It’s Personal

This weigh different thing is personal for me.

Allow me to explain:  As I shared, I have four children, healthy children, who all had that pre-adolescent weight gain prior to their growth spurt (ok, except for you, Zach).  But my youngest son, Zeke, kept gaining weight. Worried and wondering, I elbowed my husband and whispered in his ear, “Kenny, we have to do something.”

“He’ll be fine,” Kenny replied, playfully dismissing my maternal worries in complete denial, I might add, of the firestorm of metabolic hormones raging in Zeke’s young body.

So I did what most mothers would do. I watched him. I watched him and I micromanaged his eating.

“Zeke, are you really that hungry?  Why don’t you wait a few minutes and see if you still need seconds.”

I would find food wrappers in his room and admonish him. “Remember, we only eat at dinner time. Please ask if you want a snack.”  It didn’t matter. His appetite was voracious. And by his eleventh birthday, even though he was a towering 5’ 8” his weight reached 211lb, which was over the 90th percentile for BMI. For kids, we use BMI percentile to determine obesity.

It’s with tears in my eyes that I will admit I was ashamed and embarrassed.

I truly thought the food we were serving, mostly prepared at home, mind you, and rarely ever soda, was healthy. We were eating whole grain cereal with skim milk and maybe some orange juice. He ate the school lunch, and we’d make a healthy meat and potato and vegetable meal for dinner.

Then I started studying for my board exam and I discovered that he was getting too much sugar from food I didn’t even know had sugar. Why didn’t I learn this in medical school? (That’s a great question for another post) Too much sugar was the hormonal drive for Zeke’s voracious appetite.  And so he was gaining weight.  

Did you know there is sugar in just about everything you buy in a grocery store? That’s right! Eighty percent of foods in grocery stores have added sugar: soda, juice, bread, rice, crackers, cereal, pasta, tortillas, noodles, bagels, the list goes on. Basically, any Carbohydrate that is Refined, Artificial or Processed turns to sugar in your body.

And what does this sugar do to your body? It causes your pancreas to release insulin. Insulin keeps your blood sugar controlled but is also the main storage hormone. When your muscles have enough energy, they become resistant to insulin putting any more energy into them. So insulin defaults to storing the energy in your fat cells and they get bigger and hungrier. This is the basics of insulin resistance.

Before I lose you to scientific ad nausem, this translates to weight gain. What I was feeding Zeke was actually driving his hunger.  My husband and I took a closer look at what we were eating. We took the sugar out of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And we put it back in dessert where it belongs. We didn’t say we couldn’t have sugar; we just made sure it was only in dessert and we reserved dessert for the weekends. We did this as a family. Not singling Zeke out, we all ate the same.  We packed his lunch (don’t get me started on school lunches) and signed him up for cross country.

Zeke didn’t just grow into his weight. Over time, he lost weight as he was growing. By age 14 he was 6’ 1” and he weighed 175lb. He grew 5 inches and lost 36 lb in three years.

Reflecting back, I didn’t need to feel embarrassed or ashamed. I just needed better information and a willingness to change. Even small changes over time makes Weigh Different work.