It sounds like two really fortunate things happened in your family, Jan: Sadie choosing to join swim team and Callie being asked to keep a food journal. If naturally-thin Callie is the one who's been assigned to do that, and the whole family participates in some fashion, then Sadie doesn't have to feel singled out at all if she's asked to participate.

I've been thinking about a scene from a movie we saw (part of) last week. The parents are recently divorced, there are two girls - 8 and 6 I think, and the mom is seeing someone new. The new boyfriend is a fitness nut, and he's trying to help the 8 year-old, a little chubby, with her diet and exercise. The dad comes over and has a righteous fit about it. To paraphrase his reaction, it's something like this: How dare you make her self conscious about this!? She's only 8!

Emotionally I was totally on his side. His anger came from genuine love and concern for her feelings. So it's complicated, because on this blog I'm advocating for taking conscious steps if a child is heading for obesity. And I'm advocating for that because in our household the problem got away from us, and by 11/12 years old our son was very overweight and the effects on his life were making him really unhappy.

I guess the middle ground is for the parent, who like the father in the movie is motivated by unconditional love and a desire to protect the child's sense of self, to help the child out. And what I've learned is that to be conscious about it and actually talk about it doesn't damage the child like I thought it would. Like it would have for me as a child because any parental "help" that came my way was more...rejecting.

Which leads me to how we're doing around here. I've noticed in the last week, as the weather's getting a little cooler, that I've wanted to pig out in a way I haven't since I started this new way of eating in July. But I haven't gained any weight because I've been eating, for instance, nearly a whole bag of fat-free pretzels at a time. While watching Project Runway or something.

So I'm going to address what's going on for me that's making me do that, but it's not a huge problem because of the food I've been pigging out with. I've noticed that Matthew, too, loves to eat and eat. He's always been a cereal afficionado. But now he eats Special K with fat free milk. My dilemma has been whether I need to say something if I see him eating bowl after bowl. It's so hard for me to stop the policing, but I have to. He put on a few pounds over the last few weeks, but now he's taking control again. I'll tell more about how he's done that and how I've tried to stop myself from policing and replaced those kinds of messages with supportive cues that help him with his own goals in my next post.

How is Sadie liking swimming? Matthew's swim practice is two hours long, includes "dry land" training (usually running) as well as swimming, and he comes home totally wiped out but with a sense of achievement. It's been very good.