Fuck Off, Weight Watchers

So, I'm gonna assume that if you are the kinda person who reads what I write that you also watch Mad Men. Right? So you know that there were a few scenes on last night's episode, "Dark Shadows," that were set at a Weight Watchers meeting.

Just so it will be clear how I feel about this, I'd like to start with a little letter to Weight Watchers, since we know I often write letters to things that can't read, like tacos.

Dear Weight Watchers,

Firstly, fuck off. Also, no thank you to the helpful emails you send me (I know I can unsubscribe; I'm lazy like that.) and to the postcards that say how much you miss me. I can't come to a fucking meeting right now, because I'm eating olives, dammit. And planning recipes with avocado, bitches.

With bitterness that's only somewhat misplaced,

Miss Lady

P.S. What makes you so damn sure I still need to lose weight, hmm? I feel highly suspect of your business model that thrives off the great American failure to lose weight.

So...I knew there would be a WW rant on this blog, maybe many, but I wasn't quite ready to tackle the subject yet. Since I wrote about Fat Betty though, I feel like this Mad Men episode forced my hand...like when Biden made Obama publicly admit how he has probably felt about marriage rights all along!

I'll start by admitting that there are a few positives to WW, and that I have lost weight following their program at various points in my life, albeit temporary, and sometimes unhealthy. See how good I am at being positive?

Pros
1) Accountability-- There's nothing like having strangers look at your weight to make you think about what you eat. I love making food choices because I'm worried about shame! Shit, I suck at being positive. I suppose there were times when I felt accountable to only myself on the scale. Course, once I felt like that, I also didn't want to hear what the ladies had to say about my weight either way. Again, fuck off.

2) Support-- You can find a sense of community and share various tips with people at the meeting. Before I bitch about the volume of absolute nonsense that gets said at these meetings, I will say that some of the leaders did provide guidance in negotiating the low-fat, cheating your way to thin version of dieting that is prominent up at the WW. "If you put yellow glue substance on your sammich it's just like cheese. And with a side of diarrhea chips, you'll have tricked yourself into thin in no time!" No really, there was some good advice. I'm just not capable of saying anything nice.

3) Helping people who ain't got no sense-- One of my friends told me that her husband once tried to help her eat healthy by giving her a Hostess fruit pie...you know, a fried pie, presumably because the fruit was healthy. I also know that many people have lost perspective on what's healthy, thanks to our fast and fatty national cuisine. Case in point: I went on a date, with a man y'all may know as "Spite Fuck" to the East Side Kings (where I like to conduct all my life's affairs actually) and after we consumed our 3 fried items (albeit delicious, real, and whole fried items) SF said, "Wow. I haven't eaten that healthy in years!" My point is that there a whole lot of ways of eating worse than Weight Watchers, so for some people it really is a drastic improvement.

Cons-- Hell yes! I love cons.

*Full disclosure: Since I have sworn off the WW, I don't have much experience with their PointsPlus plan. My understanding from...discussing it with my mother, is that even though there is some focus on whole foods (aka Power Foods) the core of it, is really still the same. Other than that, I've had intimate knowledge of ALL of their plans since about...well...1980..81, somewhere in there. One of my earlier (but not the earliest) lessons in the shame of being out of control of your eating occurred when I accompanied my mom to a WW weigh-in at a creepy old church. I have a lot of nice childhood memories with Mom, but this isn't one of them. I remember leaving quickly, and I remember her being mad and disappointed. And I have 15+ years of personal weigh-in memories that mirror that memory, and the Betty scenes...which is why I wanted to climb of up my friend's living room wall during them. A room full of people basing their self-worth on their weight that week...yep.

On to the cons...

1) A lot has been written about the folly of the low fat craze that advocated choosing pasta over protein, so I won't go into it too much. If you want to read more about it, I'd start with In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. But I will say how very detrimental this was to me. Probably for reasons having to do with genetics, I was only ever meant to process simple or complex carbohydrates so well, but following the Wisdom of the 90s and WW (which was of course based on the Wisdom), actually made me sick, and maybe broke my metabolism forever. I kicked ass at eating low-fat, which meant that when I loaded my body with carbs there was nothing to offset the sugar rush-- no emulsifying fat, no protein replacing part of the carbs-- just sugar. Which meant an insulin dump, excess insulin -- which I believe helps you make FAT, and a subsequent loooowwwwwwww. At which point I turned into the incredible hulk version of Miss Lady and/or cried because I couldn't decide what to eat. I eventually fixed this symptom with whole food and protein, but I'm still resistant to my own insulin after years of that. This, people is one of the ways that people become diabetic.

So...do I blame WW for that? Not entirely, as we were all guided by the Wisdom of the 90s...but WW does promote and, in fact, still advocate a one-size-fits-all nutrition plan, and that seems stupid as hell, given that some of their advice has been so detrimental that it could steer some metabolic types toward, instead of away from, the betes. Course, you can layer your own guidelines on top of WW, but after I did that enough, I wondered why the hell I was giving them money every week.

2) Which brings me to the next point of my rant-- undercalorie dieting. There's some shit I'm not doing again. Regardless of  how suitable or not suitable WW is for how you metabolize food, you will lose at least some weight if you follow their plan, because it just isn't that much food. However, you might also be hungry...really really fucking hungry. You might also feed off your own glorious muscle...and be congratulated for your big weight loss as a result. You might hit a million really sticky plateaus. You might give yourself adrenal exhaustion. And you might...um...fall off the plan again and again because you are hungry and then spend ages 14-31 or so joining and quitting over and over and have a harder and harder time losing weight each time and write a really long rant about Weight Watchers even though some of this is surely your responsibility. Just hypothetically.

3) Here's my biggest problem, and one that it took me quite a while to spot. WW, with a little bit of help from other sources, cultivated the idea that I was a sick, broken eater. Somewhere along the way...sometime after the time of "exchanges"...WW seriously ramped up the marketing of their WW products. Between this, and the advice being dispensed and shared at meetings, the idea that overweight people needed a lot of shit to manage the task of feeding themselves lodged into my mind, the minds of my family members, and seemingly a lot of other people. At their meetings WW sells and often promotes, "low point" candies, cookies, and chip like things to get your through your day. There was an awful lot of talk about "needing" these items to get from meal to meal or in order to avoid cake at parties and such. Now that I understand a bit more about what causes cravings-- for me, but also for other, I know that the most insidious part though is not what we said about the food, but what the food does. All of it, of course, is highly processed, even more so than regular junk food. What response does a body have to being flooded with the chemicals of  a low- fat ice cream sandwich? It wants more chemicals. Pretty sure a lot of junk food works this way, but when this happens to people who are not eating enough calories and probably not getting enough fat..and so they are often craving both of those too...and you tell them that for just.one.more.point they can have some more faux chocolate...

Here's what happens: 2..3...4 Skinny Cows in a day! If you've ever done this...or if you've ever cut down your REAL MEALS to budget for more diet junk food...I understand. Even though I once had the very reasonable attitude that desserts were for here and there, special occasions etc...when I first arrived at Weight Watchers at 118lbs (yep...be advised that I'd kill any one of you if I thought it would make me weigh that little now...actually I'd want more muscle than that...but its neither here nor there since killing doesn't make you thin) within a decade I was sure I couldn't get through the day without a faux dessert...or two. I know that the very last time I took a stab at WW, I decided to try to get through the week with just one 4 pack of desserts, and it was BETTER. Now I don't eat that shit at all, and I can't say I miss it. Turns out, I don't need it-- so yeah, WW you can fuck off again.

I haven't even touched on the fact that its easier to calculate points with packaged crap and the dependence that creates, but I think the implications can be inferred.

4) Other non-sense enabling ideas-- The one above fits into this category, but there were so many more. One that stands out, is the shitty attitude toward exercise. This can vary from leader to leader, and physical activity is certainly encouraged...but there was always this undercurrent of..."we know you defective fat people don't want to exercise, but you have to!" Fuck off again and again, Weight Watchers. I'm an athlete, bitches, and I love working out. I'm looking at 1..2..3...6 fucking race medals hanging on my door right now. And not for no pussy 10Ks either cause they don't give you medals for that. The fact that they be disrespecting me aside, this has other implications. First, because they rely on the scale, or because they don't really expect you to workout...a muscle gain will be read as a failure up at the Weight Watchers. A serious fucking flaw, that you have to have rock solid confidence to overcome. Imagine...you've been deadlifting fucking tractor trailers or hippopotomi all week and some flabby arm quasi-healthy geezer lady tilts her head to the side and says "aww" while you are standing on the scale in you damn socks (taboo at WW btw) and your cotton weigh-in outfit (story for another day)! Clearly, I'm still a little upset up this.

More important though, is that in their efforts to promote exercise amongst the feeble fat non-exercisers, I've seen WW enable people to not fucking get a workout. Favorite story like this: I was at a WW meeting here in Austin (which for some reason suck even more than in other cities) with my friend Jackie-- not the one you know, I have LOTS of friends named that. We were gonna like get thin for real or something. Anyhoo, this leader lady starts talking about how to get more activity/activity points in your life and asking for ideas from the group. I want to suggest marathoning or climbing Mt. Everest, but I keep my mouth shut and listen, cause I do know that's not for everyone. People name some reasonable stuff, like go for a walk. Then we talk about gardening, which is definitely harder work than I'm interested in at the moment...but isn't really a consistent workout for most...but I see what they mean. Soon we move on to talking about how making two trips from the car with your groceries is a really good way to get more exercise. Really? Is your car in Oklahoma? At this point, Jackie and I start to exchange looks, cause its kinda funny. But when the leader starts to champion this line of thinking and come up with other helpful workouts, like walking down to your mailbox instead of pulling the car up to it, or putting the remote over there...we start looking for the candid camera hidden somewhere. It was like an SNL skit, except, alas, no.

So basically, she just talked everyone out of exercising for real. It was not appropriate advice for anyone except the morbidly obese or limited mobility elderly. And maybe not even then. NOT my first time to hear that shit either. I believe Jackie and I ran out, debriefed, and promptly ended that round of WW.


So...um this has been a lot of cussing, even for me. Clearly, I have a few pent up feelings about WW and probably dieting in general. I feel like I should cut some of this, because of its volume, but I'll leave it, in case any one part of this is helpful to someone else or touches on their WW and/or dieting experience. Sometimes its nice to know you aren't alone in Skinny Cow addiction or whatever. And I certainly don't mean to ruin or dampen anybody's WW experience. I'm sure it has merit for some. Just for fucks sake, take it all with a grain of salt. (0 pts!)

I end with this: I clearly do not have it all figured out, as I haven't managed to achieve a lean body mass yet. However, since I told WW to fuck off, I'm not hungry, ever. My relationship with food has improved drastically-- in my brain and my body chemistry. I don't have many cravings (outside of ESKings) and I control portions naturally on a regular basis. I'm happy, though you can't tell it from the volume of times I used the f-u-c-k word here. It really is fucking awesome when you tell Weight Watchers to fuck off.