WeightWatchers

Weightwatchers is the best of times and the worst of times. It's the best because I honestly do lose weight when I do it. How could you not? The simple act of paying attention to what you're eating is enough to get you pointed in the right direction. That's pretty much its plus point (see what I did there, fellow WW subscribers?).

The downside to WW...well, jeez, where do I begin? How about finding out that everything you thought you knew about eating just doesn't matter when you start the plan? This is my second time doing it and I was still shocked when I started. I got up in the morning and prepared to pour my standard bowl of cereal and milk. We're not talking Reese's Puffs and whole milk, people. We're talking Kash GoLean and unsweetened soy milk. A nice healthy, well-rounded way to start my day I thought. Nuh-uh, not according to WW. They generously allotted me 27 points per day to start, and that bowl of cereal and soy milk? A solid 7 points. 7 out of 27. And that's only if I actually follow the serving sizes listed on the products. Do you know what a serving of cereal is? 3/4 of a cup. Have you ever poured exactly 3/4 cup of cereal into a bowl? It looks pathetic. Like, surely there's more, right? Nope.

I can't decide if this is an issue with the serving sizes reported by manufacturers or if we simply make our bowls too big, but this is the way of the world when you join WW. You start to realize that you can no longer eat the portions you used to eat, even if you didn't think you were overeating. It will break your spirit when you learn that a serving of pasta is actually only 2 oz and you see what 2 oz of dried pasta looks like in your hand—and that it will cost you 5 points. That's before you add olive oil, or pesto or red sauce or whatever you like on your pasta. You pretty much decide right then and there that it's not worth eating pasta any more because how depressing is that?

And hunger. If you try to eat the things you ate before but simply adhere to the serving sizes listed, you will never feel sated again. When I ate what was, for me, a normal serving of cereal in the morning I was usually hungry by mid-morning. What was going to happen when I ate even less than that? It's an impossible strategy, until you learn what WW is actually trying to do.

See, they fool you a little. Their literature and ads spend a fair amount of time reassuring you that you don't have to give up on the things you love. Yes, you can still eat cake or pie or a hotdog or whatever! The word "diet" brings thoughts of deprivation and denial. Deny yourself the things you like to eat. Everyone knows this eventually backfires and can often lead to bouts of binge-eating. But WW says, "Hey, no, we're not asking you to do that. That's silly. We just want you to think about what you eat, plan it a little. That's all. No big."

The things is, you absolutely can continue to eat pasta and pizza and cake or whatever, if that's your thing. Just know that if you eat a piece of cake, it'd better be the tiniest sliver known to man or you'd better plan to not eat anything else for the rest of the day. Go ahead, have a bowl of pasta. Same rules though. You have 27 points. You can spend it on whatever you want, but that's all you get so choose wisely. To be fair, they do also give you these extra weekly points that you can use, so technically you could go over your daily allotment, but I get the feeling that doing that a lot doesn't yield the same kind of results.

You eventually get the hang of it. You realize, okay, I want some pasta. It's 5 points. 2 oz of pasta is not going to fill me up. So, I'd better make it count. I don't want to be hungry in an hour after using 5 points (and then some unless you eat just plain pasta). So you layer your pasta with a shit ton of vegetables. Lots and lots of vegetables. Conveniently, most vegetables and fruits cost no points. You can literally eat a lb of grapes and WW will say, "Cool. Good for you." You learn to pile these foods on to actually get full, and you learn to live off of these if you plan to splurge and have that piece of cake.

This is a nice, clever way to get vegetable-adverse people to eat more of them. I get it. But a person like me, whose meals largely consisted of vegetables and tofu and brown rice and other shit that I thought was healthy? It's just frustrating. I'm not trying to eat cake. I'm not trying to eat fried chicken. I just want a bowl of fucking cereal and some fucking soy milk. Now I either have to accept that I'm going to never feel satisfied by breakfast again, start piling a bunch of berries on my cereal (whether I want to or not) and hope they help fill me up, or change my breakfast eating all together and decide I can only have cereal and milk as a treat to myself every now and then. That...that just pisses me off. Who uses milk and cereal as a treat?!

You know what started this rant? My company provided sushi for lunch for us today as a reward for good financial performance. I had four pieces of sushi—not fried, no tempura, just stuff like spicy tuna and squid nigiri and a california roll—and some edamame, and it cost me 20 points. 20 points for lunch. A small lunch even. I'm hungry again already. To add insult to injury, because I lost weight WW decreased my daily point allotment. I went from 27 points to 26. It's one point, but if you do the program you'll realize how precious one point is. I'm hungry and I have 6 points to use for the rest of the day. Dinner should be creative. Maybe I'll dive into some of those extra points.

But hey, I'm losing weight, right? And that's why no matter how much it sucks I will continue to do it. The reality of WW though? Shitty, shitty reality. I'm gonna go gnaw on some cardboard now.