When My Four-Year-Old Went on a Diet--My Messy Beautiful

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This is one of those posts that you let the mouse hover over the “publish” button multiple times before you actually click it.

Putting something so incredibly personal to the world takes a strength I know other people think I have, but one my heart teeters on and says, “Maybe you don’t.”

Be brave, little self.

This community exists for honesty, so honest I will be.

Brutally, beautifully honest.

Brutiful.

The battle began when I was eight. The pediatrician sent my too-much-ice-cream-not-enough-exercise belly to a nutritionist and cholesterol doctor. I was asked to pick my favorite plastic foods to make a complete meal (cake and pizza anyone?) and shown a chart of lines and curves while I heard a skinny old man tell me I would always be "heavy."

When I was twelve I had some sort of soccer progress parent-coach-player conference where my coaches told me if I “dropped a few pounds” I'd be a whole lot faster.

While attempting a back handspring in high school, a coach remarked that "Maybe if you work on toning that core this would get easier for you.”

Without dragging you, dear reader, into the details that followed, I think it will suffice to say that those things build inside your head.

And they stay with you.

They stayed with me.

A really good therapist, a supportive family, an encouraging husband, and a whole lotta yoga classes have taken most of it away.

But it stays with me--a teensy little bit is always there.

When my oldest son, Will, was an infant I was obsessed with the food that went into his body. My mom gave him lunchmeat at 10 months old and I nearly flipped out. Okay no, I totally flipped out. We were organic, all the way, baby. All. The. Way.

But then I came out of that newish parent fog and realized that hot dogs and mac and cheese were a freaking Godsend, and so were lollipops and cookies for bribery, and I began incorporating them into our weekly grocery lists.

When Will was three, he was heads above his peers. “He’s only three?!” people at the park would remark. “He’s so BIG.” My five-foot-half-inch frame (only short people add the halves) would sarcastically shoot back, “He gets it from me.”

At about three and a half Will also became pounds heavier than his peers.

“Keek, you were the same way,” my dad reassured me. “Do NOT let this get to you. He is NOT abnormal.”

“Keek,” my husband would say, “You can’t let your own neuroses about weight and body image start to affect your perception of Will.”

Oh they were right. They were right right right right RIGHT.

But there were days I’d swear Will was just fine, and the next he would look, well, BIG.

At his four-year well visit he was one percentage point on the side of “normal” on that ugly curved chart.

At four and a half, we had a problem.

I was concerned. It wasn’t right. I didn’t want this to be just my neurotic damaged brain, but I also didn’t want him to be asked what football team he was going to be playing defense for “with a build like that” (thank you pea-brain muscle man at the gym).

So we went to his pediatrician.

And she showed me that curved chart.

She mentioned something about “two hundred pounds in high school on this curve.”

And the part of my brain that had been through this 25 years ago wanted to run from the room; it wanted to cry; it wanted to tell her that I didn’t want to talk about it anymore; it wanted to wrap up my little big kid in my arms and tell him that he didn’t have to go through this, too.

But honestly? The only person going through this was me.

She nodded as I spilled a lot of my experience, family history, and the stuff that has stayed with me. I wanted her to pat me on the arm and tell me it was okay.

Instead, she put him on a diet.

(Really, in her best Dr. Phil, she was saying, “It’s not about YOU!”)

She recommended a nutritionist.

We had to go get blood work.

This was déja vu at its finest. Or worst.

For the blood work he was a champ, while I winced (okay, nearly passed out) in the corner--mostly because I hate blood and needles and that’s usually the case--but partially out of fear for him.

What would this do to him?

But that’s this brutiful thing, you see, because it hasn’t done anything to him. Just me.

This isn’t 1988. Today, in the same breath in which we talk about this crazy obesity epidemic going on in our world and berate the country’s fattest city, we also have a sensitivity to weight issues that didn’t exist so many years ago.

My husband and I, we pump up Will, like a personal trainer with Rocky theme music and arms-in-the-air victory dances. We’re not handing him trophies with every vegetable eaten, but we are parading more than ever that it’s cool to be strong, and strong is eating healthy, and strong is feeling GOOD.

Hear that, self? Strong is good! Eating healthy is good! YOU, therefore, are strong and healthy! That feels better than good--it feels amazing!

Know what else feels good? Doing the right thing for him.

Doing the right thing for him with the right approach--one that builds his self-esteem and makes him feel strong.

In helping him transform both his lifestyle and ours, he has made me strong.

He doesn’t even know it.

-Kristin

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