The Food Police: Failing!

At age 11, my son barely weighs 90 pounds. He's moderately active, plays baseball three seasons of the year, plays outside with friends. So, I figure I'm not doing so bad as the food and exercise police, right?!?

I decided to find out how I stack up as "the nutritional gatekeeper" that author Brian Wansick (Mindless Eating) identifies as the person in charge of family food choices. So I piled the kitchen table high with boxes, bags, bottles and packages. Here is a day's menu:

Breakfast: buttered toast or kids cereal, small handful of peanuts, ½ banana or apple, ½ cup of 1% milk
Lunch: 6 oz. low-fat yogurt or ½ cup sweetened applesauce, snack crackers, 1 pack fruit snacks, bottle of water
Snack: handful of red grapes, or celery stalk with 1 tbsp. peanut butter, toaster tart, ½ cup milk
Dinner: 6 homemade chicken nuggets with 1 tbsp. catsup, ½ cup mashed potatoes with butter, ¼ cup peas
Dessert or snack: 4 Oreos and ½ cup milk or ½ cup ice cream
During baseball season: one 20 oz. sports drink

I picked just one ingredient -- sugar -- to gauge how I was doing. On food labels, ingredients are listed by weight, in grams. Four grams of sugar equals one teaspoon. Counting only the added sugars—that is, not foods’ natural sugars—here’s the total:

Breakfast: 2 ¼ -5 ½ tsps.
Lunch: 8-8 ½ tsps.
Snack: 6 ½ tsp.
Dinner: 1 tsp.
Desserts or snack: 6 ½ tsps.
Sports drink: 8 ¾ tsps.

TOTAL: 23-37 teaspoons

Pretty bad, huh? And Dr. Wansink estimates that parents control only 72 percent of a child’s diet. Add in birthday cupcakes, pizza parties, lunch trades, team celebrations and other splurges, and his total could increase by almost 30 percent. At its worst, that’s about 48 teaspoons a day. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says to eat no more than 10 teaspoons of added sugar a day!

I took out a measuring cup. Those 48 teaspoons pile up to more than a cup of sugar. Going from bad to worse, I converted the sugar into calories, 16 calories per teaspoon. The total now? About 770 calories!

Estimate that a child under age 14 should consume 1,000 calories a day, plus 100 calories per year of age. That means my son's diet is about 2,100 calories a day. So, if his daily calorie count approximates this figure, he’s getting about 35 percent of his calories from sugar!

I'm not even talking about the fat and sodium in his diet, which I can see is considerable. It’s clear that we have some work to do before we're nominated for Best Nutritional Gatekeeper!

Obesity and family food choices

I've been to two high school productions recently. One was a musical, the other a choral event. Let me tell you what I noticed. In the musical, of the performers who didn't have lead roles, I'd say about 1 in 4 was overweight. In the choral production, the ratio was even higher -- nine of the 13 singers were overweight and probably five of them would be considered obese. I was shocked.

But maybe that's just the way it is today. Bill Baroni, a well-known New Jersey politician who told me about his 132-pound weight loss, said that when he grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, he was the target of cruel comments and hurtful exclusion by other children because he was “the fat kid” in his class. But today, he speculated, kids might not have it so bad.

“Today, you’re not the only fat kid in the class,” he said. “You’re just one of many fat kids.”

In fact, that’s just what health researchers have found. In a 2002 survey, the National Center for Health Statistics calculated that about 17 percent of children over the age of six are overweight or obese—that’s around 13.5 million children. That number has more than doubled in the last few decades. And who knows what’s happened in the years since the survey.

Having a child myself, I don’t want to believe that the blame lies solely with parents. And, in fact, I don’t think it does. Read up on the food industry—Don’t Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock or Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser—to come face to face with the powerful corporate forces that are battling us for our children’s health.

But we are not blameless. One Cornell University researcher has quantified just how much responsibility we as parents bear. In his book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink examines the influence of the person in the family he calls “the nutritional gatekeeper.” That's the parent who does the menu planning, grocery shopping and cooking. Through extensive studies, Wansink found that this person is responsible for about 72 percent of a family’s food choices.

I was heartened by that number, because it means that in our own house we can control all but 28 percent of the food our child eats. But if I’m honest, I have to admit that the decisions we make aren’t always good. Grilled sausage-and-cheese sandwiches. Donuts. Cheese puffs. Pepperoni pizza. Of our own volition, we abdicate some of our responsibility on a daily basis.

I recently laid out on the kitchen table the typical foods my son eats during an average day. I checked labels, looked up nutritional information online and added up his intake of just one ingredient: sugar. I'll post the results soon.... as soon as I pick myself up off the floor!

Me in the Soup, Chicken that is

I love soup, all kinds of it. Corn chowder, lobster bisque, roasted sweet potato, onion soup. But my favorite? Chicken Soup... for the Soul, that is.

I got word this week that the Chicken Soup for the Soul folks accepted a story of mine for one of their collections: Shaping the New You. It's the story of my weight loss success. Woo hoo! Look for it in December, just in time for another round of New Year's resolutions.

If you're a writer (and I know from all your blogs that you are!) take a look at the Chicken Soup website for their books in progress. I submitted two or three stories before this one was chosen. I'd like to give the book on grandmothers a try. Already pondering memories of my wonderful grandmothers!

Food love: Then and now

You know by now that this blog is all about success. Weight loss success. I'm having fun sharing people's stories, people who lost anywhere from 20 pounds to 220 pounds.

But today, I just want to have a little fun. Over on Mary's weight loss blog, A Merry Life she posted a meme that made me laugh: five foods you used to love before your weight loss journey, five foods you love now, and five foods you still hate.

I consider it success to look at a list like this and see how desires change to make a healthy life possible. I'll post my own list here, although it's not a very exciting one. Eating was never my big downfall. My love of the sedentary life was. But, anyway, here goes.

Five Foods I Used to Love

Potato chips and dip. This combo was a bottomless abyss for me. Wash it down with plenty of diet soda and I could keep on going until there was nothing but crumbs left in the bag.

Bleu cheese dressing. Not by itself, of course, but slathered on huge salads topped with bacon, provalone, boiled eggs, pine nuts and what not. Healthy, right?

Chocolate. Dark chocolate. Bars and bars of it.

Onion rings. I'd only indulge occasionally. Or should I say, overindulge? My husband and I once came across an onion-ring maker who'd park his London double-decker bus on sideroads in Maine and dish out vats and vats of these beauties. We'd vacation there just for that reason! And order an extra helping for the ride back to our cottage. And eat them until we were sick. Now there's a good time!

Mashed potatoes. Like the other four foods, this is something I still love, made with butter and slathered in butter. My go-to comfort food.

Foods I Love Now

Avocados. Or is that avocadoes? Either way, I love them in salads and as guacamole.

Salads. But more healthy ones now, topped with a few splashes of a homemade olive oil and raspberry champagne vinegar dressing.

Pears. Usually on the salads. I don't like the sweetness of most fruits, but pears snuck up on me.

Roasted veggies. Carrots, snow peas, onions, sweet potatoes, green beans, asparagus. Roasted in the oven or pan-seared in a cast iron skillet. The smoky sweetness of roasted, carmelized veggies is tops in my book.

Anything made in a cast iron pan. Cooking with cast iron creates new favorite foods every day! Scallops, crusty on the outside, gossamer light and sweet on the inside. Toasted cheese, beautiful to behold. Spiced potato wedges, pure gold.

Five Foods I Still Can't Stand

Mushrooms. Raw or cooked, they give me the willies. It's the texture. When they're cooking, the odor makes me gag. (Blame it on my sister... it was a craving of hers in our teens. The house always smelled of the things.)

Pasta. This one' s a bummer. So many fast meals can be made from pasta. But cold or cooked, even al dente, it's that texture thing again. Slimy and never hot enough.

Pizza. And isn't this a bonus?!? This is a hard one for many people to give up. It just bores me. Crust, tomato sauce and cheese in endless combos. It doesn't even interest me as a cook.

Soggy stuff. I can't stand to see someone ruin a perfectly good piece of cake by topping it with a scoop of ice cream or drowning it in milk. Or dunk cookies in milk, or biscotti in coffee. Are you a dunker? Not around me, please! Same goes for soggy desserts like bread or rice pudding. Or side dishes like risotto. Eggy breakfast casseroles. Ugh.

Bad coffee with skim milk. It would have been a lot easier to lose weight drinking my coffee black or with sweetener and skim milk. But I love my half 'n half! It's a disaster of infinite proportions when I run out -- almost as bad as running out of t.p.

There you have it. I'd love to hear what you love and hate. Pass it on!

Pastor Robert Hartwell: The Skinny on Sacrifice

Most people make weight loss resolutions only after the annual holiday binge. But it was on New Year’s Eve 2007 that the Rev. Robert Hartwell’s weight-loss odyssey came to a dramatic close. That morning, he stepped on a scale on NBC’s Today Show in front of 10 million people.

Just how the pastor of Village Lutheran Church in Bronxville, NY, got to this point began two years earlier. Pastor Hartwell's church had started a campaign to pay down an $8 million mortgage the church had assumed for a building project.

One day, Pastor Hartwell got a baffling call. A former parishioner, someone who kept close ties with the church, offered to make a substantial donation. But there was a catch. “This donor said that he wanted me to commit to losing 70 pounds, and if I did so, he would donate $5,000 for each pound I lost,” he says.

It was both an intriguing and a heartbreaking offer. “I was crushed—mortified—that someone had discovered that I was overweight, although of course everyone saw it when I stepped into the pulpit each week,” Pastor Hartwell says. “But this donor said he wanted to know that I was as committed to the project as he was.”

So was born “The Skinny on Sacrifice” campaign. Although up this point Pastor Hartwell hadn’t acknowledged his weight problem, he certainly understood how it had happened.

“My life is so hectic. I was always eating on the run. I’d grab a muffin between hospital visits, get home from council meetings at 10:30 at night, exhausted and ravenous, and grab a couple of sandwiches and chips,” he says. “And I was a volume eater—I could eat a half a pizza by myself, or eight White Castle burgers at a time.”

By the time the sly donor came into the picture, the six-foot-tall pastor weighed about 270 pounds. After consulting with his parish nurse practitioner, Pastor Hartwell took up the challenge, choosing NutriSystem for his meals.

On a food plan of about 1,500 calories a day, Pastor Hartwell lost 10 pounds almost immediately, and he continued to lose two to three pounds a week. He and his wife, Sue, had always walked for pleasure, and he made sure he got in two to three miles a day. After six months, he started going to the gym at next-door Concordia College, where he is an adjunct professor. A congregant who is a personal trainer showed him how to use the machines. He found the college atmosphere stimulating. “I was there with the 19- and 20-year old baseball players, and they motivated me to keep going,” he says.

Meanwhile, an employee at the church’s school who happened to be a lighting director for the Today Show brought the pastor’s challenge to the attention of a producer. The producer asked whether Pastor Hartwell would be willing to weigh in on the show the morning of December 31, 2007.

“I had already told the donor that I wouldn’t weigh in during a church service, and here I was agreeing to do it in front of a live audience on national television,” he laughs. “Barring Jesus projecting it in the sky over the earth, it couldn’t get any bigger than that!"

Just before Pastor Hartwell stepped out onto the stage, someone clipped a microphone to the back of his shirt. “This thing must weigh five pounds!” he protested. No matter. Robert made the donor’s 70-pound limit, with 8 extra pounds in the bargain. The donor wrote a check for $390,000, which church members augmented for an even $400,000.

Since then, Pastor Hartwell has lost 18 more pounds, bringing his total to 96. And, while he originally targeted 200 as his goal weight, he now wants to see 170—a total loss of 100 pounds. He still uses NutriSystem, and intends to continue even after reaching his goal.

In 2008, Pastor Hartwell challenged his congregation and the church's school to join the Skinny on Sacrifice II challenge. Over 200 people took it on and by last year had lost over 3,000 pounds. Many participants reported improved blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels, allowing many to reduce or eliminate medications to treat those conditions.

Pastor Hartwell says he now believes that weight loss is not only an individual pursuit yielding personal satisfaction, but a goal with wide-ranging possibilities for strengthening family and community ties. “Food is a short cut. Food is really a substitute for spending time with each other. I just decided we weren't going to do that anymore," he says.

Faith and "excess avoirdupois"

"Faith takes over when willpower fails." When my husband and I facilitated a support group for addictions recovery at our church, we often heard this sentiment from people wanting to kick alcohol, drugs and cigarettes. The same can be true for weight loss seekers. A spiritual outlook on the road to weight loss can be a powerful motivator. In my last post, I shared the story of Sandy Ward's success using the biblically-based First Place program.

As early as the 1950s, Presbyterian minister Charlie Shedd published Pray Your Weight Away, a bestseller that rebuked gluttony as a sin. “When God first dreamed you into creation, there weren’t 100 pounds of excess avoirdupois hanging around your belt,” he wrote. He suggested doing karate moves and sit-ups while reciting Scripture. (Not sure I want to visualize that!) He preached his message well into the 1970s, when he published The Fat Is in Your Head.

About that time, Carol Showalter, a Presbyterian pastor’s wife in Texas, founded 3D: Diet, Discipline & Discipleship, the first nationwide church-based weight loss program. Other programs followed: First Place, Free to be Thin, Overeaters Victorious, Thin Within, Lose It for Life. Some programs piggybacked on national crazes, such as the Believercise aerobics program of the 1980s. Today, Christians can choose Christian yoga and Christian pilates, among other faith-based diet and exercise regimens.

If churches are turning to weight control programs, it may be because church-goers struggle mightily with weight. In several studies, Dr. Kenneth Ferraro, a professor of sociology at Purdue University, found that religious people are more likely than nonreligious people to be overweight. The findings surprised him.

“In the 1990s, all the evidence showed that being in a faith community was good for your health,” Dr. Ferraro says. “In terms of smoking, alcohol, and high-risk sexual activity, religion seemed to promote health. But weight is a different story.”

Food, Dr. Ferraro suggests, is often the only acceptable vice left to an otherwise teetotaling and smoke-free congregation. In addition, he guesses, faith communities are welcoming groups in which everyone finds acceptance. And, the culture and traditions of some denominations may worsen your plight—Southern Baptists, he finds, lead the way in obesity (church suppers! prayer breakfasts! fellowship breaks!), while Jewish and non-Christian religious groups are the leanest.

Getting the message, some churches are literally breaking new ground. In Raytown, Missouri, First Baptist Church has built a $14 million community and fitness center and staffed it with personal trainers and volunteers who organize sports leagues with an enrollment of 500 participants. “We want people to have a better quality of life,” says Dave Foster, the center’s director.

In Davenport, Iowa, St. Mark Evangelical Lutheran Church has an active Wellness Committee, started 10 years ago by a parish nurse. Its outreach programs include blood pressure screenings, flu clinics, exercise and weight loss groups, classes for caregivers and new mothers, healing services and newsletter articles addressing health issues.

For his part, Dr. Ferraro plans to study the role of pastors in modeling fitness. If ministers are fit and incorporate fitness opportunities into their ministry, he wonders, will congregants follow their lead? In later posts, I'll talk with some pastors who have led the way after dropping their own excess avoirdupois!

Sandy Ward: In First Place

Can there be anything more disheartening than to have to quit as the leader of a weight loss group because you’ve gained too much weight? Sandy Ward was determined it wasn’t going to happen to her.

Sandy struggled with weight most of her life. She enjoyed those blissful early years of childhood without a thought about weight, but in her teens, she began a cycle of gaining weight and then thinning out as she grew taller.

With marriage and the birth of her son, Sandy’s weight continued to plague her. At her highest, she reached 234 pounds. She tried many times to get it under control and successfully got down to 140 at one point.

After her son went off to college, Sandy became a partner in a sporting goods store owned by a friend. They thrived in the niche market of skating and skateboard equipment. But over the years, her weight crept back on. Five years ago, having sold the business and retired, she wanted to do something to help herself. One Sunday, she found her opportunity.

“I was sitting in church waiting for the service to begin when I saw an ad for a First Place group that was starting up at my church,” she says. “The ad just clicked with me somehow. I guess I was just ready for it.”

Sandy went to the first meeting and liked both the people and the program of Bible study and group prayer, as well as the nutritional program of dietetic exchanges. Over the course of the 13-week program, she lost 40 pounds. But when it came time for the second session, the leader had moved away, and the group had dwindled to just three women. They decided to continue anyway. And Sandy made another decision.

“I’m not the kind of woman who gets up in front of everyone and speaks,” she says. “But I thought that becoming the leader of this group might be a good ministry for me.”

Eventually, even as the group's leader, she began to put on extra pounds. In January 2007, she had another decision to make.

“The First Place people told me that often when leaders gain weight, they just quit, and I didn’t want to do that,” Sandy says. “I made a vow to God that I was going to take that weight off. I made a date and when that date came, that was it. Vows to God are serious!”

Returning to the First Place plan, Sandy cut back to a 1,200-calorie daily diet. She and her husband switched to mostly organic foods, and their menu became fairly simple. Gone now are the extras she enjoyed. “No more desserts and no more fancy Starbucks coffees!” she laughs. She walks and exercises to a DVD included in the First Place member kit.

This time, Sandy's weight loss quest wasn’t a matter of a silent vow. She was still a First Place leader. “I had to do it in front of everyone,” she says. “It’s hard to face your own demons and the people who have seen you fail.” Yet, in six months, Sandy lost 37 pounds.

Today, the First Place program is thriving at Berwyn Baptist Church in Maryland. Sandy says that usually around 20 people are signed up. Sandy often offers the program for subgroups like diabetics. To Sandy, First Place is more than a weight loss group. Group members make a commitment to deal with anything in their life that is out of balance. During one session, three people successfully quit smoking. And, Sandy feels that as a leader she benefits even more than the group’s members.

“God has given me such a love and compassion for people with weight problems,” she says. “When I see them, I just think, ‘Oh, bless your heart,’ because I know the humiliation of it all.”