Chronicles of a Late Bloomer

I am NOT a girl who goes for cliches or trite sayings, and the weight-loss world (if there is such a thing) is full of them. My primary problem is that most of them seem so negative and belittling. I mean, consider exhibit A:

A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.

On the surface, sort of cute, right? But when you think about it, a terrible message to send. It essentially demonizes all food, regardless of nutrition, and warns you about those damnable hips. I’m sorry, but hips are lovely and wonderful and make us womanly. There are worse boogeymen in the world than hips, I think you’ll agree.

Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.

To me, this implies that people who are, say, naturally skinny walk around in a state of euphoria all the time. I mean, they must, since a piece of good cake tastes euphoric to me! This cliche assigns some magical and very emotional power to thinness and to thin people, which in turn condemns fat people. I’m not into it.

So, when I say that my Weight Watchers leader believes that words have power, and that she uses the structure of words to help change our thinking, I certainly don’t mean to imply that she is spouting cliche’s all the time. However, she does have some key phrases and sound bites that I’ve been chewing on for the past few weeks.

There’s no bad food, only bad math.

I like this one particularly because, overall, it is positive. It’s accepting of both a variety of foods and ourselves! Imagine! We are not bad people, we only need to brush up on our math skills! I think anyone who has taken the SAT’s would agree with that statement.

I was reading from G.G. yesterday, who was detailing a list of (for lack of a better word) indiscretions from the previous week. Splurges. She had indulged in a tiny, individual-sized ice cream and had allowed popcorn at the movies. Oh — and while we’re thinking of it — she’d had “a bit” of chocolate cake and “a handful” of chips as well!

The cliche police would have run her to the edge of a cliff and stoned her to death. “A MOMENT ON THE LIPS!” they’d chant. “A MOMENT ON THE LIPS!” And yet…

What I have learned to do, though, is compensate for those splurges. I’d eaten lightly Saturday [...] I was able to juggle food to fit in some special things without overdoing it or feeling deprived or hungry at any point.

Sounds like G.G. is learning new math. For my part, I’m trying to learn my way out of a world ruled by logarithm and exponential. A bite of cake is actually not bad^evil. It is, in fact, a world away from my previous habit of eating the entire cake. That’s not calculus, it’s arithmetic. I know what a “bite” of cake does. It puts me at risk of an insulin spike. This puts me at risk of urges and cravings for MORE (hence, eating the whole cake). It contains more calories than a bite of broccoli, yet on many days I eat its caloric equivalent in broccoli. This is not emotional turmoil. It’s just math.

And so, I sometimes eat the bite of cake. I do so carefully, mindfully, and infrequently. It is this size (small) and frequency (less often) that makes this math new to me, and that’s the kind of change that helps.