THE NUTRITIONIST
I have dribbled around this for awhile now.
Briefly, to return to our heroine with the potential case of the mumps (read that post here). She did not have mumps. After two blood tests and visits with two different doctors, the facial swelling went away on its own and she felt better.
In the course of all this the pediatrician recommended that my youngest see a nutritionist, to make sure that she doesn’t gain anymore weight. Not exactly music to my ears.
My experience with nutritionists has been, well let’s say, tepid. I saw one in college in an effort to lose weight, who told me that I should really just cut out juice to lose the freshman 15. To be fair, I probably was not completely honest about the amount of the beer in my diet.
Then there was the nutritionist I consulted during my second pregnancy, who had me on a steady diet of chicken breasts and steamed broccoli. To be fair, my opinion of her was surely tainted by the fact that she looked like a supermodel when I was wearing compression hose under my maternity pants.
The pediatrician promised me that this woman was excellent. That she wouldn’t shame, or take away all sweets, she would just help organize the menu a bit so that there was more balance. In the end, I was just too skeptical. So I went alone, armed with the food diary and Kids, Carrots and Candy.
She was a nutritionist. As my husband commented, what did you expect? I showed her the food diary, and she calculated the number of calories and grams of fat on each page from memory. She had no interest in what else might be going on for my youngest, for what she might be feeling, or why she might have started gaining weight at a particular time. Weight and body mass index were simply an equation of calories in vs calories out.
Which is of course true, and not true. As anyone who has ever been on a diet will tell you, there is so much more to it than that. I was astounded that this woman paid no deference to any of it.
It seems the experiment that I am doing and her philosophy are at opposite ends of the spectrum. I guess I was hoping for something more in the middle, a common meeting ground where we might work together.
Culture hacking can be really lonely.