I have been way too busy to write. Way too much going on.
Something about Weight Watchers – you set an end goal for your weight loss after you lose 10% of your body weight. The goal has to be within your BMI range, but you decide where it is in there. Then when you reach goal weight, you have six weeks of maintenance, where you still come to meetings, still weigh in, except instead of trying to lose, you’re trying to stay within two pounds of your target. Once you do that six weeks, you become a lifetime member, which means you don’t pay anymore, only have to weigh in every month, and don’t go to weekly meetings, unless you want to. Lifetime is the big pie-in-the-sky for those on program (who have probably quit eating pie.)
So here’s the deal: when I crossed the 183 mark, I could have said I hit my goal, and started the maintenance. But I still felt I needed to lose more, so I talked to the leader and we decided to make it 180, and see how it is when I get there. From the start, I sort of thought 175 was my goal, and 170 would be nice but unmanageable. So that gives me three goals: 180, 175, and 170. Do I shoot for 170 and when I “fail”, I am still at my 175 goal? Do I say 180 so I can stop paying sooner?
As of yesterday, I am at 180.2, which basically means if I skip a glass of water on Saturday, I will be at the high goal weight. And a big part of me thinks I am not “done” with this project. I am not in shape in any way. I still struggle with wanting to go eat fast food. Vegetables are not entirely my friend yet. And without constantly looking at a WW book or the web site, I often get flustered on what to eat. And lately, I have been eating too little. Like I eat a nice bowl of soup at lunch, and it’s great, and filling, and it’s only 3 points, instead of the 6-12 I would get at Subway. And an hour later, I am starving, and I start eating protein-less fruit all afternoon. And by the end of the day, I have a 32-point goal and I’ve eaten 22 points. I am sure I am not losing just fat when I have days like this. I still need more structure on this, and I really need to get to a gym.
The other problem is I do not feel thin. I am currently thinner than pretty much any of you have ever seen me (except for Larry, who knew me in junior high when I weighed 100 pounds soaking wet.) But I have realized I developed this weirdness about not being thin. Like I go to some store, or go to the gym, or eat at a restaurant, and I always expect weird looks, because appearance-wise, I would be this outsider. It’s very hard to go to the gym if you weigh a lot and are self-conscious about being around all of these people with monster metabolisms who spend hours in the gym every day. It’s always disturbed me on some level that I might be sitting in a Denny’s ordering a plate of fat and grease, and someone looks over and sees a 250-pound man shoveling pancakes into his gaping maw. I still feel like that person, and I think getting past that will be harder than losing weight. And if you wonder how people lose 200 pounds and then gain it all back, this is why.
But sometimes I do feel thin. Like I will look in a mirror and see me with only one chin. Or I have this thing called a Resperate, it helps you lower your blood pressure with this guided breathing thing. Anyway, it has a strap you put on your stomach, and I have not used it since I started WW. When I tried it yesterday, the strap was literally set twice as big as my stomach. And I used to be tight in a pair of 38 jeans; right now I am wearing 33s, and they need a belt. The weirdest thing was the other night, I had to go down to the parking garage, so I decided to run from our apartment to the car and back. And I could RUN. My sides didn’t hurt. My ankles didn’t hurt. No shin splints. Okay, I was horribly out of breath, and I wasn’t going to hit a five minute mile. But I could run, probably for the first time since Reagan was still in office. So maybe I should start doing that.
Another hard thing for me to work on when trying to fit this into my life is other people’s opinions. Every single person I talk to about losing the weight immediately snaps back with “yeah, but I bet you can’t keep it off.” And that pisses me off, because I was very careful about how I did this, and I did not go on a diet where I could only eat fish on Tuesdays or blue foods on odd days or whatever else. I ate less, and what I ate, I ate healthier things. I stopped eating bad things, and trained myself to eat better things, and to eat them at the right time of day, and to think differently about food.
But people bitch about this obesity epidemic and yo-yo diets and Super Size This and high fructose corn syrup, and whatever far-left tirade about the misery of our country is being mass-marketed as a book or movie this week. And you know what causes all of this? People bitching about the obesity epidemic and yo-yo diets etc etc etc. Our society has been conditioned to respond to anything with grief and failure. And you can blame the fast food companies for deep-frying everything but the napkins, but the reason people go to fast-food places is they are told they are nothing, especially if they are obese. If you tell a person “you are horrible” a thousand times an hour for twenty years, guess what? They are horrible. I know when all of the sociopaths at an old job of mine were going on and on about their diet and their gyms and gave me endless shit about eating a hamburger and fries, it did not make me want to go join a gym and go on a vegan diet. It made me not want to be one of those fuckers, and it made me go eat at McDonald’s every single day.
I also hate that everybody is an expert. Everyone told me to quit soda, to quit diet soda, to only drink green tea, to not drink brown diet soda, to not drink nutrasweet soda, to drink only regular soda, to buy $4 bottles of cane sugar flavored soda, and so on. And I lost the weight by not following any of their advice. Weight Watchers isn’t about glycemic index or counting proteins or high and low starch or low energy density or any other shit. It’s about eating less bad things, and eating more good things. You don’t even track calories, and this floors so many people I know. There is no single food I am forbidden from eating. I can have a hamburger. I just can’t have five of them, and six pounds of fries and a 72-ounce Coke. But I hate having to defend the program, and I hate having to basically duel with someone every time they ask me how I lost the weight. I lost weight by not doing things that made me gain weight.
I think there are some people in meetings who might be pissed too, because I reached goal (plus .2 pounds) in 17 weeks, while others spend years on program and don’t. That’s another conversation.
Like I said, very busy – gotta get to it.
