster child from Cleveland - like the scientific study suggests - has his appetite hormones out of whack after a weight loss.  It's hard for me to control myself in this situation as an adult.  How much harder would it be for an eight-year-old?  Without his parents?  Without his friends, in a new school, with life upside-down?  I know how my eight-year-old self would have handled it. Hell, I know how my twenty-eight-year-old self would have handled it.  I'd eat.

Is it sad that an eight-year-old is over 200 pounds, and suffers from sleep apnea?  Certainly.  Does it need to be addressed?  Yes.  Are the parents responsible?  Absolutely, to the extent that they are able to control their son.

But does the child need to be removed from their custody?  I'd say no.

While he's in danger for future comorbidities from obesity, he only has apnea, and has been treated for it.  While a parent can encourage and schedule healthy eating and exercise, there is nothing they can do to stop their child from, say, buying crap at school.  Stopping at a convenience store on the way home.  Swapping their healthy apple for processed junk from friends.  I cite these three examples because they are, in fact, things I did as an overweight child.  I remember that our cafeterias had some good salads... but candy, sugary sodas and fresh-baked cookies (3 for a dollar!) were sold at our high school store. Other kids didn't have a problem resisting them... but I did.  I know there were others like me, too. 

So, what can we do?  How can we help this generation of children get healthy, and stay healthy?

For starters, while this branch of the government is removing obese children from their parents, other branches are approving french fries and pizza as vegetables.  (Not even veggie pizza, people.  Any pizza with tomato paste - a tiny fraction of what goes into a pizza's calories.)  It's Regan and ketchup all over again.  Nobody's banning food advertisements.  How many late-night tacos were born of TV commercial taunting?  Who, as a kid, didn't want to go to McDonald's to get the latest toy?  Why are we still allowing it to happen?

The answers lie even beyond the ridiculousness of school cafeterias food and marketing.  But they're not easily addressed.

It would help if there wasn't such a stigma attached to being overweight.  Shame is often a chief reason for overeating - a vicious circle I was trapped in for years.

It would help if there wasn't such a stigma around therapy.  Everyone can use guidance.  Nobody is "normal."  And it's the very thing that helped me begin to address my health.

It would help if sports - especially competitive sports - weren't jammed down every kid's throat.  I have no hand-eye coordination.  I wasn't strong.  And I was scared of every ball ever thrown at me in gym class.  I was never taught to kick the kickball.  I was tossed aside on the no-cut basketball team.  And I was forever losing every race.  The lack of positive reinforcement from teachers taught me to hate gym class.  The negative taunting from my classmates taught me to fear exercise.  So, for a long time, I didn't do it.  I didn't realize that the dancing I loved as a kid could be good exercise as an adult.  I didn't know that the swimming that made me so happy on vacation could make my every pool workout feel like a vacation.  Not every kid is a softball star... and not every kid wants to be.  Maybe parents (maybe even schools) should consider an activity program for those kids who are averse to sports.

It would help if parents who struggled with disordered eating would do everything they could to address their own habits before passing them along to their children.  And that, my friends, is what I'm doing right now.

To the kiddo from Cleveland:  I hope you find your way back to your family, and that they can be a united team to help support you.  And I hope that they, along with the others around you, can help you to learn to take good care of yourself.

And everybody reading this:  I hope that you're taking good care of you, too. 

Weigh-in Tuesday: Dear Twelve-Year-Old Heidi

Dear Twelve-year-old Heidi,

Hey, kiddo.  It's me.  It's you.  It's us.

Here I/you/we are at the spring music program in sixth grade.

I'm 32 now, and the other day I stumbled upon a thought I hadn't had in a long time.  I was thinking about you, and your music program in sixth grade, and how you were really having a hard time back then.  Because when you're just on the verge of a breakthrough, things can feel especially dreadful.

I remember that you felt isolated.

For one thing, you didn't feel like you were on the same page as the people in your class.  It was a small class, with tight cliques, and emotions running rampant as prepubescent hormones blossomed.  They grew up into some great people, but at the time, you were drifting apart from them.  Couples were pairing off, and it really stung as some your closest friends started holding hands with some of your crushes.  Ah, crushes.  So called for their ability to crush a little heart.  You felt completely unpretty.  You definitely felt fat - though you were at a healthy weight -  and you believed that the fat stood between you and all good things.  It's important that you hang in there, little me.  There are kindred spirits in your future.  There is great love to come.  There is upcoming comfort in your own skin, even when you're actually overweight.  (Even when you're morbidly obese.)  And there is courage to take care good of yourself, too.

For another thing, you were saddled with a teacher who discouraged you.  When you mention to a teacher that you're interested in writing, the last thing you should be told is that you'll never be a good writer.  Heck, even if you were a bad writer at the time (which you weren't) a teacher's job is to encourage and enrich the student, not put them down.  I hate to admit it, but that one statement will come back to haunt you, long after other teachers award you, bosses promote you, clients commend you for your writing.  You'll still secretly worry that your sixth-grade teacher was right, that you'll never be a writer.  But you ARE one.  Throughout your life, you'll work very hard on it, and you'll keep improving at it.  You'll even make a living doing it.

To top it all off, you were getting ready for the spring music program.  Two of the 'cool' girls were asked to do a dance together, and you were secretly (or maybe not-so-secretly) jealous of them.  I know it wasn't so much about the dancing (though you'd been studying ballet for six years)... it was about feeling lonely.  Girls with whom you wanted to fit in were spending extra time together, without you.

Chin up.  You have to realize - you weren't really excluded.  You were, in fact, invited to sing a solo.  But you didn't like the solo, because you wanted to dance with your friends.  And you didn't like the song. It though it was unpopular, like you thought you were unpopular.

But you sang that song anyway. Here you are, doing it.

Here's the thing.  That song?  It's actually one of the most beloved songs in the American music canon.  It became famous in a movie musical.  One that you will grow to love.

You'll watch it for the first time in a few years, at a cozy cabin while eating raspberry pie with your very first kindred-spirit friend.  You'll adore it.  You'll quote from it frequently.  You'll come back to it again and again.

Later in your life, you'll find yourself sitting in a lawn chair, in a cemetery, in the dark.  You'll be snuggled up in blankets, and in your husband's arms.  You'll be surrounded by several of your kindred-spirit friends, as you all stare up at a mausoleum wall, aglow with beautiful scenes from your favorite movie musical of all time.  A cool breeze will swirl around you, and you'll look up and notice that you can just barely make out the outline of the palm trees in the dark

You won't be thinking of how you sang that song in your sixth grade spring music program.  You won't be thinking of anything... except how you feel incredibly - completely - content.

 There's a little piece of advice a former (er, future?) boss gave me once.  When you're feeling jealous of someone because they... have a boyfriend... spend more time with someone else... have a moment in the spotlight... have an easier journey to good health... are more successful in their career...  or for any reason at all... you should:

...Keep your eye on your own plate.

  
It's a figure of speech.  It means that if you're worried about what you don't have, you should focus on what you do have.  Don't have a dance to perform like someone else?  Work hard on that solo, and really savor the fact that you get to have your own private moment in the spotlight.  Haven't sold your screenplays like someone else?  Work hard on them.  Working hard on your writing has always paid off in the past.  (See?  I'm taking the same advice.)

I think it's also good advice to take literally.  You're going to go through a long process of weight gain, little me.  It's going to be hard on you.  But in time, you'll find your balance, and then you're going to take good care of yourself - and try to do it in every way you can.  That's what I'm doing right now.  I'm down a pound this week, but I notice that I've gotten a little bit lax with the measuring, lazy about counting.  So I'm going to work on keeping my eye on my own plate.

You've got big things ahead, twelve-year-old me.  You've got places to go and people to love, who love you.  How's this for a deal?  You keep breathing, and keep trying, and keep being yourself.  And I will, too.  And in another 20 years, maybe we'll get some great insight from 52-year-old Heidi.  In the meanwhile... I am always with you, and you are most definitely always with me.

Love,
Heidi