I’m not a huge fan of diets anyway, which is why my second book, The Gorgeously Green Diet, should have been called a “live-it” because it has nothing to do with deprivation – and everything to do with enjoying healthy food. Diets for children, however, can be really scary. There was a huge media backlash this week against Dara-Lynn Weiss who wrote an essay for Vogue Magazine about the extreme diet that she put her six-year old daughter on. The 
article was ironically sandwiched somewhere between an article on Victoria Beckham and another on Kate Moss – two renowned stick-insects, but I digress! The rage that’s come up against Weiss is that her approach was almost draconian and certainly cruel: She humiliated and deprived her child to the point of the ridiculous. Weiss herself has serious food/weight issues, so when her daughter was called “fat” at school, and was told to lose weight by her doctor, Weiss freaked out. Now, anyone with a ounce of sense would know that this is not the way to address obesity or to help an overweight child. Her daughter did wind up losing a significant amount of weight – but so do inmates in prisoner of war camps. Needless to say, Weiss got herself a book deal, and her book will be called “Heavy”.
I recently came back from a vacation where I barely saw an overweight person – how bizarre is that! It was actually shocking not to see any overweight kids, which is very sad because in America, it’s now the norm. On past vacations, my husband and I have been stunned by the amount of little girls who look almost pregnant, with huge rolls of cellulite to boot. It has to be said that most of the guests where we vacationed, were either Canadian or French. I’m not imagining that all European and Canadian kids are slim, however, the quality of the food they eat would be the clue.
Cheap food in America is killing us. Diets for kids are not the answer. Making a child count calories is sad and cruel and will inevitably lead to serious mental issues later in life. To start counting calories and even talking about weight loss in front of a child, in my opinion, is a very silly thing to do. Children, particularly girls, are like sponges – if they absorb even a bit of your neurosis and fear, it will mess them up. The solution is way more simple than diet foods, calorie-counting or deprivation – it’s so simple: FEED YOUR KIDS MINIMALLY PROCESSED, HEALTHY WHOLE FOODS and they won’t get fat.
When I grew up in England in the 70’s, there were virtually no overweight kids. In every school that I attended (7 total), I can remember perhaps one “fat” kid, if that, at each school. I believe that the reason why we didn’t suffer from obesity is because of what we ate. High Fructose Corn Syrup wasn’t around. If you ate sugar, you knew you were eating it – and eat it we did! We all ate candy, cakes and cookies when allowed, but we didn’t sip at sugary Big Gulp drinks either. Nowadays, in England as well as the U.S. these sneaky sugars are in virtually everything on the grocery store shelves, and therein lies the problem. Take a simple hot dog: There is sugar in the actual hot dog, in the ketchup and in the bun – so your kid’s entree is laden with sugar – and they haven’t even got to dessert.
Dr Robert Lustig is a professor of clinical paedeatrics at the University of California, who has been calling for laws that restrict sugar in the same way that alcohol and tobacco is restricted. He’s made a study of obesity and says that “It’s not the fat.” We know this because in the 70’s the Western world went low-fat. Not only does this strip a food of valuable nutrients, but it makes it taste like cardboard – the solution? Add carbs in the form of High Fructose Corn Syrup and Sucrose. So, 35 years ago, we stripped out fat and added sugar. This ‘invisible’ sugar, according to Lustig, is the main cause of obesity.
In the sixties and seventies, convenience foods were a relatively new and novel concept and they were expensive. Low-income families couldn’t afford them. Now it’s the other way around. It’s so sad that cheap food is now filled with junk which will, without any shadow of a doubt, lead to obesity.
When my daughter was about six, we went on an outing somewhere with my friend and her daughter. We got to a buffet-style restaurant and the girls ran ahead excitedly to choose what they wanted to eat from the counter. My friend almost ejected herself forward when she heard her daughter ordering, “Wait, Isabella,” she yelled, “we need to know what’s in it!” At first I thought she was going to ask if it was hormone-free meat or something like that, but she demanded to know the exact calorie content of the chili that her daughter wanted. It was so sad, because the little girl was embarrassed and confused. Now Isabella is about eleven years old and struggles with a serious weight-issue.
As a mother of a very self-conscious tween, I’m so sensitive about these issues. My daughter is lucky because she eats whatever she wants and gets way too many treats, but she is skinny for now. I allow her to have anything she wants – ANYTHING, even junk food, however, I explain the health issues concerning junk food and let her make the decision for herself. Since she was tiny, I’ve always got her to be aware of how she feels after eating certain foods. I’ve never been too heavy-handed or serious about it, never lectured – just kept it light and fun. As a result, she’ll come back from a party and demand “growing” food – anything to mitigate the awful feeling she has, from stuffing herself with too much sugar.
I make sure that we eat whole foods, because diet, fat-free and convenience foods have vital nutrients missing. My daughter slathers her toast with creamy butter, she adores cheese and one of our treats is to go to a fancy deli and “sample” cheeses. I want to teach her that food is not only for nourishment, but it’s also something to be thoroughly enjoyed. I buy bread with no added nothing, and make as much as our food from scratch because that way, I know what’s in it.
I’d rather my daughter be a little chubby, but happy. Obviously the most important thing is health. Granted, obese children are not healthy and obesity is an epidemic in the US right now – closely followed by the UK. Unfortunately, once a child is obese, the damage has been done, and radical measures need to be taken. However, to force a child to go cold-turkey and have them obsess about calories, is not the way to go. It’s all about educating them to pick out healthy foods and Jamie Oliver has started to to an amazing job with this, in his Food Revolution series.
The other missing part of the equation is exercise. Sadly, kids don’t get as much exercise as they used to. We are largely a sedentary society and with the school budget cuts, the lack of exercise is getting worse. Exercise releases all those feel-good chemicals as well as all the other health benefits that we get from challenging ourselves physically everyday. A way more positive and effective way to help an overweight child, would be to find an exercise that they just love, and encourage them to do it at least three times a week.
My philosophy is to enjoy everything in moderation. When we were kids, we drank coke, but in a small glass, not a Big Gulp bucket – also it was a treat because most meals were accompanied by that strange beverage called water! We ate cakes and cookies, but not all day long. We weren’t a ‘grazing’ society, where kids are armed with snacks 24/7 because God forbid they may get hungry. We ate at meals and not-in between on most days. When it was a holiday or a special weekend, you got to stuff yourself with candy and chocolate cake until you were sick. My point is, that to be kind to our kids is to wean them off the IV sugar drip. As parents, we have to be vigilant label-readers, and understand that liquid sugar should be rationed, not necessarily calories. If we absolutely must calorie-count our kid’s food, then we should make it an inner dialogue. A child under the age of twelve, doesn’t need to know.
The final missing part of the food/diet debate is the messages that we give our children about beauty and body size. We were watching the Oscars the other night, and my daughter commented on how thin certain celebrities were, and was this a good thing?
“Not necessarily,” I replied. I explained that they probably feel under tremendous pressure to appear slim for the red carpet and all that, however, I also explained that thin doesn’t equal beauty in any way. I said that women that are too-thin (and there were a couple of good examples,) are just not attractive – not to other women or to boys. I added that the reason is because emaciated women are not healthy, and unhealthy=unattractive. I said that you can’t see real beauty in a photograph because real beauty comes from the inside. Women who are kind, honest, and laugh a lot, tend to be the most gorgeous. I watched that nugget of information soak into her little sponge of a brain and hope that when she next flicks through one of my fashion magazines, she’ll have the sense to know what real beauty is.
My daughter developed her eating disorder at 14. Children should never (not even above the age of 12) be calorie counting. You never know what obsession it could trigger. Thank you for your article, for bringing this to the organic side of life.