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I have a serious problem with the diet industry. I believe they're making gazillions of dollars by making people (mostly women) feel bad about themselves. I also believe they're setting people up to fail so that they'll come back and spend even more money. I hate the success stories that are all about how disgusting someone looked before and how she's a whole different person now. I hate how the success stories always state in teeny tiny print that those results are not typical. I hate to give my money to companies that do shit like that.
And yet. I joined Weight Watchers. There are some things I hate about it -- most notably the politics of the industry -- and also some things that are really working for me. I'm trying my best to use what tools are helpful and still do my own thing.
What I like:
- Getting weighed, officially, once a week
- My leader (more on him later)
- The online tools (looking up foods, calculating points from my recipes, etc...)
- Counting Points (isn't that freaky -- I thought I would hate this, but I don't. More on that, too)
- It inspired me to get more exercise, which has changed my life more than losing weight is.
What I don't like:
- That I'm supporting the evil diet industry
- That the food they sell is total processed crap in small portions and they pretend it's good for you because it's low in "Points"
- Most of the other leaders I've encountered
- The "success stories" that make people sound like they were disgusting losers before they joined Weight Watchers
What makes me feel like I made the right decision to join is that I ended up with my leader instead of someone else. My leader is gay, Jewish, in his 50's, entirely un-perky. He tells stories about his mother hiding food from him when he was a child. He never uses catch-phrases. He rarely gets to the Weight Watchers assigned weekly topics. I adore him. I wish he was my friend.
The first leader I encountered had been working for Weight Watchers full time for about thirty years. She was drinking the sugar-free Kool Aid, big time. In discussing how to deal with celebrations -- your own birthday, for instance -- she pulled out a Weight Watchers cookbook and pointed to a chocolate cake recipe. She asked us to guess why a slice was only, I don't remember how many points -- 2? 3? I was thinking, less sugar? whole wheat flour? eggless? The answer was: a serving size is approximately two bites. So she's trying to sell a cookbook based on its serving sizes. Fucked up. I drove across town to get away from her.
Once my leader (across town, and completely worth the drive) missed a meeting and our substitute made me want to play corporate bingo. She kept saying "your weight loss journey" and smiling too big. She said that at the end of the summer "there should be less of us." I walked out.
Another time he was gone, our substitute handed out plastic sun-visors.
I got really lucky.
And so, I let them charge me every month so that I can go to meetings and be weighed and count Points on my computer. Did I sell out?
When I hear someone else's story about being fat, losing weight, gaining weight, I want stats, so I'll start with stats. I'm 36, 5'4", and currently 224 pounds. At my heaviest, (most recently in March of this year) I was 253 pounds. Once, several years ago, my size 24 jeans were getting too small for me. Right now I usually wear an 18.
After a lifetime of being fat and several years of losing and gaining weight with a lot of ambivalence, I am now losing again, and trying not to get smaller in the process. On this blog, I'll be trying to work out my ambivalence.
A good place to start is the incident that inspired my blog's name. About twelve years ago, I had a brief medical scare (all is and was well, so I'll not go into details) which was traumatic in and of itself, and which led to an appointment with an endocrinologist who, (winning the award for worst doctor ever) poked at me, answered no questions, and then said, "There should be less of you."
Afterward, I managed to not go to any doctor for three or four years and to gain probably fifty pounds. As someone who has always been overweight, I have always felt self-conscious about how much space I take up, but I have never, in my most insecure moments believed there should be less of me. Me is good. Fat, maybe is bad. Maybe there should be less fat. But in one brusque, offhand prescription, this overpaid asshole defined me as my fat and told me not to exist.
When I've lost weight in the past few years, usually stalling at about 200-215 pounds, I have struggled with the fact that by intentionally losing weight, intentionally changing my body, I am somehow admitting that my body (and thus me) is and has always been wrong. That pisses me off to no end. It makes the process of losing weight all about hating myself, which I don't.
So I am here, losing weight again and trying to figure out how to keep going, how to enjoy my body right now, as it is changing, rather than feeling that it's a bad thing I need to fix or get rid of.
