March 2, 2006
Thursday 

I have to say I am chagrined. Discomfited. Nettled. Vexed, even.

For the fifth week in a row, I stayed the same, weighing in at 217.

“Did you get the leaflet on plateaus?” the receptionist asked me. I said I hadn’t, and I said that I really didn’t want it. I am not in the mood right now to make any more changes. I am not going to “go Core” (the plan where only very basic foods are allowed), nor am I going to increase my exercise time just for the purpose of burning calories, nor am I going to start using “fat-free half-and-half” (the very name is an abomination!) or any other ersatz food. And if that means I don’t want this enough (“this” being weight loss and a new wardrobe and compliments spilling out of other people), then that is what it means.

I did fail better this week. I made some changes. After the disappointing weigh-in last Thursday I ate my way through most of a fresh-baked loaf of bread “as big as a Honda Civic,” and on Friday, after my workout, munched on a Hot Pockets Philly steak sandwich (or what passes for one) and microwave fries. (Yes, that’s food as fake as fat-free half-and-half, but fake food I’m willing to eat. And I did count all the points — 9 for the Hot Pocket and 9 for the fries — for a total of 35 that day.) And then, of course, there was Fat Saturday, the day I set for my Last Eating Hurrah Before Lent (instead of Fat Tuesday) because we were invited to the home of friends for dinner. I spent the day baking psomi, a Greek bread one of my fictional characters is making on an important day in the story (you have to make sacrifices for research!). I took one loaf as a hostess gift and put one aside for the soup and bread supper at church.

I enjoyed the dinner, and the conversation, and came home determined to begin again on Sunday.

On Sunday I had cereal, milk, a banana, and a bit of the bread from the batch I’d baked for my hostess. During church I began to feel unaccountably depressed. It might have been post-event letdown, but it also might have been post-carbohydrate letdown. So every day this week I had only protein for breakfast. No bread. No fresh fruit. No juice. (And if you don’t know what a sacrifice this is for me, then you don’t know enough about me yet.)

And it worked. I didn’t experience a mid-morning depression all week, and I felt clearer and more focused as I went about my tasks (all of which involved writing).

I stayed for the meeting, though I was late and since Sandra’s meeting is very crowded I had to search for a seat. The topic tonight was “maintaining your dream home.” We talked about the things we do to maintain our residences. We clean, we fix the roof, we mow the lawn. Major repairs have to planned for and can involve significant expense and inconvenience. And if we can do those things for a building, something that could be replaced brick for brick if it burned to the ground (and is insured for that, even!), why can’t we do it for our bodies, the irreplaceable house we live in every day?

At one point Sandra said something about how before she lost weight she didn’t know how to “fit in” with thin people, she only knew how to fit in with overweight people. Now, 85 pounds lighter and a lifetime member and a leader for several years, she finally fits in with all those thin people.

Maybe I heard her wrong. Maybe she wasn’t saying that it’s better to be able to “fit in” with thin people, that once you lose weight you’re liberated from having to interact socially with overweight people and you can leave them to themselves. Maybe I was just so disgruntled with myself that I was trying to hear things that would make me hate Weight Watchers.

At the end of the meeting an enormous man called everyone’s attention to his hat. (I don’t know how long he’s been doing Weight Watchers. He looks like he should lose about a hundred pounds. Maybe he’s already lost that much and has a hundred more to go, maybe he hasn’t lost even ten yet.) His hat had the slogan “I might be fat, but you’re ugly, and I can go on a diet.”

Everyone laughed.

I felt very sad, and I left quickly.

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