All the Horrible Girliness

WW

Here's how it works. You go into a Jewish temple lit low, mostly by the dimming light from outside, after work on a Thursday. You're directed to a brown folding table and a form and a pen. You forget the information you ink in. You pay some money. There is a special going on so all you have to pay is that week's fees, about ten dollars. You are given a little thick paper booklet plus some colorful small books and you get in line. You take off your shoes. In line in front of you are other people, mostly women, taking off their shoes, standing on the scales, and beyond that, putting on their shoes. From another room, you hear the low echoing murmur of women talking in a big room.

You go to the scale certain that you will be turned away, your ten dollars and change refunded, because you are surely too thin for this. You are not like the land whales who half-waddle, half-swim their way to the big room, clutching their little booklets and talking about last week's bad choices. But, at the scale, you are surprised by the number. This is the hardest day, because you've been lying to yourself a long time. Later you find out that almost everyone in the room lied to themselves to some extent. They shopped rarely and alone or from catalogues. They avoided mirrors and cameras and the doctor's office. They all have the trigger story: the thing that made them come in or come back. The photo at someone's wedding. The dress that wouldn't zip no matter how they held their breath. The comment made by a child at the supermarket. The heart attack.

A lady with short, tight brown curls writes the number down in your little book without comment. You put on your shoes. You join the women and sprinkling of men in the next room.

There is another number next to the big number in your booklet. It's your next weight loss goal: ten percent of your weight. Only after that do you get to start thinking about the big goal.

Every food, depending on their fat, fiber and caloric content, has a point value. You get 24 a day, and 20 extra per week to use how you like. Some of the women get more points a day, because they weigh more. Some get less, because they weigh less. This makes no sense to you, because you think you should be rewarded for weight loss, not penalized. This is how your brain works: food is reward.

You forget what they talk about at the meeting. After the meeting, you have to sit and listen to another speech detailing the program. Then you go home and write down everything you ate that day. You look up the points values in your books and write those down next to the foods. Then you do the math.

The first week is hard. You're hungry a lot. You have to figure it out, how not to run out of points before ten a.m., what foods you really need and then you realize how much you eat when you're not paying attention, and that's a lot. Then you substitute out some foods you don't care about much with other foods that cost less points, and then eventually you find that little corner of the frozen food section with the diet desserts.

Next meeting, you have lost five pounds, so you get a bookmark and everyone claps for you. After that, you lose less: a pound or two a week. Certain weeks every month are tougher than others. There's always a week after menstruation when you lose more. There is a frustrating three week period, months later, when you stay the exact same weight, down to the tenth of a pound, even though you go to the bathroom before every weigh-in and weigh before breakfast on Saturdays. The fourth week, you lose four pounds.

A few weeks in, they tell you about activity points: points you earn for exercise, though they'd never call it exercise. People have bad connotations of the word, especially the land whales who were fat during gym class, fat during the Jazzercise era, fat during the yoga era, fat during Oprah's ups and downs. Some of these middle-aged ladies, they hear "exercise" and they think twenty-year olds in thongs, leotards, tights, headbands. They think marathon runners. They think embarrassing gym memberships. They think sweat, and for many of these ladies, sweat is an ugly, scary thing. So, they call it activity, and activity means parking a little further away from the mall. Activity means taking the stairs to the second floor instead of the elevator. Activity means strapping on a gadget that tracks how many steps they take, and increasing that number every day. Activity means taking the stroller out for a walk around the block after dinner, and these things are doable.

You learn to like egg whites, black beans, wheat bread and salsa. You start saying things only thin people say, like, "Whoa, that's too rich for me," and "I didn't save room for dessert" and "I'm eating a light lunch because we're going out for dinner." When you start hating food and your life, you learn to cook something new. When you want the carrot cake four days in a row, you have a piece on Saturday after weigh-in. When you know you'll be going out for sushi and sake with ten friends you make sure to get a twenty-minute run in beforehand, for activity points.

A month or so in, you find a different meeting with a funny leader. She makes you want to go. When you stop losing, she tells you it's perfect maintenance. When you gain, she's excited you came anyway and she tells you that you can't fail if you don't quit. When you lose, she says Con Grat U LAY Shuns! and you can tell she means it, even if you only lost point two pounds.

There are other reasons to go: every few weeks, you buy something else. A magazine, a food scale, a restaurant guide, a book of recipes, Crystal Lite, a ten-pack of weekly coupons with the eleventh week free.

Then, the best reason. At work, your pants almost fall down, so during lunch break, you go to Express and shuffle through the pants. You pick out the biggest size from the back of the rack, a size you have dreamed of fitting into for years, and take it to the dressing room. With trepidation and the little prayer to the loving God of your youth you pull the zipper – and it doesn't fit. It's too big.

With more joy than is civilized you tell the annoying knocking salesgirl that you need a smaller size. This is a sentence you've heard other women say, in other dressing rooms everywhere you've lived, your whole life, but you've never had the opportunity to use it. The next size down slides on and zips up perfectly, plus your legs look amazing. They look like someone else's legs. They look like legs you'd be jealous of.

At the register, you tell the girl that you really needed a new pair, and as proof you pull the waistband of your current pants away from your hip. She weighs a total of about twelve pounds so she looks at you like you've told her a joke in Swahili. You let it go.

There are compliments, but you still see your problems. Some days you are one large problem area. Some days you blame everyone else. It's certainly your husband's fault that you gained weight this week; does he have to order eggs over easy and hash browns and bacon and sausage and toast and cover it in ketchup and tobasco and wash it down with hot chocolate while you poke at your egg whites and oatmeal?

You learn things about yourself. Like, that you don't want to eat a piece of the expensive French birthday cake at work. You want to eat the entire cake, alone in a stall in the clean bathroom down the hall. With your hands. And you want it violently, angrily. You're so pissed off, you have to take a walk. You want to hurt people, so instead you go down the elevator and out the clean lobby and clean glass doors and down the leaf-blown sidewalk and across the newly paved street at the freshly painted crosswalk and into the Starbucks which smells of coffee and spray cleaner and sounds like the Johnny Cash Starbucks compilation album, all of this to the rhythm of your just-broken in, unscuffed Franco Sarto pumps, the sounds they make different on each surface. You order a low fat caramel frappuchino with no whipped cream (four points) and then you go back to work, your shoes clack clack clack thock thock thock fump fump fump over concrete, marble and carpet.

At work, a girl decides she wants to lose weight so she eats yogurt. Every morning, she eats yogurt and complains because she hates yogurt. Finally one day you ask why she eats so much yogurt, every day, if she hates it, and she says because she has seen you eating yogurt and look how much weight you've lost. And you have to laugh. You eat yogurt because you like yogurt, you've always liked yogurt, and there are nonfat options that fit into your daily points. In fact, there is no space in your daily points for things you don't like to eat. You never realized before how many things you ate because they were there, things you didn't even like but you finished them right up.

The office girls try other things, too. There's a Special K diet. For two weeks, every cubicle but yours sports a large box of Special K with dried strawberries. There's a Hello Kitty water dispenser on another desk, and then there's an Atkins diet, thrice or four times removed (Atkins as explained by a cousin whose friend has a roommate who did the diet). But within weeks if not hours, they're back to McDonalds every day for lunch. You watch them fail and you say nothing. You don't even think anything, because you're fairly certain you'll fail, too.

As you lose, you lose daily points too, two at a time. At the end, you're down to twenty per day. Every milestone, there is a sticker or a keychain, and there are many milestones. When you speak up in the meeting, you get a silver star sticker. Every five pounds is a gold star sticker. When you lose the smaller number next to your big number, you get the biggest keychain. Then there are smaller things: a tiny pair of hands clapping with a 16 etched on for sixteen weeks on program, a star for meeting your goal weight, and a few weeks later, a key for becoming a lifetime member, after which you don't have to pay unless you gain more than two pounds over your goal.

The keychains are junk. They get scraped and broken and they fall off the cheap rings. You keep them, with your jewelry, because what you had to do was that difficult, that important. You don't tell anyone because you don't want them to know how important it was to you; that would make you shallow and vain.

More clothes shopping. You didn't know you'd wear size smalls, size mediums. You get your hair lightened. You wear lip gloss and you make sure your straps don't show. You paint your nails. The lotion on your legs has a gold shimmer, because you're showing them now. There is one discouraging trip to the mall: when your bra cups become way too big.

During the maintenance weeks you get to add two daily points if you lose weight, subtract two points if you gain. Then you finish, and you have to stand and make a speech and answer questions. You love it when the other people make lifetime, especially those who've lost a significant amount of weight, because they look fantastic but they're still scared, shy. Many wear baggy clothing. Their fat is still there, in their aura. What's great is, they look normal, all body types, slender now but none have transformed into sixteen-year old Cosmo models. These are mothers, grandmothers, fathers and brothers, secretaries and construction workers, people who had diabetes and heart disease and cholesterol counts through the roof, who now enjoy hiking with the retriever, afternoons at the park with their grandkids, the occasional footrace for some good cause, all things they never thought they'd accomplish. You want to take care of them. You want to take them shopping. And you want to know how they did it.

Everyone wants to know how. And throughout your tenure as a paying member of Weight Watchers, you've listened to dozens of lifetimers say the same thing: They followed the program, exercised, drank water. Everyone nods and the leader says something funny. But you're tired of that. Something's changed for you, something significant, and nobody outside of this meeting will understand it.

So you tell them you had a fight with your husband last week, and then you wrecked your brand-new car, and then there were problems at work. All true. This all happened by last Monday.

By Wednesday you'd eaten through weeks of points and every point made you feel better. But then you would stop feeling better and another point would make you feel better again. You ate your way through the pain and it worked just like it always had:

For awhile.

On Thursday you stop. You say to yourself in the clean work bathroom mirror, "This is not how I handle things anymore."

After work, you go to the store and pick up some trashy magazines. Anything with Britney on the cover will do. Also some Crest White Strips. You go home and read this trash, your teeth taking forever to whiten, upper first and then lower, because during this time you can't eat. After that you brush and floss and rinse so that the urge to eat goes away, and when it's dinnertime you eat with your husband and then you go to sleep.

You tell the people in the meeting all this. An older lady in the front row says, "White strips!" and you know you've made her very happy with this new idea. The leader says, "How many of us thought, when we got thin, that we'd never wreck our cars?" They laugh, you laugh, because deep down we all thought thin people lived charmed lives with no troubles, or at least that the answers would become clear when we hit that magic number.

You stop paying but you keep going to the meetings, even though you only have to go the first week of every month. You keep weighing in because you are still pretty sure you're going to fail. There was that time you put cheese on your salad. Okay, so you're putting cheese on your salad a lot now. Also, you don't count points so much anymore. You write the food down, not as maniacally as before. You can wing it awhile. You have the rhythm down. You know what it feels like to be hungry, you know when you're full, you know what foods are good for you and bad, you know which foods have to wait for the weekend, you know that the lower fat options often taste passable enough to enjoy. The pounds stay off, even fall off until you're a good seven pounds under your goal and you don't have to stress so much. You'll keep weighing in, and when you start gaining you'll write everything down again and rethink things.

The day they throw you out is sad. You feel rejected, even though it's your own fault. They don't throw you out, really; it just feels like it. They tell you to come back once you've given birth, that you'll get three free months to get back to normal then. The doctor tells you to gain a certain amount of weight; for you, it's the exact weight you lost.

You miss it. Every time you pass the Weight Watchers, you look in, sadly. But you will return. You will lose the weight, and you will become one of those ladies who have been thin so long, most of their acquaintances would be surprised to know that they attend these meetings. You did it once, and you will do it again.

Plus, you get ten extra points a day if you breastfeed.

posted by Samus @ 4:43 PM