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So yesterday Christopher tells me M has been sneaking him candy bars. She goes out and buys Twix bars every day, hides them in the oven or in the meat drawer where I won’t see them, and then, when I leave the room, she slips him one. She slips one to Christian, too. Then the 3 of them huddle together in the family room, stealth-eating their illicit Twix bars.

source:
Bitter Single Guy

That explains a lot.

I’ve been killing myself this summer trying to get Christopher slimmed down via exercise as I did two summers ago after reading Trim Kids, a superb book that belongs in the office of every pediatrician in the country.

That was the summer after 4th grade. Christopher had gained weight after a brutally cold winter led the school district to cancel recess until spring thaw. When we told somebody at the school we'd like Christopher to go outside and play anyway, cold or not, we got the old, "A lot of parents want their kids inside — you'd be surprised" response. It's always those other bad parents, the ones you've never met and never will, who are gumming up the works.

Christopher gained so much weight that winter the kids were calling him “fat,” and when he stepped on the scale and discovered he’d passed the 90 mark he burst into tears.

So it was time to dive into child-weight-loss research, which led me to Trim Kids & subsequently to the discovery that kids can lose huge amounts of weight from 3 hours a day of bike riding and camp without having to count calories or swear off ice cream.

Christopher stayed thin through 5th grade, but this year was impossible. The new middle school has a state-mandated Wellness Committee but no playround. It does have a track and a football field, but the kids aren’t allowed to use them. Plus there’s no recess and if they jostle each other during their lunch break the teachers scream at them.

So: back to Trim Kids.

Two summers ago Christopher was going to the Dows Lane day camp, which is maybe a mile from our house, most of the route off-road & shaded. Christopher and I would ride our bikes over in the morning; then, in the afternoon, I'd ride my bike to camp again and we'd ride home together.

It was wonderful.

Different story this summer. This summer he’s going to Squire Camp at the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry. One and a half miles through traffic, uphill, and in the sun. Ten minute stoplights, single-file sidewalks with no setback, lousy Westchester drivers, honking, people trying to mow you down at the Pedestrian Crossing sign, other people’s dogs, the works.

I’ve been speed-trekking Christopher and both dogs to and from camp every morning. By the time I get home I’m pouring sweat and exhausted. Not exhausted, spent. Caved in. Caved in and in need of an hour or two recovery time from whatever dog-or-car (or dog-and-car) close call in the steaming heat has befallen me and my not-the-dog-whisperer pack that morning. E.g.: three weeks ago Surfer tried to eat a Welsh Corgi & the owner screamed at me. Ever since then I've been hauling Surfer and Abby off the side of the trail every time I spy another dog in the distance, putting them in sit-stays, and then enforcing eye contact between Surfer and me while the other person's dog lunges across the path and into Surfer's face as the owner beams and says things like, "She likes to boss the other dogs around."

I’ve been doing this 5 days a week.

I've been doing this 5 days a week and until 3 weeks ago, when I put everyone on ELOO, Christopher’s weight had not budged. He was getting 6 hours of exercise a day and he still had exactly the same body he did at the end of 10 months with no recess.

How could this be happening?

So now I find out M’s been slipping him candy bars behind my back. Not just candy bars; candy bars and Gatorade. Huge quantities of Gatorade, Gatorade all the livelong day. This has been going on for....I don't know, years, maybe.

I didn’t know about the Gatorade, either.

This summer, once Christopher started the ELOO, he stopped drinking Gatorade. M would hand him a glass of Gatorade and he’d say, “No thank you.” That’s when he started losing weight, finally; since going on the Shangri-La diet he’s been losing weight steadily even with the Twix bars. As of this morning he’s lost 3.5 lbs in 3 weeks. He looks great. Kids can look better fast; they only need to lose a little to tip back over the line visually. By the charts he's still heavy; by the mirror he's nice looking. He looks so different my neighbor's husband didn't recognize him yesterday. Today one of his friends said the same thing.

update 8/7: Christopher hasn't lost 3.5 lbs. He's lost 5 lbs. No wonder he looks different.

Ed thinks the fact that Christopher told me about the Twix bars is a good sign. I do, too, though I’m not sure what it’s a sign of, exactly. It’s definitely a sign Christopher wants to lose (more) weight, but I’m wondering whether it’s also a sign the ELOO is working so well he no longer craves the Twix bars as much as he did.

[news flash: Christopher just looked up from his Saxon Algebra ½ and said, “I feel like venturing in the woods.” I hope this means he’s learning the 15 new vocabulary words per day (pdf file) E.D. Hirsch calculates a high-achieving kid acquires each and every day from age 2 until age 17 when he gets accepted by a selective college.]

I haven’t come up with a plan to combat the Twix bars. Christopher doesn’t want me to tell M he told on her, and I can’t quite envision a way to casually open up the oven door and peer inside for no reason in the middle of the afternoon without raising suspicion.

The more important question is Jimmy. What is he eating that I don’t know about? Christopher says M doesn’t give Jimmy the Twix bars. That's possible. Ed took him to the doctor this week and found he's lost 4 lbs since last year. He'd been gaining steadily at a rate of 10 to 15 lbs a year; this year he didn't gain, but lost. So maybe Christopher is right.

Ed was scandalized by the whole thing until he remembered that his maternal grandmother used to sneak candy to him and his brothers. His dad was a dentist, and he didn't allow his kids to eat candy. He was so hardcore about it that he gave the neighbor kids apples on Halloween. His mother in law disapproved, so she sneaked candy to the 3 boys.

I suppose this is the kind of thing that makes young frontier wives prefer to face Indian war parties alone instead of taking refuge in their mother in law’s big brick house where the guns and the male slaves all live.

The good news is that the Shangri-La diet is a brilliant success where Christopher is concerned. Either it's working as advertised and Christopher’s appetite is suppressed, and/or it’s working as a frontal-lobe booster, creating a daily structure so compelling Christopher is able to resist sugar drinks. Either way, he’s losing exactly what he needs to lose at exactly the rate he should lose: one lb a week. Perfect.

update: It's closer to 2 lbs a week. 5 lbs in 18 days.

The jury’s still out on Jimmy and me, although at the moment I am “cautiously optimistic.” More on that anon.

I wonder if Ed’s dad knows his mother-in-law sneaked candy to the kids.

image:
Bitter Single Guy