September 27, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Can she lose weight with Weight Watchers? Fat chance
by JENNIFER NAGEL

I have been a weight watcher on and off for my entire life. And that’s not an exaggeration — I do mean my entire life. My childhood, which was largely spent with my grandmother and her seven sisters, featured special afternoons in which a group of the sisters (at least four) would come over, stand on the scale in the kitchen and weigh in.

They would write down their respective weights and then sit around the kitchen table drinking tea with Sweet ’n Low and eating sugar wafer cookies until the ‘soaps’ came on at 1 p.m. I learned a great deal from these women, including the incredible weight loss power of frozen grapes sprinkled with artificial sweeteners, the myriad toppings you can put on cottage cheese and exactly how much things weigh.

For example, if you get on the scale with wet hair, that adds at least 12 pounds. Most jewelry should be taken off; charm bracelets are especially heavy as are pearl earrings and delicate gold chains around the neck, which usually run, all told, about eight or nine pounds easy. You have to pee before you get on the scale, but if you drink anything between the bathroom and the scale, that’s at least 17 pounds, no problem.

There are also adjustments that must be made for various specialized female problems, irregularity or stress. Stress, I learned at about age four, can cause someone to carry an additional 50 pounds. The body apparently just holds onto that weight for dear life, and though it may seem that you put that weight on due to overindulgence in said sugar wafers or the blue plate breakfast after church every week for four years, it’s actually stress. Lots of people don’t know that.

So when I finally got out of college and looked in a full length mirror and looked at the size labels inside my clothing and noticed that the numbers had been getting bigger — slowly! — over the previous four years, I decided it was time to go back to my heritage and go to meetings and get on the scale and figure out what it was all about.

As it turns out, real Weight Watchers runs somewhat differently from the way my grandmother did it (read: the wrong way) and that weight loss isn’t usually made successful by “reward cookies” for not eating everything in sight the night before. And they taught me something magnificent there, or tried to teach me something they thought was magnificent, although my personal jury is still out on the efficacy of such a pronouncement. They said that not every social event needs to be centered around food and eating.

Uh, yeah, it does. They can’t really believe that; can they? Even these leaders who look fabulous and tell us every week how to reach your goal and how hard it might be, but look at them, they lost 80 pounds, and their ex-boyfriends from high school saw them at their reunions and didn’t even recognize them! They have to know that social events need to be centered around food and eating. They have to have already known that and figured that’s how they got to Weight Watchers and sat in the meeting in the first place.

So the bottom line is that I get a little miffed when this fabulous woman who I know for a fact used to be fat sits there and tells me to rise above the food. Well, I would, if I weren’t too heavy to rise above the food. “Don’t put the food on a pedestal.” Apparently, some of these leaders have never had the pleasure of Denny ‘s cheese fries at 2 a.m., or those butter cookies with jam that my cousin makes, or cream cheese crab dip, or Oreos by the box, or a bacon-avocado-cheddar burger with fries. Some things you just can’t rise above.

So now that I’ve learned the tools for living healthfully over my two year tenure at “real” Weight Watchers, I’ve created a splinter group with my good friend, and we weigh in on a scale at her condo and then sit down and talk about our goals for the next week and the problems we had the week before and what we need to change or keep doing well. It’s very rewarding.

And no one tells me not to celebrate food like it’s the center of my universe. Um, I can tell you unequivocally that it is the center of my universe. So to celebrate our successes with weight loss and exercise, my good friend (who really doesn’t need to be losing weight, but skinny girls always seem to have these magical invisible hidden pockets of fat all over their bodies) and I went to the Reading Terminal Market.

Sidenote: if there’s one place on earth you shouldn’t go if our goal is to stop making food the center of your universe, it’s the Reading Terminal Market. After four hours of walking around, salivating and rationalizing, we began buying up — and eating — everything in sight. Hoagies, cannolis, huge hunks of ridiculously fatty cheese, bread, cookies, vats of honey bigger than our heads. Who can say no to all of that? I try to imagine the person saying no in my head, and if she seems to be a normal, rational human being with most faculties intact, I try to curb my cravings and follow her example.

But the only person in my head I could imagine saying no and deciding not to make this social, girls-bonding event into an eating fest looked like she runs two marathons a day, has half a salad for lunch and complains about being “so stuffed” and is miserable in life because she denies herself a happiness everyone can understand — being ridiculously full and still seeking more food. Every time I turned around, I saw someone with food that I just had to have. I admit, I am guilty of coveting my neighbors’ almond macaroons. May God strike me down if that’s His will.

In short, the weigh-in this evening will be interesting, given the amount and rapidity with which we put that amount of food away. But in the meantime, I’m gong to have a cup of coffee (said to speed metabolism) with half a packet of Sweet ‘n Low and chomp some frozen grapes. I’ll be slim in no time.