Mid-way through writing this it occurred to me that I have multiple friends who are in OA and for whom this might be triggering. This is a lot of talk about food, weight, and body image. Feel free to skip this if you might have issues with those topics. 🙂 You don’t even have to be in OA to not want to read about my weight issues. 🙂
So I’ve been doing WW for a few months again. I’m finding that I have a strong reaction to it this time that I didn’t have the last time I did it–namely that I keep getting angry. One of the leaders (I bounce around meetings due to Shanna’s inconsistent nap schedule) told a story a few weeks ago about how she went to visit her sister and obviously her sister was trying to sabotage her (the leader’s) weight loss because she had bowls of M&M’s and candied nuts sitting out; and obviously the sister is doing this because she is jealous because she is still fat. !!! Dude. Maybe she likes fucking M&M’s and candied nuts.
I don’t know if the meetings were like this when I went years ago (Do you remember, Tom?) but I am rather offended and pissy about this attitude.
Also: I’m doing the three steps forward two steps back thing with my weight loss this time. I keep messing with how many points I’m eating because I lose too much in one week then I gain in the next even if I don’t change my points much–it’s kind of weird. If you look at the average I’m losing something like .8 lbs/week. This is a great average. It’s just kind of weird because I stay the same or gain for a couple weeks in a row then I drop down four pounds in a week. Erf. But I accept that my body is being weird right now and seeing as my average is pretty much where I want it to be I figure I’m not doing my body much harm. This doesn’t seem like a big deal to me; what is a big deal is that when I stay the same the receptionist says, “Awww… that’s too bad” and when I gain the receptionist shakes her head and tsks at me. Fuck you, lady. I have explained a number of times that I don’t have a problem with those weeks, but the attitude persists.
In the meetings there is a lot of talk about how if you “mess up” and go over points one day don’t hate yourself too much! Everyone screws up sometimes! Uhm. I didn’t mess up. I didn’t screw up. I had fucking good fondue thankyouverymuch. The little games around how to minimize points makes sense to me–it’s a control game and I get wanting control over random shit in life. What I don’t get is acting like you are a terrible person if you enjoy high fat/calorie food. I am not a failure if I eat something off plan once in a while. Hell, I am feeling kind of nasty about following a food plan. I’m not an addict if I eat cinnamon rolls a couple of times during December. I don’t have compulsions around food and emotions. Well, except for the fact that some foods have strong memory connections and I eat them once in a while to enjoy the reminder–this isn’t unhealthy!
I also dislike this attitude that “my life will be better once I am a size ‘x'” because it is complete horse pucky. You know what? I got down to a size 8. I have never been more fucking miserable in my life. I hated myself and everything around me. I went back to cutting. I tend to be fattest when I am happiest. Why is this such a terrible thing? Alright, there are some issues with me being heavier. But those issues are: my back hurts more and my knees hurt more. I do not magically become a worse person as the number on the scale increases. I don’t loathe my body. I loathe that the fashion industry is controlled by people who eroticize teenage boys, but that’s a completely different thing. I hate that in my average chunky size I seem to be too big for Misses 14 but still too small for Womens 14. That’s bloody annoying! That isn’t me hating my body though. That’s me being annoyed that clothing doesn’t fit me. I want to be somewhat smaller because a)I want my back and knees to not hurt, b)I want to have an easier time finding clothes, and c)because I have an easier time rolling around on the floor energetically when I have a bit less stomach fat. I don’t hate my body. I am not disgusting. I don’t appreciate people telling me I should feel that way.
WW has some incredibly effective tools for helping me lose weight. I appreciate that. But I think that my “goal weight” is probably somewhere around 170 at this point because I don’t think it is a great plan to be sling-shotting up and down during this breeding period but I also don’t want to have to do as much gestational diabetes testing during the next pregnancy so I need to be a bit smaller than I was at the beginning of the last pregnancy. WW believes that I can’t have a goal above 150 pounds. Yeah… we just aren’t going to see eye to eye on this.
So I’m going to cancel the membership but keep following the plan on my own. Yes I know that it is less effective that way. My goal is pretty humble. I don’t need to be super good at losing weight to achieve it. Maybe (maybe–I doubt it) someday in the post-breeding period I will worry about getting back into size 10 pants. For now, who fucking cares. 😛
Have you looked into doing it only online? I think you can do that….
And I totally get what you’re saying…. They wanted me to be like 140/150 too… and I haven’t been that since elementary school….. I too want to loose weight for health-ish reasons (knees for me too).
Massive hugs and happy new year….
I have the paper materials and I do well with hard copy. 🙂
Let me know
Husband did it himself. It wasn’t brain surgery. IMO WW is a racket for most folks. Some people need the hive mind. I know you don’t.
If you are interested: http://www.dailyplate.com
I wish I could tell you how I managed to take weight off these last few months. I don’t honestly know. Especially since I was house bound with a lot of sugar and high fat food. The only thing that has really changed is my son is not nursing regularly. My body seems wired to carry extra reserves when I am a food source.
Re: Let me know
I tried daily plate before and for some reason I just really didn’t like the interface. I do well with the WW format and i bought a three month planner and the books so that is really all I need.
It’s very common to lose weight at the end of breastfeeding. I spend a lot of time hanging out at http://www.mothering.com and I find out lots of stuff about the whole having kids process. 🙂
Re: Let me know
First time I did it was useful cause I learned stuff. Mostly I find its useful when the women share products they’ve found that are tasty yet low cal/low fat, or the which sushi places will do it with brown rice (zero points).
Other than that, the BEST thing for my diet is competition. When dad and I did it together we both lost around 40 lb over 6 months. Unfortunatly WW won’t let you keep running public amounts.
Other than that some, if not most of the class leaders are useless
I made it to exactly one WW meeting for a lot of the same reasons. We had WW at Work, and my co-worker went religiously and asked me if I’d go with him one lunch period for moral support. I left wanting to punch someone, so decided that it wasn’t for me. It seemed like everyone was really being two-faced nasty underneath the “Hooray” treacle sweet exterior – you could practically see the sharpened claws flexing. They WERE genuinely nice to my co-worker, probably because not only was he one of the sweetest guys in the world but also because he was a guy. They seemed to reserve their sharpest honeyed comments for other women.
There is actually a lot of bitterness towards men because they lose weight more easily. But the whole process is wrapped in some pretty powerful misogyny so you are right that it is worse for women.
Ew!
Some of my co-workers (different groups over the last several yeas, different groups at different work sites) go to WW. The only thing they can find to talk about at lunch time is how many calories and points everything is, how much they’ve lost & gained, how agonizing it is to make/buy/see desserts for everyone and not have any (or sneak some), and how ‘bad’ they’ve been. Nothing. Else. At least two of them have to be BMI’s ideal or smaller, and yet they persist.
Apparently, WW is all about determining the number of points everything is, then figuring out how to cheat to get as many points as possible while still losing, and about how to put yourself in temptation’s way as much as possible and then have a group to whine to when you succumb to that temptation. Their kink is (kinda) okay, it’s just not my kink.
I’m glad you’ve taken the parts of the program that work for you and left the rest behind.
It really is about gaming the system, which I have mixed feelings about. It’s interesting this time because with the extra points I get for nursing I get to have dessert. Granted, the program thinks I should be using those points differently–oh well. 🙂
Ahhhh, the Lifetime Members. They are pretty scary. They seem to believe that if they step out of the program they will instantly balloon out to 300 lbs. Granted, many of those skinny folk were once 300 lbs. It’s a really interesting obsession.
Noah is already sick of dealing with points. Hell, I’m sick of points.
That’s what drove me away from WW. When I first started, I had this great fag as a leader, who pretty much ignored the WW lessons and ran the meetings as brainstorming sessions, where one person would talk about a challenge they’d been facing and others would contribute ideas that had worked for them. it was low-key and collegial and nice, and I lost a lot of weight and enjoyed the process. (I’m told he’s still working the meetings at MCC in San Francisco — I’ve actually considered commuting in for them.)
The leaders here in Oakland are mostly perky older women who teach by-the-book WW lessons, which seem to me to be targeted to women whose values are very conventional. The most useful moment I got out of the whole thing came from one comment by a butch dyke, who mentioned that she actually preferred the feeling of being big but her bones and joints didn’t; she and I talked privately for a while, and that little conversation was more helpful than months of WW meetings.
I actually toyed with the idea of starting a support group for queers who wanted to lose weight, but never followed through with it.
Some tips if you decide to go back: If you get a note from a doctor saying that your goal weight is more than 150, then they’ll obey that. And my weight loss pattern has *always* been three weeks of plateau and then a week of big loss — it’s not rare, and if they’re making you feel like it is, call them on it. (I used to say while getting on the scale, “I don’t expect to lose this week — I’ve been following the plan, but I only lose weight every fourth week,” which shut them up pretty well.)
You know,there is a big difference between someone who likes food (people who don’t baffle me, actually!) and someone whose life becomes a mess when eating those foods. For me, I became obsessed…thinking about food all the time. What I was going to eat. When I was going to eat. How much, etc. I lied to people about my binges. When taking in sugar, I became irritable and felt strung out. I could never eat just one (or two) cookies. I would tell myself that I would never eat to the point of being physically ill ever again, only to do it all over the next day. I was like an alcoholic who takes that first drink. Not everyone is like me who wants to lose some weight. And I have also learned, that part of my obsession has been about what I weigh, what size clothes I am wearing, believing that I would be happy if I were thin. It has become painfully obvious that there is no correlation between the two. My life did not become miraculously “perfect” once I got down to a certain weight.
I so respect your strength and conviction and your ability to be your own advocate, not taking in stuff that does not belong to you and is an example of absurd our culture can be when it comes to healthy women who just want to lose a little weight. And it makes me happy to know that your daughter has a mother who has a positive relationship with her body and food…the odds are much more in her favor that she will not become someone like me and wow, how amazing is that to be a young woman who loves herself, not based on some number on a scale, but for who she is as a person? You just rock!