Food Freedom, Kids' Edition

The other day, Google photos showed me this li'l gem from 14 years ago.

This is D with their friend Morgan (in the background) at the Dallas Zoo. I noticed that D was holding a long twisted marshmallow (a much better choice than when we bought a popsicle in June at the San Antonio Zoo, and its rainbow immediately melted all over D and me, and then it just fell off the stick entirely), but what really struck me was the fact that Morgan also had one. 

Morgan's mom Susan and I were different in a lot of ways, but we got along well and I always thought she was one of the most genuinely kind and encouraging people I've ever met. This picture made me appreciate the ease of parenting in Susan's vicinity. One or both of these kids saw the marshmallow and wanted it, and we both got them. Simple.

Mal has so many good friends whose parents very heavily influence what they eat. If we're somewhere and Mal gets a bag of cookies, those kids also want cookies... and it turns into a whole "thing." They ask their parent, the request is declined, they beg, the parent gets frustrated.

I'm sure the other parent really wishes that I wouldn't let Mal get whatever he wants. But letting my kid eat intuitively is a parenting philosophy I decided on when D was very, very young. I didn't want my kids to have weird food stuff to unravel when they became adults (or if they did, anyway, I didn't want to be the cause of it).

The more I thought about the ease of feeding D and their friends when they were small, though, I realized that relaxed eating was the norm pretty much everywhere we went. When we had lunch at enrichment classes, people had all sorts of stuff, and no one really commented on what anyone else was eating unless it looked good and someone wanted the recipe.

In fact, I remember vividly the exception to that rule when I was watching D's friend's sister once, and she was hungry. I asked if she wanted a grilled cheese sandwich, and she said, "I don't think my mom would want me to eat that much sugar." I was flummoxed. What did she think was in a grilled cheese?

I've heard this from one of Mal's friends many, MANY times. The thing is, I'm very good friends with her mom, too. We just have different food philosophies. But it makes her and Mal's together times around snacks and meals more stressful.

Whereas another friend of Mal's would come over here and eat whatever regardless of what her mom might think, this friend will often reject certain offers by saying her mom wouldn't like it. The other day, after she said no to a banana, an apple, and string cheese, I offered her a Lunchable. She said, "Oh, no, my mom wouldn't want me to eat that. She said they're so bad that even the creator wouldn't let his kids eat them!"

Mal asked me if it was true that they're "bad" and I just indicated that we weren't going to talk about it. But I had to know if that was the truth, so I looked it up. First, I did find a couple of websites that indicated that Bob Drane, who was one of the Oscar Mayer employees who developed Lunchables to help them sell more bologna, didn't let his kids eat the kits (which are not enough food to be a full lunch, in my opinion, but they're adequate in a snack situation) but they were all URLs like "healthvalues" or "eatingcleanforlife," etc. Not what I consider reliable sites, with zero citations. 

I finally tracked down an article from Popular Science entitled "Industry insiders don't use their products like we do. That should worry us," It's a bunch of elitist crap, like the fact that Steve Jobs's kids didn't use iPads. Listen, if I could outsource my kids' every moment, what they do in a day might be vastly different. But this isn't an instructional article for me. It's just saying, "Wealthy people don't have to live the same way that most of us plebes do."

Furthermore, it doesn't say that Drane didn't let his kids eat Lunchables. It says that one of his two adult children doesn't let her kids eat Lunchables because they're "junky" and "awful," and "we eat very healthfully." Barf. Or high five. Whatever.

Here's why I don't really pay much attention to "nutrition" guidelines or diet fads: I've seen them change too much over my lifetime. Eggs are terrible. Steaks are death. Butter will murder you. No, wait! Those fats are good, and protein is great, and margarine is fake and IT is the real danger! Don't eat fat and you won't be fat. Nevermind. Fat is good and satiating, but added sugar is something to avoid. Processed foods and things that are ultra-palatable is what's causing the downfall of our food society! Heck, even salt, which has been vilified for years, has recently made a comeback when studies have shown that the recommended intake of sodium that the American Heart Association publishes is actually associated with WORSE health outcomes than consuming moderately more sodium. 

When D was a baby and couldn't breastfeed, I fed them a bottle of formula. We'd only been home from the hospital for a couple of weeks, but initially, D was losing weight and becoming jaundiced. They were also very frustrated because they were literally starving. I made a bottle, which they slurped right up and were so content. I had been contacted by lactation consultants who offered to come help me figure out the breastfeeding thing, but I was just exhausted and ready not to have to worry about my newborn's health. The threat of being re-hospitalized was too much. I just wanted to know that D was getting enough to eat.

We visited the pediatrician a couple of days into formula-feeding, and I sheepishly admitted that I didn't have the will to try too hard to go back to breast-feeding, and did he think that D would suffer? As he continued D's exam, he asked me, "Is your baby gaining weight? Does your baby seem content? Is your baby thriving? Then I don't care what you do. Keep that up."

I guess that's been my feeding philosophy since. 

Fundamentally, there is a difference between "nutrition" and "health." Nutrition is literally a measure of the nutrients in any given food item. You might say that spinach is more nutritious than a slice of cake, and that's probably true (if it's a real cake and not a fake "hide 'healthy' ingredients" recipe). However, calories are important to consume! And joy from having a treat is a mental health boost that goes a long way toward a total "health" picture. Health isn't just about maximizing every calorie for its narrowly-defined benefit to the mechanical function of your biological components.

Food is about joy and family and socialization and meeting your needs in a specific moment in time. I love a good salad! And I also appreciate a Cinnabon. There is literally no time when I could switch one out for the other. Nor would I want to seek out a "more nutritious" version of a cinnamon roll in order to biohack my body's performance. And I'm certainly not putting that weight on my kids' shoulders. When they're hungry, I want them to listen to their bodies, not to have my voice in their brains knocking around, nor to see my side-eye even if they can still that voice. 

So... here's to those two kids in the picture with uncomplicated relationships with the stick of spun sugar and corn starch that they're carrying around during a fun day at the zoo. They and their moms are my heroes.

Scarcity vs. Abundance

When I was visiting my parents last week, my mom noticed I was drinking more water than I used to (read: any water at all) and asked why I was doing it. In the past, I've exclusively drunk diet soda. I wrote recently about changing over, and, honestly, I think the biggest reason was just boredom. We're all stuck at home, and you can only handle so many days of opening all the blinds, making breakfast, cleaning up, brushing teeth, making lunch, tidying up, checking the mail, making dinner, brushing teeth again, closing the blinds, going on a walk, and heading to bed before you're just itching to shake SOMETHING up.

Then yesterday morning, I had a shower thought:

The question to ask isn't why am I drinking water now, when I didn't used to at all.

The real question is: Why didn't I used to drink water?

And I know exactly why I did not.

For YEARS, I lived from a mindset of scarcity. There was never enough of the things I wanted most: acceptance, emotional stability, and, most of all, FOOD.

My mom made me a Diet Coke birthday cake when I was 16, so obviously I have a history with the beverage. But then once I started dieting in college, diet soda was one thing I enjoyed consuming that I could continue to enjoy without feeling guilty, or having anyone judge me for it.

Also, I didn't and don't and never will believe the causation argument that consuming artificially-sweetened beverages makes anyone gain weight. Yes, I've read all of the things. But none of it is very convincing. If a person does the mental gymnastics "I'm drinking zero calories, so I can eat an extra hamburger," that's nothing about the beverage itself. And it's impossible that the body somehow metabolizes a no-calorie sweetener the same way it metabolizes sugar because "the body doesn't know the difference." So no. I mean, drink it or don't, but it's not the devil, and I've always drunk diet soda, whether I was heavier or lighter.

Anyway, I was restricting. I wasn't eating things I really wanted because I was trying to maintain a weight that would be esthetically pleasing to people who wouldn't like me if I were larger. Then I also experienced a BUNCH of outside control in terms of what music I was "allowed" to like, and which movies were "appropriate" for me to watch, and how often it was "reasonable" for me to interact with various family members.

It was a lot.

But I could drink my diet soda and be quietly happy without annoying anyone.

Fortunately, I don't live in a place of scarcity anymore. I have unconditional love and acceptance from my family and my church, and no one tries to control to whom I talk or how much I love a recording artist or gives me a dirty look for throwing down a slice of pizza at 10:45 PM because I have the munchies.

At some point, I guess it occurred to me that I have enough to enjoy, food-wise, that I had the space to drink water, which wasn't my favorite. I'm also drinking other things. Like I'll have a mug of milk with cookies, whereas for years, I didn't want to "waste" the calories on the milk (which wasn't my priority) when I was calculating intentionally "spending" calories on cookies (something I wanted); it seemed too extravagant. Also, I've started drinking a can of V8 Sparkling Energy drink as my morning "coffee" and it has a whopping 50 calories; I literally used to disavow ingesting calories on liquid, unless it was a smoothie with which I was replacing a meal.

I don't have to live that way anymore. I'm allowed enough pleasure that I don't have to cling to the tiniest slice of happiness or risk fading away.

I'm living in abundance, and I can tolerate water now. Yay.

I reduced my consumption of artificial sweeteners, caramel color, and caffeine; and increased my intake of water. You won't believe what happened!

Hey-o! A few weeks ago (or a few months? maybe 10 or 12 years? who knows, at this point), I mentioned that I was cutting back on my drinking of diet cola, specifically. Since whenever that was, I have drank both less diet cola and more water. Before, I was drinking either diet cola or diet Mt. Dew varieties (we have a Sodastream, and they call theirs "Fountain Mist") all day every day. No water. Because it's gross.

When we got the Ozarka delivery service, and the water is pristine and ice-cold, it was palatable enough that I decided I could try to drink more sad, tasteless water... only less sad and more tasteless (in a good way).

While I long ago made my peace with caffeine and artificial sweeteners, I have read enough about caramel color to make me want to try to cut that down. So I did.

These days, I usually drink some of the Diet Fountain Mist for "breakfast," as some people drink coffee for that initial wake-up boost of caffeine. Even the 4-8 ounces of soda I drink there has less caffeine than a cup of coffee. And usually that's it, unless I'm lagging at that 2-4 PM stretch, in which case I'll have a booster to get over the hump.

I am otherwise alternating between clear diet soda like Sprite (Lemon-Lime in Sodastream-speak) or uber-dyed beverages like Powerade Zero and our magical water cooler water.

Whereas, in the past, I drank literally NO water unless I was mowing the yard (which I haven't done fully in more than two years), now I'm drinking probably 20-30 ounces per day.

I don't have exact measures because I have long since given up tracking precisely anything that goes into my cake-hole, because disordered eating sucks, and, honestly, logging everything that passes your lips, even if it's not compulsive, also sucks... and becomes compulsive. I'd rather be free.

Anyhoo...

So basically: Caffeinated soda, water, caffeine-free beverage, water, caffeine-free beverage, and then maybe another water/no caffeine drink, depending on how long the day is and how thirsty I am; and perhaps another shot of caffeine in there. That's from drinking all caffeine, all the time.

Do you want to know what this has done to my overall, day-to-day well-being and health? Good! Because I'm going to tell you:

The increase of water and decrease of things like caffeine, artificial sweeteners, and caramel color has produced no change in my appetite, either way. It does not affect my level of energy. It has not weakened nor strengthened my sweet tooth. My weight (according to clothes and the mirror, since I don't have a scale) has stayed the same. I am sleeping no better or worse. I do not feel any different (since I got over the mild headaches at first.. which I'm sure would be worse if I'd eliminated caffeine entirely).

A lot of times, people make changes to their diets, then go off on how they have a new lease on life. Listen, if you want to cut out sugar, you do you. But I think that a couple of things play into people's drastic wellness changes when they make a sweeping change in their diet: 1) They EXPECT results, so they experience them (placebo affect, and its negative Nelly cousin, the nocebo effect -- see also "When we let my kid play on the iPad, he acts AWFUL"). 2) When someone makes a big diet change, they're probably also increasing their exercise, paying closer attention to their sleep hygiene, etc. (For a negative example of this, please miss that "documentary" "Supersize Me" where the guy not only ate McDonald's for every meal, but he also forced himself to eat every single bite of everything he bought, AND he stopped working out entirely, even though he'd been an athletic dude before.)

I fully believe that if a food or category of foods gives you physical symptoms (some people can't eat tomatoes or they break out in hives; my older kid can't eat avocado anymore or the left side of their face balloons up frighteningly), don't eat it! But the fact is that outside of those conditions, the inclusion of elimination of any one food item is not going to ruin or supercharge your life.

A couple of interesting effects, though; one negative and one positive: 1) Whereas before, I could drink caffeine in bed as I was winding down and still sleep like a log, my tolerance is diminished. If I have some soda with dinner, I am not sleepy at 11, even if it's been a long day and I need sleep. I guess an upside of this is that I need less caffeine to get a boost from it? 2) When we went to Haiti 7 years ago, I had to find caffeine gum to take with me because I wasn't certain I could find soda there. I did end up having one Coke and one Diet Coke during the week. But I have a wider variety of beverage options now. Mal wanted to get McDonald's the other day on our way home from the Zilker Botanical Garden, and what sounded really good to me was unsweetened tea. It was not good; it was McDonald's swill. But it was drinkable and I finished it. So the beverage world is really my oyster now?

That's it. Sorry it's not more compelling. Reality usually is not. :)