I’m skipping my Weight Watcher meeting today even though I love going. Going to Weight Watcher is like going to AA: you can fall off the wagon and skip meetings for like six months and STILL when you go back they’re nice to you.
I stayed away for one long time over the holidays so I know. In the final days of that particular binge I got to where I was standing at the open fridge drinking heavy cream straight from the carton, POURING IT ON MY ICE CREAM even, which hey don’t knock it 'til you’ve tried it.
I’ve been on every kind of diet because when I was a child I was pudgy. My big sister loved it when our mother put me in this certain little homemade sweater. “The Pinch Sweater” she called it because she just couldn’t NOT take between her fingers the little kielbasas that were my baby arms and squ-e-e-e-eze. Later, she settled for telling me that if I REALLY wanted to be thin I should peel down a stick of butter every day and eat it like a banana.
Strange, right? But the actual weight-loss regimens I began following a short decade later weren’t much less strange. I did the Grapefruit Diet in high school which was punitive but what could I do? I was getting so I looked like the late Anna Nicole Smith at her chubbiest. Only not blonde of course. Only not, you know, pretty in any way.
Then in the college years they were serving us Yorkshire pudding and hot fudge sundaes every time you turned around so I really packed on the pounds and the next thing I knew it was real-world time and I began teaching high school and believe me you don’t want to be feeling vulnerable about your appearance with 200 teenagers a day studying you instead of their books which is what they do during class time. I remember the September day my fifth period class filed in for the first time. “She’s fa-a-a-t,” one girl mouthed to another, a look of glee on her face.
It was at that point that I joined Weight Watcher and went from 155 lbs to 130. Then seven years later I started having babies and soon my rear end looked like a big old sanitation truck lumbering down the street. This time I tried the Scarsdale Diet which on Day Three makes the inside of your head start buzzing. The pounds come off but they only stay off for like a week and a half after you stop. THEN, lucky for me, an au pair came to live with us, started going to Weight Watcher, dropped 60 big ones and looked so changed when she flew back to Austria at the end of her year with us that her very parents walked right past her at the airport. With her inspiration - and may we say her special Weight Watcher recipes - the fat fell off these little bones of mine and I went down to 118 and looked like Flat Stanley.
Life being what it is of course I inched up again during my 40s and so Zone-dieted. And so Suzanne Somered. And so I did everything but slap at my thighs with leather belts – oh but wait I DID that too back in the 70s at a salon-like weight-loss emporium called Gloria Stevens which was ALL ABOUT leather belts and jiggling machines.
But finally finally FINALLY a year ago I went back to Weight Watcher where they're so sensible they TURN YOU AWAY if they think you don’t need them, which is why I stuffed little two- and three-pound weights into my pants the first time I went there, the idea being I could start high enough for ‘admission’ and then kinda progress no matter what heh heh, take a weight out here this week, take a weight out there next week and get praised at the weigh-in!
And sure it made me walk a little funny but I had to do it since you might look at me and SAY I’m not overweight. Maybe you Weight Watcher police really might NOT have let me join but hey, I’ll say hey, I’ll say hey again: you guys don’t see my in my underpants.
