When Dara-Lynn Weiss thought her 7-year-old daughter, Bea, was overweight, the Manhattan mom knew there was only one thing to do.
Put her on a diet, then put her in Vogue.
Even at her young age, Bea was apprehensive.
“It is not worth it to write it if it will make you feel bad,” her mother offers.
“No, I want you to,” Bea says. “I just don’t know if I want to be in the picture.”
Weiss’ husband, Jeff, suggested she ask her therapist for advice.
“His response was quick and definitive. The magazine article must be written. The book, too. The issue was an important one . . . However, Bea should be left out of it, he said. She should not collaborate on the book, as I had considered. And she should not appear in the Vogue magazine photo. This was my work; Bea should be kept separate from it.”
Why does Weiss go ahead with it? When she tells Bea the girl won’t be in the photo, the once-reluctant daughter was “crestfallen.”
“We should have stood firm. I should have listened to the therapist’s advice,” Weiss writes. “But I imagined the article coming out, next to a big picture of . . . just me?”
So Weiss shamed her daughter as fat in the pages of a national magazine, held the child — and herself — up to ridicule and scorn. But at least she got that book deal. “The Heavy” hit shelves last week.
Don’t expect a mea culpa.
Weiss, a TV producer, has delivered the dieting version of Amy Chua’s bestseller “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” a bad-mommy memoir about how only strict discipline can lead to success.
She begins by describing her daughter’s weight issues in nasty detail.
“At birthdays, she sucked juice boxes dry, ate every morsel of the pizza and cake and enthusiastically consumed whatever candy happened to be in her goody bag,” Weiss writes.
By 3, she’s in the 99th percentile in weight. While her brother, a picky eater with a fast metabolism, gained about 5 pounds per year, Bea was averaging twice that amount.
Weiss and her husband, who works at a nonprofit, began to monitor their daughter’s eating habits. They insisted on whole grains, stayed away from processed foods and pushed fruits and vegetables.
But Bea’s weight kept climbing. By 4, she was wearing clothes meant for 8-year-olds.
“Were we going to let our daughter be the fat kid in the class? Would her schoolmates tease her?” she writes. “Might she be ostracized in the lunchroom or at recess?”
Weiss’ neurosis stemmed from her own battles with body image. Weiss had struggled for years with disordered eating — taking diet pills, laxatives and even emetics (to make her throw up) — throughout her adult life.
“For the prior three decades, I had not attended a party, sat down to a meal, gone to the bathroom or been physically ill without, on some level, silently calculating how that action would affect my weight,” she writes.
Clearly Bea was not immune to her mother’s unhealthy relationship with food.
Weiss found her 4-year-old applying lip gloss in the bathroom. When she asked why, Bea responded: “So people won’t look at my belly.”
Bea’s diet began in earnest following her sixth birthday after her pediatrician delivered unwelcome news: Bea had hit 93 pounds at 4-foot-4, which placed her squarely in the obesity range.
Weiss signed her up with Garden City-based child nutritionist Dr. Joanna Dolgoff, whose “Red Light, Green Light” plan teaches children how to place foods into three categories: healthy (green), yellow (to be eaten in moderation) and red (only occasionally).
The Type A side of Weiss glommed onto this way of thinking — and she became especially obsessed with the weekly weigh-ins.
Though Dr. Dolgoff warned against putting too much stress on the numbers on the scale and refused to give her pediatric clients goal weights, Weiss insisted anyway. Denied, she eventually found a number on her own. Her daughter’s magic number was 77, or 16 pounds less than she currently weighed.
During that time at a dinner party, Bea had eaten dinner but was still hungry. A friend offered to give her the rest of her plate of tuna nicoise salad. Weiss didn’t yet have the nerve to say no, but privately seethed and fixated on the potatoes and olive oil on the plate.
After only a few months with Dolgoff, Weiss cut ties because she didn’t like the program’s philosophy of unlimited fruits and vegetables. She also felt that Bea’s weight wasn’t coming off fast enough.
So she decided to go at it alone.
She stocked her cabinets with processed foods like 100-calorie Doritos, Cheez-It, and Oreo snack packs. Yogurt, nuts, granola were deemed too fattening. She became convinced of McDonald’s “viability as a diet-friendly destination.”
When a parent criticized her choice of Oreo Cakester snack packs, she responded with: “Her health priority is eating less, not eating healthier.”
When Bea would inevitably cheat — one time she ate 800 calories of brie, chocolate mousse and baguettes during her school’s French heritage day — her mother would deprive her of dinner, sometimes leaving her with only a salad and nonfat dressing to make up for the used calories.
Though the weight was coming off — “when dressed in certain clothes, Bea could pass for a normal-weight kid,” Weiss writes as if it’s a compliment — they still hadn’t hit “the goal.”
By her 8th birthday, she finally got down to 77 pounds, and her pediatrician insisted, “She doesn’t need to lose anymore.”
But the glory didn’t last long. Soon after, Bea had eaten too much fruit and noted: “I’m fat again.”
Dr. Dolgoff says she thought Weiss was a caring mother when she worked as the daughter’s nutritionist.
But “when I first read the article I was shocked. This is not the mother I knew,” she told The Post. “Then I read the book, expecting a different tone, something more even-handed. And I was surprised again.”
Weiss remains unapologetic, saying she believes she’s doing a service by drawing attention to childhood-obesity problems.
The girl’s weight still seems to be an issue, as far as her parents are concerned. When she attended camp last summer, her father had “recurring nightmares” that Bea had gained 10 pounds.
“He expressed more concern about what that would mean for me than about how Bea would react,” Weiss writes. That seems to be the prevailing theme — what Weiss wants.
Now that she’s going on the talk-show circuit, Weiss has decided, belatedly, to protect her daughter. She won’t supply pictures of Bea today and will only comment that her daughter’s weight is “healthy.”
In fact, her publicist told The Post, “She wants to keep her daughter out of it.”
Isn’t it a bit late for that?