As Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention opined, “If you go with the flow in America today, you will end up overweight or obese, as two thirds of Americans do.” Even if Bea avoided school lunch, she wasn’t out of the woods. More challenges awaited. At 9:30 a.m., a scant hour after they’ve arrived at school, the kids in Bea’s class are trotted down to the cafeteria to eat the snacks they’ve all brought from home. When we’d started the program, Bea got a green-light food as her morning snack. Along with a piece of fruit, I’d throw in a 100-calorie snack bag, or maybe some hummus and carrots. When I decided I had to cut back on the number of junky 100-calorie packs I was giving her every day, I split one serving between lunch and snack, instead of giving her a full one for each. Now I felt I needed to take it a step further. I know that as a person loses weight, her newly smaller body requires fewer calories to maintain its size, so calories need to be reduced for weight loss to continue.
