All the Horrible Girliness

Two very conflicting but awesome things have happened in my life in the past month or so. First, I'm back at Weight Watchers with some regularity. Second, I've made new friends.

Weight Watchers, I've decided, is only great at my particular branch, and only with my particular leader, Connie. Connie is hilarious. At her meetings it is standing room only. I would write some of her jokes here, but they would lose their punch. I'll just say this: she's wry, she plays it straight, just a tad self-deprecating - okay, not just a tad. When she talks about hiding the food in the couch cushions because she heard someone coming, everyone in the room laughs but also nods sadly at themselves. Getting the ugliness out into the open is the only way to deal with it, and the best way to let the ugly out of the closet is to laugh about it. That's what Connie does for me.

I'd like to hover around seven pounds under my goal. This is the weight that gets me into the jeans that cost $270. There were whole years, when I was bigger, that I didn't buy clothes. The experience was too harrowing, and I hated myself. My mom buys clothes maybe every ten years. She has shirts with holes in them that I remember borrowing when I was about thirteen, during those two minutes when it was fashionable at my school to wear big shirts and tight jeans. For those of you who don't know how old I am, that was eighty-four years ago. Whenever I see my Ma wearing those shirts today, I give her shit without thinking. I forget how it feels.

Connie goes into this: how fun it is to lose weight, how people come up to you and exclaim, and how new and exciting the program is. Then comes Lifetime, and it's just... you. Nobody cares anymore. People who meet you for the first time don't know what you used to look like, and you feel a strange urge to tell them. It's also not appropriate anymore to explain about the program when you order egg whites and dressing on the side and no sour cream, please. Instead, you have to lie and say you just prefer your meal that way. Like the "Thins," as Connie calls them.

"Watch the Thins," she says. "It's very interesting, and frustrating. They often talk between bites. And they chew before swallowing."

Whenever I come into the meeting despairing because I haven't hit the weight I really want, which is about six pounds away now, Connie tells me, "It's free. That's all that's important: free." She's referring to the fact that Lifetimers don't have to pay until they're two pounds over goal. In the meeting last Saturday, she called me "Our little Lifetimer" and asked, "How much did you pay today?" I replied, "Nothing. I'm free. I'm free!" It was very Shawshank Redemption.

***

My new friends are conflicting because where I have learned to curb my food intake and get into the $270 jeans, which is what I thought I was supposed to be doing my whole life, Celeste and Jason are decadent and fun, kind and forgiving and accepting. They're not new friends; I've known them a few years now, but I've just started really getting to know Celeste because she joined my gym. She "kicks the box" with us about three times a week. She's strong and awesome, and tries very hard, unlike most of the girls in the class, who drop their hands in despair and huff these enormous sighs until the instructor pays attention to them. Then we go to the showers and giggle to one another so loudly that Mister Aran can hear us from the men's locker room.

Celeste is big and gorgeous and sexy, so full of life and so happy that I am ashamed of my attitude. She seems so happy to love and be loved, to eat great food and drink great wine. Also, when I first lost the weight, I heard that Jason asked Mister Aran, "Your wife used to have an ass, didn't she?"

I suppose what I'm getting at is, I thought I was doing what it took to belong with the Thins, like maybe there was a magic keycard that would let me into the club, like that Family Guy episode where Peter surgically gets good looking and is escorted to the front of every line, and allowed into the shimmering, golden palace where the beautiful people hang out and laugh the way thin people do. It didn't happen - the thin girls in the locker room still just look at me funny when I compliment their $270 jeans. Meanwhile, Celeste is always ready for the kind of hug where I get lifted off the ground and launched into joy.

posted by Samus @ 6:49 AM