Where is the Line Between Your Weight and Yourself?

Girl Disappearing by Curly Tops

Perfectly round. A circular platform encircled by a raised bar. Like a stage! The kind that lights up underneath and lifts the performer above the crowd as mist billows beneath! And indeed I am being watched. But there is no applause and I am given no chance for a monologue. Perhaps, I think - silently, to myself - it reminds me less of a stage and more of a teleportation device. Closing my eyes I wait for a beam of light to descend and obliterate the particles of my mortal shell, to reduce me, no more no less, to the same matter that permeates the universe. No light comes. My atoms stay rigidly arranged, the faulty DNA that is Broken Me still intact, still informing.

I wish it were anything but what it actually is: a scale.

The brushed steel platform on which I stand, obediently thinking defiant thoughts, does not look like any scale I am used to. Certainly it doesn't resemble either of the torture devices to which I have arranged my bathroom, and my life, around. (Two: one to check the other. Accuracy is paramount.) This is an industrial scale, large enough to weigh an elephant but stark enough to weigh an anorectic. Even if she is too weak to hold herself up and must lean on the circular rail for support. But not comfort. No scale has ever been comforting. The very idea of weighing and measuring a human being is not so they can be loved but so they can be compared.

I know quite well what I am being compared to. The problem is that I don't know how I measure up. The digital display that shows the all-important numbers is across the room. Across the room! And turned away so only the nutritionist can read it. Upon first entering the eating disorder clinic, I had protested vehemently at this weighing ritual. "But I'm at a healthy weight!" And then, "But I'm not anorexic! I'm here for compulsive exercise and orthorexia!" Then finally, "My shoes (large wedged heels) and my coat (thick for winter) are so heavy!" All of these things were quite true.

"It doesn't matter. This is just to get a baseline. All patients are weighed at every appointment. Please step on the scale."

"But I'm not even trying to lose weight!!" My final plea. This, incidentally, was not true.

The nutritionist didn't blink. "We can't continue until you are weighed."

There was a standoff. I held out for a half hour, picking my nails, studying the pastel 80's artwork, staring blatantly at my nutritionist - a woman so thin that she must always get asked if she has an eating disorder, if she is a size 0, if she has any tips . Of course these things are filtered through the madness of my illness. I can't see anyone in any other light except fat or thin, evil or righteous, rebellious or obedient.

The thing that breaks me is knowing my babysitter can't stay past an hour. White as a sheet, I step on the scale. The silence that had started at our inauspicious beginning continues to blanket the room. I make not a peep as my worth blinks in black and white. She makes not a sound as she writes it down on my chart, her face inscrutable. Surely, I think, she had never seen someone weigh as much as I do. Surely, I think, she is horrified. Surely she thinks I'm faking sickness. It makes me feel so angry and impotent and worthless that the only thing I can think to say when we finally sit down in proper chairs - as if one of us hadn't just subjected the other to an invasive and dehumanizing ritual - in her office is, "My shoes have solid rubber heels, they probably weigh two pounds each."

She nods, unsmiling, "I'll make a note of that on your chart." And she does. Although I do not know whether she notes it under my weight or under the "disordered fixations of patient" column. I reassure myself with the thought that next time I will wear tiny sandals and take my coat off in the waiting room, no matter the fact that it is winter. No matter the fact that I am always, always freezing. Next time, I vow, that number will be less.

"Excuse me," my lips stretch and I show my teeth in what I hope is a smile, "but I didn't catch the number. What was it?"

"I already told you, the number doesn't matter. It's just a baseline for our charts. Something to see if the intervention is working." Her bony chest, visible through her v-neck sweater, rises and falls as she sighs.

Intervention. I bristle at the word. Bristle at the thought that something as intensely personal, as intrinsic to my corporeal self, as my weight is kept from me. It's mine! I want to scream. It's all I have left! I don't want to add.

"Now, since it took so long getting started," she pauses and I stare right back into her hollow-cheeked face, "I won't be able to finish all of the intake questions. But I'd like you to take this and read it before our meeting next week." She slides a bound booklet across the desk to me. It has a clip-art picture of a fruit bowl on the cover. Nutritional Guidelines the title reads. It is tacky and I hate it without opening it.

But then I remember Pam, my beloved therapist, the one who insisted that I go to this meeting, do this intake, finish this outpatient program. I can't face her next week and report yet another week of no progress. Flipping open the booklet, the first page tells me to eat a protein, a grain and a fat at every meal. The nutritionist leans over to point out more clip-art pictures illustrating each of these categories. As if I don't already know every macronutrient, every calorie, every gram, every vitamin, every category that a food could possibly be compartmentalized into by heart. Did you know an apple is a fruit?

My sickness does not make me stupid.

The nutritionist thinks it does. She hands me a list and asks me to circle which foods I will eat. Scanning the everlong list - is every food in the world really on there? Because I am an adventurous eater. At least, I used to be - I draw a heavy X through them all. This will be faster: I scrawl on the bottom "salad, berries, nuts, steel-cut oats and non-starchy vegetables."

"This is what you will eat?"

A lump forms in my throat as I realize that several days ago I struck oatmeal off the list. Grains are bad for you, our primal ancestors didn't eat them, our systems haven't evolved to digest them without inflammation. See? I had to take them off. It was the right thing to do.

"Charlotte?"

I'm not aware that I'm not saying any of this out loud. What I know is this: I am crying. And my babysitter can't stay any longer.

"I'm sorry, I have to go now." I stumble over my too-tall, too-heavy shoes. (How could I have ever thought these made my legs look thinner? Clearly I am huge and no shoes are going to hide that.)

"All right, I'll see you next week?"

"Sure." By the waiting room I have chewed my lip raw. Mothers don't have the luxury of eating disorders. By the elevator I have dried the tears. I can't go back to my children with red rimmed eyes. With problems. With heavy shoes. By the front doors I have recovered myself. I toss the booklet in the garbage can under the cigarette sandbox.

I don't come back.

I prefer my small-scale scales. The ones that don't have the power to transport me to another world. The ones that won't take me apart piece by piece, demanding my faith that it will put me back together in the end.

* Note: I wanted to end the essay here. But I worry that some of you will think that this is my contemporary state of mind. And it isn't. This incident happened several years ago and I have made amazing progress with my disordered eating. The reason I write about this today is to try and describe what it felt like for me. Why the scale still holds such prominence in my life. And because today, for the first time since my baby's birth, I weigh the weight that I did that day (of course the first thing I did when I got home and paid the babysitter was to run upstairs and weigh myself, shoes, coat and everything). Before you worry - do realize that my weight today, totally naked, is what I weighed then fully (overly) clothed. It isn't truly the same but seeing that number brought back this memory. It seemed important to write it down.

Do you have a weight that holds particular importance for you? A number that brings back a particular memory, good or bad? Edited to add: I ask this not to have you fixate on an arbitrary number but to encourage you to challenge the beliefs that you hold about yourself and your weight. You are so much more than a number.

My Disordered Eating Past

Polly is dead. She committed suicide on February 8, 2008, a likely result of her lifelong struggle with anorexia. I don't know Polly but for some reason the news of her death went through me like a cold shiver, the same way it does any time I hear about a eating disordered woman who loses the battle.

So I did what any intelligent stalker-type does these days: I googled her. I discovered that her death made headlines because she was one of three eating-disordered women profiled in the HBO documentary "Thin" that aired back in 2006. Not watching TV, it has taken me this long to hear about it I suppose. Someone posted the entire documentary (in 11-minute segments) to You Tube. I watched it two nights ago and have been torn up ever since.

I've been mulling it over and trying to think of a way I could post about it - to let you know what an interesting, amazing, inspiring, and yet completely horrifying & depressing show it is - but I couldn't think of an appropriate angle. It just hits too close to home for me. I see myself in every one of the girls profiled.

The Start
I've never been officially diagnosed with an eating disorder [edited to add: I have now! Compulsive over-exerciser, that's me!] but there are times in my life where I think I definitely would have qualified for ED-NOS (eating disorder - not otherwise specified). As did far too many of my friends, I flirted with anorexia in high school & college, always managing to keep my weight just on the safe side of things. Always able to pull back when I really really needed to. I never cognizantly thought of the times where I would subsist on a single "fun size" package of candy for an entire day, several days in a row, as "restricting." I just thought it was what girls did to stay thin.

Lots of girls I knew did it or things similar to it. Other waitresses at the restaurant I worked at taught me which foods had the least calories and tricks to make all the decadent food we were surrounded by look unappealing so we wouldn't be tempted to eat it. Our dinner breaks were actually competitions to see who could eat the least actual food. Girls in my gymnastics classes taught me about not eating before a competition (the lower your weight, the higher you fly!) and then using massive doses of caffeine pills to mask the hunger & keep your energy up. Roommates taught me about "saving calories" by restricting all week so you could eat on a date and the guy would think you are one the cool girls who is thin but can eat whatever she wants.

This type of behavior also runs in my family - my grandmother, whom I still adore and think about almost daily despite her being dead for 20 years, was an active bulimic all her adult life. Two cousins were bulimic. Two more spent time in eating disorder clinics. And then of course there was the media - thin movie stars, even thinner fashion models. Even my health teacher encouraged disordered eating by requiring only the girls in class to keep a food journal, a practice I kept up for over ten years after her class ended. (The boys had carte blanche to eat whatever they "needed" to keep up their strength for sports and because they were still growing. Never mind that many of us girls were also in sports and also, duh, still growing.) I was surrounded, almost from birth, by our culture of thin. Every girl I knew was tainted by it.

The Decline
And yet my bouts of bad eating were interspersed with longer ones of health because my body's will to survive and thrive was stronger than my willpower to starve. That is, until I met G. in college. He was my partner on a swing-dance team. He was an amazing dancer and, simultaneously, a sociopath. I saw something good in him and he, likewise, saw something in me: vulnerability. We began to date. The entire time we went out (if you can call it that), he abused me in every way possible. It started out small with little comments about how I was harder to lift than some of the other girls on our team - natural waifs, every last one of them. Then it progressed to screaming vitriol, that I cannot even now bring myself to repeat.

To cope, I did what came naturally - I stopped eating. I pulled out all the tricks I'd ever been taught over the years and combined them with hours of intensely athletic dancing. It worked. G. complimented me on my protruding hipbones. He liked that his hands could almost span my waist. He was happy. I was nearly destroyed. I fainted after a dance performance. I suffered heart palpitations, dizzy spells, nausea & insomnia. He finished the job by sexaully assaulting me. That was the end of my relationship with him, thanks to good friends and family, but the beginning of a kind of self-loathing I had never experienced before.

The Worst of It
After G., my weight went up a bit and stabilized. I met a great man who cared about my mind and my soul and honestly thought I was beautiful regardless of a few pounds up or down. I married him and for a few short years, managed to not think about food or weight at all. The hole in me wasn't gone but at least it was covered up.

That came to an end when G. popped back into my life in the most horrific way possible. At the time, I had assumed that I was the only girl he had abused. Turns out he was a serial molester and had only gotten worse during the intervening years. I was contacted by the police and decided to press charges.

My only experience with our legal system being Law & Order reruns, I was wholly unprepared for the physical and mental nightmare of a sexual assault case. I was also pregnant with my third child. The interstate court case dragged on nine long months, exactly the length of my pregnancy. The longer it went on, the more I deteriorated. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. Despite being pregnant, I quickly reached the lowest weight I'd ever been. I thought about suicide every single day. The baby inside me was the only thing that stopped me from actually doing it. G. finally plea-bargained and got a year in prison, with time served. The very next day my son was born. Hale and hearty at ten pounds, he was beautiful child. I was broken.

The court case ended, everyone assumed I would feel empowered and vindicated and quickly ease back into my old perfect life as wife, teacher & mother. I think they assumed that because that is what they so desperately wanted for me. What did I want for me? I wanted desperately to finally heal. I thought being healthy physically would help me mentally. But this time my disordered eating snuck up on me as my quest for ultimate health devolved into Orthorexia, a newly coined term for people who restrict their food based on health reasons as opposed to wanting to be thin. In fact, I'm told it's the new "in" eating disorder in the Hollywood set. Yay, me.

I saw a therapist (who was tainted for me by the fact that G. was court-ordered to pay for her services) who was pretty good at helping me work through my damage from the abusive relationship. But when it came to my disordered eating, she was worse than unhelpful. She wanted tips. Every week as I shrunk before her very eyes she would ask in awe how I did it. Somewhat overweight herself, she pressed until I actually gave her a how-to, which she then promised to implement. At last we both realized that she had problems with her self image & eating and that our relationship had moved far from therapeutic. So I stopped seeing her. But I still hurt.

The End
I wish I could say that there was some huge life-changing moment that made me leave my disordered behaviors behind. But let's face it, you read my blog, you know I still straddle that line at times. Although these days I trend more towards orthorexia than anorexia [edited to add: actually these days it's crazy amounts of exercise]. Which is why "Thin" was such a powerful documentary for me. I'm at a healthy weight. I'm healthier mentally than I've been in years. And yet I still see myself in so many of their mannerisms. The way Alisa obsessively tried on outfit after outfit, sometimes for hours a day, looking for one that didn't make her look fat (not realizing that the fat was all in her head and not in her clothes). The way that Shelly (the girl pictured above in the Thin promo) talked about what her control over food meant to her and how it played out in her family. The way that Polly went to the ED clinic to heal and instead just found something else to rebel against.

I'm not saying that I have an eating disorder now. I am saying that the potential for one lives inside me. Which is why I suppose I am telling you all this. It's my was of staying accountable.

Because Polly is dead.

This post sound familiar? Fridays are greatest hits day here at GFE. This post originally ran 2/2008. I chose this one to repost today mostly because I think I need to hear it again right now.

The Cost of Counting Calories

A while ago the now-defunct Elastic Waist was currently looking for "anti-diet" tips, a concept which I love both for the opportunity of turning the diet industry's sound bites back on them and for the opportunity to practice being witty and pithy. However, despite my being both witty AND pithy (in my own esteemed opinion) they did not chosen any of my tips. So I'm going to share my favorite anti-diet tip with you:

"Keep a food journal in which you write down every single bite you eat. That way, if dieting doesn't work out for you, at least you'll have a head start on your memoirs. Really, your posterity will thank you. "

Confessions of an Chronic Food Journal-er
For years (and I do mean years - about 17 of them, over half my life), I took to heart the advice that the best way to keep off the pounds is to write down every morsel that goes into your mouth. It makes you accountable! It helps you "see" what you eat (in case you missed it at the actual time you were eating it)!! It allows you to make charts and graphs of all your macronutriets!!! BRING ON THE OCD!!!!

I even had a fancy little spreadsheet that I created myself to track every number even remotely related to food. By the time I quit doing it, it was so elaborate it took more time from my day than I'm currently willing to admit to. If I'm really honest with myself (which I try to be only on Tuesdays and Saturdays, so you get lucky today), it is probably the #1 most eating-disordered thing I have ever done. I used that fascist journal to dictate exactly what I would and, more importantly, would not eat. If it didn't fit in my journal, I didn't eat it. Not even a bite. Not even if it was the special trifle our German friends made us as a gift that was, so my husband told me, "one-in-a-lifetime good."

"You have so much self control!" people used to always say to me. It wasn't self-control though - it was fear, pure and simple. That little journal kept everything safe for me but the price I paid was having all the parameters of my life defined by Excel. Not even Bill Gates would want to live that life.

My Wake-Up Call
A couple of years ago my sister wrote a book on our grandmother, a woman whom I loved in a way that I have never been able to love anyone since. She was a teacher, a leader in her community, a published author, a mother of seven (!) children and so beautiful that she turned heads, even in her sixties. She died when I was nine and her memory is sacred to me. I still talk to her in my head sometimes. (See? Honest Tuesdays!)

She was also actively bulimic up until her death. An entire lifetime of bingeing and vomiting. When my sister started going through her journals for the book, she found something so sad and so sickening that it shook me to my pilates-honed core: page after page after page of food. Every bite she took, recorded in her beloved hand.

I knew nothing about how she felt when her children were born. But I could tell you every piece of food she ate on April 12, 1964.

My journal died that day. I killed it. I did not want that to be the legacy I left my children and, someday, grandchildren.

Easier Said Than Done
Like everything worth doing, giving up my journal was harder than I expected it to be. I was afraid to eat without it. It required me to eat according only to my hunger. I had to trust my own body - the very thing that every diet and "health" purveyor out there told me was my worst enemy. My body would sabotage my efforts with its insatiable hunger, they told me. My body wanted to be fat & lazy and unless I mastered it, it would ruin me, they whispered.

I didn't know how to answer those thoughts in my head at first. It was a leap of faith. I turned off my computer and deleted the file. I called friends to keep my mind busy so it wouldn't mentally do the calculating that Excel had once done. And at last, I found a different way to emulate my grandmother: I started writing.

Count Your Blessings
Today I still keep a journal. A gratitude journal. Every night before I go to bed, I write at least a couple of sentences about what I am grateful for. Sometimes they are small: "Today I'm grateful for bobby pins. How else could I have all these cool layers in my hair and still get my sweat on at the gym?" Sometimes they are so big I can't wrap my heart all the way around them: "Today I am grateful for my baby's chubby fingers as he waved hello to me (and his brother, and the neighbor, and the dog, and the nightstand.)" Sometimes they are tired: "Today I'm grateful for a warm bed and no insomniac tendencies." Sometimes they are pages and pages of all the blessings God has given me. This is what I want to leave my children to read someday, when I'm gone.

So if you must count something, count these moments. And be grateful for every one.

And in case you are curious as to what happened to my weight after I quit food journalling - the answer is: absolutely nothing. It turns out that "they" are wrong. If I feed my body when it's hungry and leave it alone when it's not (just basic respect, in my opinion), it takes care of itself just fine. For which I am very grateful.

Note: Thursdays are greatest hits days here at GFE. This post originally ran January 2008. I will add that almost two years later, giving up my food journal is still one of the best decisions I have ever made. With the exception of my current pregnancy, my weight has stayed within a ten-pound range without any help from a journal. Every time I blog about this, I get a few e-mails from people telling me how food journalling saved their lives. I'm not knocking journalling if it works for you - in fact I'm thrilled that you have found what works for you - I'm just saying that it didn't for me.

Guest Posting at MizFit Today! Plus Yogurt Recipe!

I want this outfit. While I'm wishing for things, I'd also like my waist back to wear it with.

To know me in real life is to know one thing about me. No, not my spunky gym craziness (which has sadly diminished since becoming preggo) or my bad dance moves that I will willingly showcase in any public setting or even the fact that I always travel in a pack of wild boys. No, what most people remember about me is my singular ability to ruin any food I come into close contact with. I'm a bad cook. The best part about it though is that I married a man who loves to socialize - as do I - and so we often have people over for dinner. So this "talent" is not one that stays hidden. Generally when I show up to a potluck, the first question people ask is, "Did you make that or buy it?" Domino's pizza is by far the most popular dish of "mine" so far. To read more about my culinary adventures, check out my guest post over at the inimitable MizFit's today!!

However, we do not eat out much. One meal a week at most. Which means that despite being really bad at it, I end up doing a lot of cooking. And I prefer to cook from scratch thereby saving on money and preservatives. So I've decided to let you in my new favorite cooking pastime: making my own yogurt.

I've long had an expensive greek-yogurt-a-day habit. I LOVE the stuff. And I like the whole fat, organic kind - which is not cheap - but I considered it an indulgence and bought it anyhow. All that changed when I read this article about making your own basic foods. The recipe for yogurt was so simple and cost effective that I will summarize it for you here: Pour a quart of milk into a pan. Heat to 180-190 F. Cool to 115-120 F. Stir in 1/4 c of yogurt (either the kind you buy at the store or leftovers from your last batch, doesn't matter if it is flavored!). Remove the pan from the stove, swaddle it in a kitchen towel and let it sit for 4 hours. Scoop it into a container and refrigerate. Viola - YOGURT! That's it! You don't need a yogurt maker! It's the easiest thing ever! Not even I can screw it up!

And yes, since I know some of you are thinking "But plain yogurt tastes like crap" and I know you won't believe me when I tell you homemade plain yogurt tastes better than that grocery store junk, you can add stuff to it like jam, fruit or honey. I also use my yogurt to marinate chicken, make masala sauce for Indian dishes, and make savory dips by adding garlic, salt, and seasonings.

I did try all the other recipes listed in the article; it was a baking kind of weekend here. The granola was yummy but kinda time consuming to make and not really healthy. The bagels were delish but a total pain to make. And freezer jam is always a winner - can't go wrong with freezer jam!

You guys have any easy healthy recipes to give me so I can ruin, I mean, try them? What other things do you make your own of? Dryer sheets? Baby wipes?

PS> For all of you who suggested that I start my own organic veggie garden, I am happy to report that last night we planted the first of our cold-weather veggies! We've got brussels sprouts, spinach and peas going on. We'll add tomatoes, squash, onions and some other things when it's not butt-freezing cold anymore. Here's hoping they grow!

Drinks On Me! (Yes, That Means a Giveaway!)

If you think my food quirks are weird, you should try buying me a drink. Truly, it's a wonder I still have friends that will be seen with me in public places any more.

Gym Buddy Paul found this out the hard way the other day at a TurboKick social gathering (that's right - we're all such TurboFans that we get together outside of Turbo to talk about Turbo. Sometimes we even bust out our moves together. Think line dancing. But louder. And with violence. It's hawt.) Paul noticed that I was the only one in our raucus group sans beverage and in an effort to be chivalrous, offered to buy me a drink.

That's me, lower left flexing my guns! Tough crowd, no? Wouldn't want to meet us walking down a dark alley. Mostly because we'd fill the alley. And if it was dark there would be a lot of smooshed toes, I'm sure.

For most people - make that normal people - this would be a no-brainer. But we all know by now that I am not normal. And so I declined. "Are you sure?" He looked worried, perhaps wondering if I might pass out from dehydration like I did once before in TurboKick when he happened to save the day with a VitaWater. I am not known for my common sense.

But this time I was not just being boneheaded about my (in)ability to do fasted-state cardio. Let's start with my religious beliefs. I'm LDS and so that rules out anything alcoholic. (Side note: I may be the only person you've ever met that has never, not even once, tasted alcohol. Don't worry, I'm still fun at parties - I've prepped an impressive list of stupid human tricks that I can whip out at a moment's notice. ) We also choose not to drink coffee or tea. (Additional side note: but hot chocolate is okay. You know that decadent Stephen's gourmet cocoa? Invented by an LDS person, natch. I think we account for 75% of the world's hot chocolate consumption.) All of which might be well and good - many LDS folks manage to have perfectly lovely social lives, even in a liquid setting - until you add my personal neuroses on top of it.

I don't like drinking my calories. This eliminates 90% of beverages. I also don't like artificial sweeteners. And that eliminates the last 10%. I haven't had soda in years. So what do I drink? Ice water with lemon. Unsweetened herbal teas. Maybe milk if I'm feeling really kicky. In case anyone is wondering, smoothies, with their numberless calorie-laden ingredients and dubious supplements and faux-health foods and fruit stripped of all fiber, are my own personal hell. Welcome to the wide wonderful world of Charlotte's mind.

And yet there are a select few beverages that I will drink if the stars are aligned just right and my meds have kicked in, my favorite being pomegranate juice. I love pomegranates. Persephone is my favorite of all the Greek mistresses. And the juice? Is a tart-n-tangy antioxidant cocktail that has the added bonus of turning your lips a really awesome shade of red. (Seriously, I would kill for a lip gloss in that color!) I will break my no-calorie beverage rule for good pomegranate juice.

And the good folks at POM Wonderful decided to help me spread the stained love. One thing that has always got me about pomegranate juice is the wide disparity in taste and price among "100% pomegranate juice." POM Wonderful cleared that up for me. Apparently most of the other brands are manufactured in countries that do not check the contents of what they sell, allowing things marked as 100% juice to actually be cut with a variety of other, cheaper juices. The POM juice is the only brand guaranteed to be 100% pomegranate juice and nothing else. And come on, nobody likes their drugs - nutraceutical or otherwise - cut with cheap fillers! I tried out a bottle of POM next to a glass of a cheap frozen brand. I could a difference in the juice even before drinking it and the tastes were completely different.

You up for the health-nut version of the Pepsi challenge? The POM Wonderful people are giving five of you a free bottle to try it out and see if you can't tell the difference. Just leave me a comment below telling me what your favorite beverage of choice is to be entered into the contest! Winners to be announced Monday, contest NOT limited to the U.S. Wahoo!

So, anyone else out there nutty about drinking their calories? Also, big question of the day: do you call it "soda" or "pop"? (If you answer "coke", you just outed yourself as a Southerner and will be forced to show off your adorable accent every time I talk to you!)

PS> Gym Buddy Paul: Your kind gesture was very much appreciated! Thanks for being my friend even though I'm certifiable;)

When School Lunch Attacks

"Chips and a rice krispie treat!" My first-grader chirped happily.

"That's what you had for lunch?" I asked incredulously as the preschooler started the tantrum process (everything must be equal in this household) and the baby took up a chorus of "Chip! Chip!!!!"

"Oh yeah, and a chocolate milk." (Note to self: the mystery of the two cavities before age 7? Solved.)

Normally, given the societal cacophony regarding that stuff we put into our mouth and also need to live, I try to reserve judgment on what my son has for lunch on the one day a week he's allowed to have hot lunch with his kickball cronies. Especially since the other four days he's stuck with a nutritionally balanced home lunch packed by me, I try to just take a deep breath and go to my happy place whenever he talks about chicken nuggies or tater tots or french toast sticks with vats of fake syrup. I may have mentioned it here a time or two but I have food issues. And I'm trying really hard not to pass those onto my kids.

But a rice krispie treat, chips and chocolate milk?!?!?

"Wasn't there some protein? Or, say, a fruit or vegetable?" I croaked, visions of Wall-E dancing before my eyes.

"Oh yeah," he nodded seriously. "They had that brown crumbly stuff on tortillas. You know that stuff?"

Do I know cafeteria mystery meat? Were there vegetarians in the Donner party? Some questions are better left unasked, son.

High Fructose Highway to Hell
As my mother is fond of reminding me, you can't bubble wrap your children. Not only does it not work for protecting them from life's hard lessons but it also says specifically on the wrap "not for use with children." (Ironic considering I don't know a single child who doesn't adore the stuff.) It's like those cruel plastics manufacturers read my mind and then stole the dream away.

Anyhow, part of letting my children grow up and develop a healthy relationship to food is allowing them to sometimes eat things I deem questionable (i.e. with more dubious ingredients than Edward Scissorhands had paper cuts). I tell myself that it's about modeling good decision making and then giving them opportunities to make choices themselves.

Of course we are also talking about the same kid who just yesterday licked the metal frame of the bus window in -45 (F) degree temps and discovered for himself that The Christmas Story isn't just a light-hearted holiday classic but also the harrowing tale of what happens when you gamble against the laws of chemistry. He's six; he's not exactly known for making brilliant decisions. (And yes, since I know you are wondering, he panicked and yanked his tongue off and his now the proud owner of a skinned tongue. Like I told my high-schoolers: Don't mess with physics. It wins every time.)



So I tooled around his school's website and discovered that the menu actually listed exactly what my little George Washington had said: soft taco, chips and for dessert they had a choice of a rice krispie treat or a banana. And like my son astutely observed, "We always, like, have bananas at home." The other option listed in teeny tiny print was "green salad." I considered calling the lunch ladies' bluff and showing up to see if any elementary child has ever in the history of the school chosen the green salad option but, like I said, negative forty five here. I can't even walk to my mailbox without my nose hairs forming a unique snowflake pattern.

In an attempt to be helpful, the school menu completed the trifecta of nutritional terror by providing the calories, fat grams and sodium content of each meal. I almost fainted. It makes a Happy Meal look downright sensible. Plus, at McDonald's, at least you get a movie tie-in toy. Double the whiny fun!

So what's a formerly eating-disordered mother to do? We've discussed the sensitive topic of childhood obesity here before. Do I take away his lunchtime ticket to coolville? After all, his fate as a geek was pretty much sealed the day he was born to my husband and I. Or is one school meal/nutritional train wreck a week an acceptable risk to take with growing bodies and minds?

At least the chocolate milk has protein in it, right? Oh fudge.