Snowball in hell
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:53 pm (Physical, Relational)
You could have knocked me over with a feather last night when my dad announced that he and my mom have started on the Weight Watchers program. Mom talks a lot about needing to lose weight, but I have only known her to do something about it maybe 2 times in my entire life. She is easily 100+ pounds overweight.
I finally got my mom on the phone to own up, and exclaimed incredulously to her, “I mean, did you go to a meeting and everything?”
Well, no. They signed up for online services including e-tools, but hey. It’s a start and, shoot: that’s basically the plan I’m following at this point. But, I did my time with 2 years of meetings before I quit.
A few weeks ago, she called me to complain about insomnia, and blamed it largely on worries about her health. I’ll admit — I tuned out a little bit. How many hundreds of times have I heard her say, “I really need to lose weight. I should start walking. I should stop eating dessert. I should… I should… I should…?” She’s always trying to rope me in to be her diet buddy, which I think has contributed in some way to my whole diet aversion. I couldn’t bear the weight (forgive the pun) of her ill health along with mine.
Anyway, during the insomnia, she told me she was up all night crafting and concocting new diets. One of them was called the “100 Bite Diet.” I was almost afraid to ask what that was. “You know,” she chirped. “I’d just count my bites and only eat 100 a day.”
The magic of telecommunications allowed me to roll my eyes and still seem like a good daughter. “And how is that going so far?” I ventured.
“Great,” she said. “It only took me 10 bites to get through breakfast, and I just had 4 bites of candy bar, so that’s good.”
And that is when I heard myself dropping the bomb.
“You know, mom. You don’t actually need to stay up nights inventing diets when so many other people have done it for you. I mean, maybe you should just join Weight Watchers and see if their plan would work for you. It’s sensible and for some people it really works.”
After that little lecture, I felt guilty. For the past few months, I’ve thought I could craft my own plan by piecing together bits of knowledge from various sources. I should restrict somewhat, but not to the point of measuring. Gosh, no. I shouldn’t eat any sugar at all, but should rely on a sort of South Beach mentality with “only good carbs.” That’s it… and then I’ll count points but only eat Core foods, and then every 3rd Wednesday I’ll allow myself to have ice cream. Or a Free Day. Because that’s what I think I’d like best. And other diets let you have a Free Day. So, hey. It must be okay, right?
Well, sue me. I am my mother’s daughter. So, I sat myself down and gave myself the same lecture about not reinventing the wheel and have gotten back on the Weight Watchers wagon this week. I don’t really think it’s dramatically better than any other plan out there — but it’s a plan, and it was written by people who supposedly know more than I do, and so it’s a fine enough place to start [over].
There’s a part of me that’s a little bit excited about having a WW buddy in the family. Today she told me she felt guilty for the bagel she had at breakfast. “I only put 1 tablespoon of cream cheese on it, though, and it was whole wheat.”
“Mom,” I soothed. “There are no bad foods. All you do is write it down and then, at dinner time, decide what you can eat based on the points you have left.”
And then, I stopped. And blinked. And I realized I have never once heard of my mother having a whole wheat anything on purpose. And she was at least aware of how much cream cheese she was using, and holy crap. That’s progress.
I’m proud of both of us.
