More often than not this is how it starts out, with people sitting everywhere except where they're supposed to.
Paddy gets considerably more interested with the actual food shows up.
...Mostly because of this guy, who loves to eat, but who also loves to throw stuff on the floor as an experiment to see 1) which sound it makes and 2) what the dog does. Dogs that eat are awesome.
She likes to eat too, although she's more skeptical about the whole process than her brother. She always has been. He eats like a lumberjack, she eats more like...a skeptical preschooler. She eats enough, has never fallen off her curve, and can apparently subsist happily for days at a time on milk, the tinest morsels of broccoli, and yogurt. I worried, like all moms, when she was tiny and consistently hating rice cereal, that I would starve my baby to death.
Luckily we have a good doctor who kept repeating, "she's tiny, but she's never fallen off her curve; this is normal for her" and I found Ellyn Satter's book, which emphasized that some kids just don't eat as much as others. Thus armed, when Buddy came along and began regarding every meal as "You mean I get yogurt?!?! SCORE!", I was not alarmed that he would turn into a tank-child. My kids are the sizes they are meant to be, and (this is key) I haven't fed either of them differently than each other. For each meal we all sit up to the table, I dish up the food--or let them dish up, if it's something easy like pinneaple pieces and they can hold a spoon--and then they eat or not. That's it.
I don't care if all they eat is applesauce, or bread, or if they eat their dessert (homemade, generally) but not their peas. I don't care if they eat three helpings of peaches and no spinach, or--something Miss Boo often does--a lot of salad and ranch dressing and no meat, or if she just drinks milk. I don't even get too worked up if they don't eat anything. I know there is a snack coming along in a couple of hours, and the non-eater will probably be hungry enough by then to be happy to eat cheese and crackers and milk.
Because I followed the same procedure with each of them, and because they're so different in their eating personalities, it's incredibly reassuring that the way they eat is not something I did/can do.
Oh, I could make mealtimes a lot more stressful and unpleasant for all of us and try to force the designated USDA number of servings of everything into my kids, letting Buddy get heartbroken because I wouldn't give him more mandarin oranges, and I could get all tangled up in butting my will against that of the same two-year-old who once insisted on wearing her shoes to bed for a whole week. I could make eating a painful thing, not be able to enjoy my own meal, and mess with my kids' internal regulatory system as well as my own, because chances are if I'm that uptight about my kids' eating, I'm going to be beating myself up, too.
And what would the result be? Buddy would still probably eat more than Miss Boo and stay in the center of the growth charts, and she would still probably be at the 5th percentile, because that's the size they are meant to be. And I would probably start exhibiting the behaviors of people who have their food restricted by themselves or others: food preoccupation, sneaking "forbidden" foods without being able to enjoy or feel satisfied by them (because I feel guilty and horrible for eating them), and gaining weight beyond my natural setpoint because restricting tells my body that there isn't enough food, so I better store while I can. If I panicked and restricted more tightly, I would (God forbid) pass these behaviors on to my kids, besides giving them the message that their God-given bodies aren't good enough.
Looking at the two alternatives, I just don't think it's that important whether they eat their peas.
The ironic thing is, with this conscious decision to release the control of whether my kids eat: they eat. They eat a lot of things that kids their age aren't supposed to like--like spinach, raw green beans, hummus, smoothies ("ice cream" Miss Boo calls them, not because she's never had the real stuff, but because it's evidently a category that means "sweet and cold") and salmon. They're healthy, happy, energetic kids, and mealtimes are generally relaxed and fun.
So here's my challenge, to myself and to all of you:
Why not do yourself the same courtesy? The articles I referenced below are helpful to figure out how, and I have a book coming in the mail that I will review here for more information, but it's really not that complicated. Do yourself the favor of knowing when you're going to eat and allowing yourself three good meals plus sit-down snacks if you need them. (Us pregnant ladies do.) Eat as much as you are hungry for, of foods you find enjoyable, and listen to the wisdom of your body. It knows what it's doing! The God who made you doesn't make mistakes!
Even if you don't lose weight, which I can't predict and which really isn't an important measure of health, people who eat in the way my kids eat--happily--are healthier by all traditional measures (except size) than skinny people who restrict and worry themselves into skinniness, even if the skinny people are using all sorts of "healthy" behavior like running on treadmills and dutifully pouring flaxseed into their bran flakes.
Of course, this is all easy to say and hard to do. We live in a society where we are shown stickish people as beautiful and told that anyone with a curve is somehow a paradox if they are pretty. If this was just Hollywood it would perhaps be easier to ignore--after all, Hollywood believes that 9/11 was a CIA setup and that L.Ron Hubbard was a prophet. But we're told by people that seem trustworthy that we should all be watching what we eat very, very carefully, and that if we don't we are both ugly AND irresponsible--and costing all the skinny people extra in their taxes, to boot. It's hard to fight all those messages, especially when they come from doctors. The problem is that doctors get their information on "healthy body weight" from the government (the CDC) and the World Health Organization, which is a CDC made up of officials from a bunch of governments. Doctors are well-intentioned, very busy, and don't have time to read studies, so they trust the CDC and the WHO, who after all have proven to be pretty good at keeping people from dying of smallpox.
They shouldn't, in this case. Fatness isn't smallpox.
When the government and the WHO set up the guidelines for BMI, they mapped population-wide BMI with a Bell curve like this:
Now, things that are distributed this way across a population--whether it is intelligence, height, or ability to pat your head and rub your stomach--are "normally distributed". In other words, most of the population falls in the bulge in the middle, with a very few at either extreme. There will be some people who are closer to zero--very small people, as regards weight--and some people closer to 100--very large people. But MOST of the population will be somewhere in between, with a small amount smack in the middle.
The government, when making BMI recommendations, drew a line at 50, like above. This happens to be at the BMI of 25.
Then they recommended that everyone with a BMI of more than 25 lose weight. (They also, reluctantly, stated that those with a BMI of less than 18.5 might be unhealthy, although all the evidence is that low BMIs are far, far more dangerous to people than high BMIs. Like, they can cause cardiac arrest, bone fractures, and make you more likely to die early.)
The problem with this is twofold. First of all, people don't have health problems until their BMIs get well above 25--closer to 45, actually, with really serious problems only way over on the extreme at a BMI of 50.
But the biggest crock about the whole idea is that it misinterprets the very concept of a Bell curve. By definition, half of the curve is always going to be "above average"--or fat, in this instance. That is what "average" means in a Bell curve. Always. If everone loses weight, it just shifts the curve downward. What it will mean is that more people will be dangerously underweight relative to their bodies' setpoints, but there will be the same number of "above average" or "fat" people in the population, because it's the nature of the graph.
So when you hear the ominous news that we are having an obesity epidemic, or, in the words of Mrs. Skinner, "Children are so fat these days--can't we make money off of that?" realize that when they say "half of all Americans are overweight or obese" THIS is all they are talking about.
Yes. Apparently in order to be a journalist or work for the WHO, you did not have to learn math.
Keep this in mind when that little voice pops up to say, "you shouldn't have any sour cream on your potato" or "you shouldn't eat so much" or "if you do that, you will be fat".
Tell that voice to shut up. Instead ask, "am I hungry? does the food still taste good?" and give yourself the freedom to eat as long as it is pleasurable, and stop when it isn't anymore. That's it.
Simple, but effective for everyone.
Cheers,
Breanna
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