So I was reading Kelli’s most recent post, and just really wanted to comment. Body image is a very interesting thing to me. Especially, since it’s so much about your brains chemistry. There are so many things that can influence it, and an outside source that can cause one kid to become wildly anorexic can have no impact on another.

I was always a good weight growing up. As a child I got fed a ridiculously balanced diet with almost no snacking or junk food (yes I’m one of the carob and sesame snack kids). Probably too good. When my Grandmother came to visit she’d buy us like $100 worth of junkfood and we’d binge for the entire time she visited. We got so sick. When I hit puberty in the Soviet Union there wasn’t a lot of protein, plus I had a fantastic case of Amoebic Dysentary so my body was not absorbing things particularly well, so I hit 6’ while weighing 120 pounds. I think my body’s been struggling to put on weight ever since then. I’ve had a metabolism that doesn’t quit. In high school I’d eat half a bag of oreos in one sitting. I’d often just eat an entire plate of pasta to “fill in the cracks”. I left high school 6’4” and weighing somewhere between 130 and 140. My diet was not conducive to reliable weight measurement.

I didn’t actually start cooking until my first year of marriage to Julie. I got to the point where I couldn’t eat one more chicken breast, marinated in salad dressing and cooked on the George Foreman. My grandmother had recently started sending Julie a subscription to Gourmet magazine and so I started cooking recipes from that. I quickly moved towards being the only one who cooked in our house since I actually enjoyed it. Two years ago I realized that I was actually putting on weight. I had started to get rolls around my hips and a slight pot belly. Nothing particularly exciting, but for someone who has never been able to put on weight in their life it’s a pretty massive life change. So I started running. I initially said I was running so I could eat whatever I wanted. And I did. And it was fine. But eventually I realized that I was running these fantastic distances and I could eat 3500-4000 calories a day, but to what end? Why was I churning through this massive amount of food? And was I hurting Julie’s weight related goals just so I could be a glutton? So I started trying to cook better. We tried reduced portions for a while which worked, but made you feel like you were really working to eat healthy. Now Julie’s doing weight watchers (as am I by extension), and it’s been good to see that I should be eating about 2/3 more than her. Which is definitely not how we were doing things before. But I’ve lost 10 pounds since Julie started Weight Watchers. And I’ve gotten a lot of flack for that. No one can tell. And people see me without my shirt off when I run, so it’s not as though they wouldn’t notice if I’d become a rib cage attached to a spine again. But it does concern me. Weight loss and exercise are just as seductive as food. How do you find the balance? How do you find your healthy weight? And how do you get over the stigma of either being to heavy or too light? We definitely seem to have hit a place where you’re going to get criticized unless you’re living just on the border of overweight and at weight.

And how does this impact Stella? I grew up with 3 sisters, and a mother who has constantly been working on her weight. There’s a constant struggle to bolster self-image, and one improperly phrased comment can just destroy self-image. It’s even harder since what can be a compliment to one sister can be the most damning insult to another.

And this has continued with Julie. Do I really care how heavy she is? Not excessively. But I do worry about things like her health. And getting into negative patterns. I mean how do you find the line between allowing people the freedom to eat the foods they love without judgement (which they should be allowed to do), and helping them avoid getting into a bad pattern? No one’s going to thank you for feeding them fried foods every night and then refusing them a second helping once they’re 200 pounds overweight. It’s much easier to loose 20 pounds than 100. But at the same time it’s much easier to give an eating disorder to someone who’s 20 pounds overweight.

I definitely want to impart a good diet onto Stella, but I also know that imposing too good of a diet can lead to binges (see also: me and oreos) which I think with a girl could easily lead to bulimia. It’s a hard road. But at the same time, almost everyone gets skinnier in high school. Growth spurts are good at eating up extra calories and redistributing fat. The fat kid in grade school seems to often become the fat kid again in college. I guess it’s just a matter of imposing good eating habits with a balance of the fatty and the healthy so there won’t be a danger of binging. And then treading lightly with the body image. Oh well, hopefully the 5 primary women in my life have given me a lot of help in figuring out how to do that. And Julie, Caroline, and Christine were pledging just last weekend to try to never mention the negatives of weight around her.

Of course, that said, it’s an impossible chore. And chances are with Julie and my genetics we’ll have at least one kid dealing with being too skinny, and one being too fat. It’s going to be an interesting balancing act.

That said, I tried making the Kale, Pickled Okra, and Pickles slaw this week and Stella loves it. You have to throw the Kale into a food processor so that the horrible texture doesn’t come through, but it’s really good, and Stella actually eats the slaw before she eats the bread (which is not the case with any other food we’ve fed her). Has anyone else tried this recipe? I’d love to find out if it’s something other kids would eat or if it’s just Stella.