Chronicles of a Late Bloomer

I had an email from Weight Watchers this week asking if I wanted to use their etools for free. I like the etools, and I use them a lot even though I haven’t been to a Weight Watchers meeting for over a year. And, I don’t always use the etools either, but when I want to sort of track how I am doing for a week, there they are. For $13/month.

Now Weight Watchers has a new promotion. A monthly pass which gives you a nice discount on meetings (between $2-$3/week) and gives you access to etools for free. All the meetings you care to attend plus etools for $40/month.

See, that isn’t such a great deal, when you’re only performing simple math. $13 < $40, true. But, resolving answers the food questions is not simple math in my life. It never has been. There is no clever adage or easy answer that has worked, so far, to change my lifestyle. No “eat less, move more” style of thinking has worked so far. Nothing that can fit on a refrigerator magnet or a keychain.

Food is comfort. It is reward and my punishment. Pleasure and pain. Carrot and the stick. Food resolves all sorts of problems that require advanced math, but like a calculus equation which resolves to both positive and negative infinity, it does so in an ultimately unsatisfying way. If the solution to a problem is “can be anything in the entire world,” it isn’t much use.

What I mean to say is that at 12:15 today, I think I will be rejoining Weight Watchers on their monthly pass. Maybe. Probably.

But, why rejoin when Weight Watchers meetings are full of those kinds of “simple math” answers? Lots of rhyming phrases. Lots of cliche’d answers. Lots of keychains.

I don’t know. What I do know is that last time I was going to meetings, I lost 40 pounds. And I sat in the back of the meetings and rolled my eyes in disdain. Regularly. And I kept my head down, and sketched, or wrote in my journal, and pretended not to even be listening. I avoided eye contact with everyone — everyone — and hid all evidence of having attended once I left. I folded up their flyers and their brochures. I tucked away the bookmarks and the reward stickers. I did not want any evidence that I was Trying To Lose Weight.

But, I went. Every week, I went and plunked down my pennies and stepped on their scale. I kept track of what was happening to my body — at least the simple math part of it — and owned up, week after week, for the food decisions I’d made.

I met some goals. I collected seven “5 pound loss” stickers. I passed my first 10% goal. And I got close to the 300-pound mark. I got down to 304 pounds, to be precise. I think I have not weighed less than 300 pounds for the past decade. And I must have panicked a little.

I mean, my body was changing so fast that I hardly recognized it. I hadn’t told anyone that I was trying to lose weight, so after losing nearly 40 pounds, people started asking me if I had cancer. They expressed concern that I was looking gaunt. (Ha! A gaunt 300-pounder!)

But, here is the new math.

• When I first joined Weight Watchers in September of 2004, I weighed 340 pounds.
• When I hit my first 10% goal (of losing 34 pounds), I weighed 306 pounds.
• This time, I am joining at 330 pounds.
• At my 10% goal this time, I will have lost 33 pounds.
• This will take me down under 300 pounds. For the first time in a decade or more.

Holy crap. Here I go.