TIMING COUNTS
While losing weight is mostly a matter of calories in versus calories out, when you eat is still important. Basically you want to try to give your body the right fuel when it needs it. You don’t need a huge high-calorie dinner right before you spend eight hours snoozing.
Around here we say “eat early and often.” Start your day with a good breakfast every morning, and then refuel throughout the day. It doesn’t have to be fancy. A banana and a swipe of peanut or almond butter on a piece of multigrain toast is good enough. And there are plenty of nutrient-rich, high-protein, low-fat smoothies and shakes you can keep in the fridge and grab on your way out the door.
BE YOUR BEST ADVOCATE
I was about to write “Don’t Be Your Own Worst Enemy,” but part of the reason why so many of us have issues about food and weight is because we’ve endured a lifetime of don’ts. I could list some of them, but I want to get away from that negative old song.
Think of the care with which you feed other people. Doesn’t your own body deserve that same respect and affection?
Show yourself some mercy.
Defend your right to take care of yourself, to carve out time, every day, to eat consciously and get some movement in. If one of my kids had a fever, of course I’d forgo a workout or grab some take-out instead of cooking, but everything and everyone else can take a number and get in line.
Forgive yourself for your imperfections. Or celebrate them—they’re part of what make you you! The road to better health is not going to be a straight one. There may be times when your healthy eating habits go belly-up (and you notice your own belly is starting to go, er, out), you start skipping your workouts, and return to your old extreme coffee drinking, late-night snacking, chocolate-covered graham cracker inhaling ways. It happens to most everyone, so never feel guilt. Even professional athletes will have weeks, even months, where they just let things go. Believe me, I’m no stranger to a plate of fries.
But it’s okay, we all need a break sometimes from being disciplined. It’s hard to maintain healthy eating habits year-round, especially given the demands of work, travel, special events, holidays, even your own fluctuations in mood. So expect a few setbacks, accept them, and move on.
The real problem is not reverting to old behaviors for a week or two, getting so depressed or mad at yourself that you abandon your good habits. You decide, in effect, to just give up. Or you actively punish yourself for failing to be perfect.
It doesn’t matter how many times you fall off the wagon or for how long, as long as you return to your healthy habits. In the end, it’s about the long haul.
ENJOY YOURSELF AND RELAX
Food is a critical part of making a house a home, and it’s how most families connect. Shared meals are a chance to relax and enjoy the company of those you love. So don’t let your concerns about losing weight or getting proper nutrition detract from those important, wonderful moments.
When children are part of the equation, it’s especially important not to make food a divisive issue. Instead, make healthy eating a way of life for the entire family. If you demonstrate healthy eating behaviors, your kids will follow. If you have an apple at four o’clock, they’ll see that as a normal snack and want one, too.
So if a morning shake becomes your routine, let your kids have some; they are bound to get more nutrition from a shake than from a processed cereal. Kids need a healthy meal to start the day, so make proper nutrition in the morning a routine behavior for the entire family.
KEEP IT SIMPLE
There is no better time to make a few positive changes in your daily routine than right now. You will get no benefit from waiting. That doesn’t mean you have to go on an all Grape-Nuts diet and start training for a marathon. For many people, it’s as simple as cutting back on hyper-processed food and getting into the habit of exercising a little each day.
I know a woman nearing seventy who’s vibrant, smart, and still rockin’ the skinny jeans. She’s an avid movie buff and takes a major trip abroad every year. Her blood pressure is low, as is her cholesterol. Her big secret? Avoiding fried food and taking her Daily Twenty, as she calls it. Yup, that’s all. She keeps her tennis shoes by the front door, and rain or shine, she takes a twenty-minute walk around the neighborhood every day.
That’s how simple all of this can be. You don’t have to let food and exercise make you crazy. As long as you know the basics, and develop good habits, a healthy lifestyle will simply become part of who you are.
Think of food as the fuel that determines how that precious body of yours thrives and give it the quality it deserves.
6
LOSE THE PEA
Just the other day I saw a boy on a scooter making his way down the street with his mom running alongside as if she was a secret service agent attending the presidential motorcade. The boy was wearing a helmet, knee pads, and elbow pads. He was rolling along at a snail’s pace. The street was flat and empty. Would it have been a huge calamity if the boy fell off his scooter? Probably not, but this mother was acting as if she was afraid for his life.
I’m all for safety, but I’m also for teaching my kids to take intelligent risks.
How could I not be, given who their father is?
Laird is the original Take-Your-Daughter-to-Work guy. It can be a little hair-raising. One of his favorite things to do is to take the girls with him when he goes surfing. He drives his duck boat out, drops anchor, and they sit in the boat with their life jackets and juice boxes and Mr. Speedy and they watch him catch wave after wave after wave. They always love to go, and after ten minutes they’re always bored. Laird paddles up and they say “Come on, Dad! We wanna go!” And they go back and forth a little and they “let” him have one more ride. Then he rides another one and he paddles up and says, “That wasn’t a very good one, I need another one.” And they say, “Nooooo!” And they go back and forth a little, and again, the girls let him have one more. This can go on for hours, with them sitting in the little dinghy, rising and falling in the swells.
One day Laird was down at the surf barn doing what he does down there, designing new contraptions, hacking down trees, shooting the breeze with his crew, and just being Laird. That day, he was watching Reece and her pal James. He wasn’t hovering—thank God—as they ran around and got muddy and tried to climb the banana and avocado trees. The barn sits on the banks of the Hanalei River, and Laird’s main focus, in that there was one, was keeping the kids out of the water.
On the other side of the barn is a steep hill newly cleared of jungle. It’s slick and muddy and dotted with jagged rocks and the huge splintered roots of banyan and kapok trees. Laird was standing by the barn, at the bottom of the hill, chatting with a neighbor. Suddenly, some bit of movement caught his eye and he looked up at the top of the hill—which is maybe three hundred feet high, with a forty-five-degree incline—and there was Reece standing on a big, corrugated metal shingle, speeding down the hill. James, her friend, was sitting behind her, and they’re both screaming with delight. “Gabrielle, when I say Reece was hauling ass, I mean she was hauling ass,” Laird told me later.
“How did she get the shingle?” I asked. I was in the kitchen wiping down the counters, doing everything I could not to spin around and get all up in my husband’s grill.
“I don’t know, she got it on her own,” he said. “I’ve got a pile of it by the side of the barn.”
“How did she get it to the top of the hill?”
“She walked it up there herself.”
I suppose I gave him one of my death stares, or maybe I just kept pretending to wipe down the counter. I’ve completely repressed the memory, because the next thing he said was, “I looked up and thought, Oh my god! They’re gonna get impaled on those roots.”
“You could have kept that to yourself,” I said.
Even so, I want this sort of thing to happen. It must. How else do children learn? How do they learn not to be complete idiots, to take this risk and not t
hat one? How do they learn how much getting hurt, well, hurts?
In general, dads are the best at teaching kids intelligent risks. Because moms are always like, “Oh, be careful. Do you have your mittens? Are you warm? Is your coat on?” And dads are like, “Sure, go for it. But don’t come crying to me if you get hurt.”
After Reece and James got to the bottom of the hill, they wanted to go again. And Laird allowed it. Only this time, he insisted they take a shorter, flatter, less rock- and root-strewn route, where he could easily get to them should something happen. But nothing did. Other than that our girl and her friend had a blast, and gained a little bit more confidence about how to be in the world.
• • •
My girls couldn’t be more different. Once, at a friend’s pool, Reece, then seven, spent the entire afternoon jumping off a fifteen-foot ledge into the water below, then scrambling back up and jumping again. Brody was interested, but she wasn’t ready to commit. She climbed to the top of the ledge, then back down, eased herself into the pool and swam over to the spot where Reece landed. After three and a half hours, as we’re packing up our towels and sunscreen and saying our good-byes, Brody decided she was ready to jump. She was only four, and part of this was her urge to keep up with her sister and the older kids, but at bottom she’s also simply a deeper thinker. She needs to stand back and look around and take some time to draw conclusions about the safest place from which to jump.
I loved watching them at the pool that day, loved watching how they worked it out for themselves. Sometimes I had to close my eyes when they jumped, but I would never deprive them of the opportunity to do this scary kid stuff, ever.
Their dad is an expert at creating that place where they can take chances and flirt with a trip to the emergency room. He provides the training wheels for a little danger, allowing them to see what it’s like to live through something exhilarating and scary, and in some cases having made good choices that build confidence.
Modern moms are known for being able to do pretty much everything. We can help with math and throw the baseball back and forth in the street and shoot hoops in the driveway. We can change the oil in the car and comparison shop for health insurance and get the water heater replaced. All this we can do. But some things only dads can do. And we can’t, and shouldn’t even try, to barge in on whatever that special thing is their dad has to offer them.
Sometimes Laird takes the girls and their friends out on the Hanalei, and tows them around in our kayak. The kids go crazy, laughing and shrieking and exploding off the back and into the water. Yes, they wear life preservers, and yes, it’s done in a controlled fashion, with Laird doing a lot of mugging and pretending he’s zipping down the river like a maniac. If there is one thing Laird is not, it’s foolhardy. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
Both Reece and Brody are well aware of who their dad is, and what he does for a living, and he would never say to them, “You can’t be part of the wild world because you’re a girl, or because you’re just a kid.”
Laird and I want our girls to be a little tough.
We have no interest in raising princesses who can’t sleep because there’s a pea beneath the mattress.
• • •
Our children are their own people. This was true from the moment they were born, but it doesn’t really sink in until they’re walking and talking and refusing to wear the purple T-shirt and knocking their bowl of perfectly baked sweet potato onto the floor.
We all understand this, that our children are not possessions, but we are also quick to pigeonhole them, to claim to know who they are before they’ve had a chance to show us.
You see it all the time. A mom notices that her son likes to stack blocks, and forty-eight hours later he’s enrolled in some pre-pre-preschool mommy-and-me architect-in-training program.
A daughter likes to sing to herself in her crib. Her parents see this as evidence of profound musical gifts. Look out Juilliard!
Perhaps all this lunacy comes from the fact that having a child is a mind fuck on such a basic level—here’s me, here’s you, we have sex for seven minutes resulting in an entire me-you human—that we need to figure out who and what they are as soon as possible to calm our existential selves.
But parenting our kids means getting accustomed to this dynamic where they’re always unfolding. Not just growing up and into who we presume them to be, but becoming, morphing not once, but again and again, all through the years.
Reece spent her entire infancy sobbing. I don’t think I’m exaggerating. Every time she woke up during the night, or in the morning, or even after a nap, she was crying. When she was walking, and old enough to get herself up from her nap, she’d stand at the top of the stairs and wail. I’d be on my way up to get her saying, “Reece, I’m right here. I’m here,” but it didn’t matter. A friend once said that every time her baby daughter yawned, just when her mouth was open the widest, she got this perplexed expression on her face like, “Hm, why is my mouth wide open? It must be time to scream.” With Reece, I think the tears started to flow in her sleep, and that woke her up.
This went on until she was three years old. I remember thinking, how is this crybaby my child? But I didn’t try to fix anything. I just let time pass and took care of her, and she grew into a girl who’s up for any adventure with little concern for her personal comfort. As long as there’s the chance of some fun, she’ll sleep on the floor and in the morning brush her teeth with her finger. Where did that sobbing little baby go?
SIMPLIFY, FAMILY EDITION
Simplify is the concept de jour when it comes to adult lives; why don’t we apply that thinking to the lives of our children? For starters, kids need to go out and play . . . for hours on end . . . every single day.
Every study you care to name says the same thing: sitting in front of a screen for too long makes kids cranky and fat. Hell, it makes me cranky and fat. Reece and Brody get only an hour of electronics a day. Electronics is defined as anything with a screen: watching TV, playing games on the computer or on my iPhone. If it was up to Laird, all of it would be thrown out the window. Of course, he leaves in the morning; he isn’t the one who has to tell them “no” every fifteen minutes.
We adults check our phones after a meeting and before we get in the car, after we get out of the car and head into the house, after we stir the pasta but before we chop the onions, after we get up in the morning and before we hop in the shower. All these little moments, these little gaps between one activity and another, when you might otherwise enjoy a little daydream or think about a new recipe you want to try or have a thought about a book you’ve read or just look forward to the weekend when you’re going to go snowboarding or hang with a friend, all those moments have been gobbled up by our compulsion to check our devices.
It messes with your head, and I don’t want it for my kids.
So I say no. A lot. And tell me I don’t feel like a shit mom when little Brody, who’s been cooperative all day, has a meltdown in the afternoon and sobs miserably, “I. Just. Want. My. Electronics.”
I often think my real lifestyle role model is Norman Rockwell. Throw on some jean shorts, play in a tree, throw a rock.
Is there anything more beautiful than that?
Why, yes, there is: a children’s birthday party that could never be mistaken for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. One of the things I love about living in our little town in Kaua’i is that the basic requirements for a kid’s birthday party are: kids, cake and ice cream, and presents. It’s a different world in Malibu. When I take my kid to those parties with the different activity stations, and the clown and the face painters, I can’t help but think, are you fucking kidding me?
For Reece’s last three birthdays we took her and some pals go-karting. We found a great little place where the maximum speed on the cars can be adjusted down for the kids and up for the parents, so everyone has a blast. All these little kids roaring around the track. Some food, some drinks, and some cake—simple, but st
ill with the sense of an occasion.
Halfway through the last party one of the kids turned in his kart and came over to me; he told me he had to leave early and I thought he’d come to say thanks for the nice time. Instead he said, “So, if you have any gift bags, I’ll take one.”
Seriously? This boy had just spent two hours in a go-kart.
“Listen, you’re seven years old. Your gift bag was getting to drive a car,” I said. “Now get out of here.”
I’m sure his mother is still telling the women at her craft parties what a bitch I am.
• • •
A lot of us have confused good parenting with overparenting. We think if we’re in our kid’s faces and business twenty-four/seven, that we’re doing a better job than the moms of yore who told their children they’d better go find something to do or else they’d find them something. (Every person I know over forty has the same story: one day I sighed that I was bored and in the blink of an eye I was pulling weeds or sweeping the floor.)
But even as toddlers and preschoolers, children need to feel as if they own their experiences. They need to be let out in the yard to discover worms and flowers, to pick up a snail, and, yes, to eat dirt. When they’re older, they need to be free to ride their bikes and explore in the neighborhood. They need to be free to make their own discoveries. And by the way, it doesn’t count as a genuine discovery if you stick a caterpillar beneath their noses. Interesting, maybe, but engineered by you, the parent.
We have to be there for our kids. At the same time, we have to get the hell out of the way.
Reece once complained to Laird that he never came to her riding lessons, her ballet or gymnastic classes.
He said, “Do it awhile, then I’ll come.”
He’s not particularly interested in watching her learn how to point her toe. These activities are for her, to try some things out and learn what she likes and what she doesn’t like, to figure out what she excels at, to get to know herself.
My Foot Is Too Big for the Glass Slipper: A Guide to the Less Than Perfect Life Page 8
