Etiquette

I’m sure I don’t need to really spell this out, but just in case, here it goes.

If you ever find yourself working at Weight Watchers – as one of the people who checks the weight of others, say – and the weight watcher in question has come in for her monthly weigh-in, and she knows her weight is up from last month (she already knows it!), and she says to you, “How bad is it?”, you can just quietly lean over and tell her her weight. You don’t need to say to her, “Here, I’ll just give you the print-out and you can see for yourself…will you be able to see it without your reading glasses?”

Because when you say something like that to a woman of a certain age – especially when that woman’s birthday is upon her and she will be A Certain Age And Then Some, it hits her in the same way as asking a woman who is a little thick around the middle whether she is pregnant. And I think we all have come far enough in life by now (and by “all” I mean even my 11-year-old son) to know that that is a sentence that should never, ever be uttered unless the thick-middled woman has her sonogram print-out pinned to her lapel.

If you misstep, and you do make a gauche reference to reading glasses, you just need to be prepared for the possible reaction. The Woman of A Certain Age may not actually follow through on this, but what she wants, at the conclusion of your sentence…she wants to reach across the desk and punch you in your fucking face.

Ok, so now you know.

I'm A Word Nerd

I went to the pharmacy today and on the counter was a little display container for Snickers bars. I love Snickers. Not as much as M&Ms, which I had a passionate conversation with Nancy about yesterday (during which she defended both the advent of Blue M&Ms and Pretzel M&Ms, two positions which I warned her might jeopardize our friendship). But if I were going to blow an entire day’s worth of Weight Watchers points on candy, and M&Ms were unavailable, Snickers would be my second choice.

Why? I would have to say it’s unequivocally the nougat.

I’m not certain what nougat is beyond sheer caramelly goodness, but it sure does resonate with my tastebuds and is well worth the immediate after-effect of having my teeth feel like they’re covered in fur. So I did give that counter display more than just a furtive glance. I knew I wasn’t going to buy a Snickers bar, but I just wanted to rest my eyes upon the logo-type and have a small, private moment fantasizing about its chocolatey chewiness.

NOUGATOCITY. That’s what the logotype read. Huh? Am I hallucinating?

Nope. Some genius coined this word and talked the appropriate Mars Brand Manager to print it on the backside of the candy bar.

I love that.

I love when big package-goods companies have fun with language. Like the time I was waiting for my son to come out of Lacrosse practice and out of sheer boredom I started reading the package copy on the bottle of Kiwi-Strawberry Vitamin Water that was sitting beside me in the cup-holder. It was a whole paragraph about a study that had been done which demonstrated that people didn’t need the letters of a word in the right order to be able to read it. Just the first and last letters of the word had to be correct. Everything in between can be willy-nilly, and to prove it, they wrote this assertion in just that manner.

If I wasn’t a die-hard Vitamin Water fan before, I became one then.

It doesn’t take more than a little effort (and a lot of courage) to add some whimsy to your product packaging. That Snickers bar logo made me smile for half an hour. But, that’s me. Word nerd.

Here's Why I Don't Drink Coffee

I first gave up coffee sometime around 1991 when a chiropractor I was seeing told me that my inexplicable back pain was likely being aggravated by caffeine. (He also told me that childless women my age – 31 at the time – were prone to all sorts of muscular complications, since our bodies were built to reproduce and by not having babies we were bucking our musculoskeletal systems. Pregnancy seemed a rash strategy to combat back pain, so I started my rehabilitation with caffeine removal.)

In 1991 I drank several cups of coffee a day. It was my breakfast, lunch and afternoon snack. Often I didn’t eat solid food at all until after 2PM. My coffee needed to be prepared just so, with real sugar and a generous amount of half-and-half. Enough half-and-half to turn the black coffee a lovely camelhair beige. I would only drink it out of a white mug, in order to make sure it was exactly the right hue. Those cups of coffee, taken in alongside cigarettes, were about as close to heaven on earth as I ever hoped to come.

Quitting coffee was a grim endeavor. It took me months before I could stay awake beyond three in the afternoon. My body was not used to relying on its own energy source and the caffeine withdrawal was long and arduous. But then, after those first few months, I found my own life energy and lived a productive and perhaps less agitated life.

Living caffeine free (no coffee, no chocolate, no coke) left me feeling healthy and virtuous, although my back pain didn’t go away. But I ultimately decided to stay off coffee because, mostly, I felt better.

When I started Weight Watchers two years ago, I quickly discovered that my daily cup of decaf was an enormous four-point indulgence. That’s how many points I had to give myself if my decaf was to turn the appropriate shade of beige. So I gave it up completely, opting for solid, chewable points instead.

Then I discovered fat-free half-and-half. No points. A teaspoon of sugar is only one point. So some days – on special occasions – I might treat myself to a cup of decaf just for fun.

That was the case last night around 9PM, after grocery shopping, a few points to spare for the day, I decided to sit down at my desk with a nice cup of decaf and organize my papers. I’d made a bit of decaf earlier in the week, so the coffee maker was already out. I pulled the Chock Full O Nuts out of the fridge and prepared to scoop. Hmmm. Where’s the little red measuring spoon that’s always in here, I wondered as I pulled back the can’s yellow plastic lid. That’s really odd, I said out loud as I looked in the drawer for another measuring spoon. Oh, well. Whatever. I scooped, brewed, sugared and drank. Yum.

At 11:30 PM I was meticulously uploading vacation photos to Facebook. Tagging. Captioning. How odd that I was so tired at 10 oclock last night. I could go on like this for hours.

I finally went to bed at midnight (late for me) and was up two hours later raring to go. I had a lot of thoughts swimming in my mind and considered that if I wrote them down maybe I could settle back to sleep. No. Still up at 3. Still up at 3:45. My husband used to call this phenomenon “missing the sleep train.” The way you sometimes can’t fall back asleep and have to just lay in bed, like you’re waiting at a train station, an hour, an hour and a half, and when the train shows up, then and only then are you able to again drift off.

But this felt different than missing the sleep train. This felt like there was never going to be another train at this station again. Like they discontinued the line completely and soon the station will be full of graffiti and soon after that it will collapse in decay. And that’s when it occurred to me that perhaps what I drank at 9PM was not decaf after all.

A quick 4 AM trip to the kitchen confirmed my suspicion. My little lost red coffee scoop was nestled right where it always is: in the green-lidded Chock Full O Nuts. The one way at the back of the fridge.

By 6AM I was back on the sleep train. Just in time to wake up at 7 to take my son to Cross Country practice.

How I Sometimes Cope

One of the major focal points of Weight Watchers is to develop strategies to get you through tough situations. It mostly just requires anticipating events where you might falter and planning for them in advance. Having a few tricks up your sleeve. It doesn’t take many tricks to get through a banquet or a barbecue. Drink seltzer instead of wine. Fill your plate mostly with vegetables. And, the handiest advice: stop focusing on the food.

These tactics have taken me through two years worth of book groups, holiday parties and Girl’s Nights Out. And now I’m using the same general principal for coping with the teenager’s absence.

Moments after the teenager departed, my husband rightly pointed out that if we kept his bedroom door closed, it would seem as if he were home. I tried it, and it worked. I look at that big white door shut tightly in its jamb and it’s as if I can hear my son behind it, headphones on, glued to Facebook, while his gym socks ferment all over the floor.

I’ve even expanded on my husband’s idea. When I feel lonely for the teenager – wistful – I simply take out the jar of peanut butter and leave it uncapped with a big, gooky knife lying across the top of it. Or I turn some sweat socks inside out and toss them on the TV room floor next to the couch.

I can strategically place half-consumed Vitamin Waters, dampened bath towels, boxer shorts and Nike high tops throughout the house and create the illusion that the teenager is right here at home rather than 3,000 miles away sullying someone else’s nice tidy State Forest or Nature Preserve.

Unfortunately, Weight Watchers strategies are usually fairly general. They’ll talk about barbecues, but not The Barbecue at the Rawley’s on Sunday Night. Similarly, there is no specific Weight Watchers strategy for getting through a day when you know your son is on the other side of a continent climbing a vertical rock wall with thirty complete strangers. So, while my little deceits have helped me miss the teenager less, they have not helped diminish my worry.

The yogurt-covered pretzels – they’re no longer safe with me.

Another Hot 100

Maybe it’s because I’m getting up in the years, but I’ve recently taken to celebrating “hundreds” of things. And this week is my 100th week on Weight Watchers.

My “week” starts on a Saturday, so technically I’m already into my 100th week. If you’re wondering how specifically I celebrated on Saturday, it was by eating an entire week’s worth of points between 2 and 11 PM. I don’t think I’d ever actually done that in the entire 100 weeks I’ve been counting points, so it was its own kind of milestone.

One hundred weeks ago, I was in my dining room surrounded by my book group and I was wearing the only thing that fit me at the time: a Kelly green tie-dyed cotton shift that is absolutely the wrong color for me and should never have been bought in the first place.

I declared to that small audience that I was planning on starting Weight Watchers that week. I actually had no intention of doing any such thing and was just trying to add drama to my explanation for wearing such an unflattering outfit. But two of the women said that if I went, they would come with me. So four days later, the three of us found ourselves in a bright loft on a long line, trying to hold our skepticism in check.

That was 100 weeks ago. Fourteen thousand points ago. And God only knows how many vats of popcorn ago.

Not so long before that book group meeting, I had gone running off to my doctor to see if I had some frightful disease. My belly was bloated constantly, taking on a shape it had never been. I’d look at myself in the mirror sideways, aghast. I looked six months pregnant, even though my childbearing years were far behind me.

My doctor is diligent and he is kind. So it was only after a thorough exam and a face filled with apology that he gave me my diagnosis. “That’s just how women your age start to carry their extra weight,” he said.

“Oh my God! I’m fine? I’m fine, and just fat!?” I was elated. Except for the fat part.

Based on his diagnosis, I got the idea in my head that my weight gain was inevitable, and worse, irreversible. I didn’t think there was a thing I could do.

I could write a week’s worth of posts about how a relatively small weight loss completely transformed my life. How I’ve only had one head cold in two years. How I can now easily get to short balls on the tennis court that I used to just let go. Most profound, though, is that with the shedding of pounds, I’ve ended up shedding a lot of negativity that was (sorry for this) really weighing me down.

I know, to a lot of folks I sound like a Weight Watchers huckster. I can’t help it. I’m a point-counter. And I’ve got 100 weekly log books to prove it.

The Truth About Sex and Food

“The way to want sex more, is to have more sex,” one player said to another during a water break in clinic.

Sex comes up a lot in Friday tennis, but the truth is, we talk about it in a very general way. We’re more detailed in our descriptions of vacuuming or cat feces than we ever are about what goes on behind closed doors.

“I know,” said Player 2, “but I’m always so cold.”

“Sex will make you warmer,” offered Player 3. (We’re very supportive.)

“But I’m just really cold. I’m freezing all the time.”

“If you were doing Weight Watchers, you could use sex as Activity Points,” I said. Activity Points translate into extra Food Points based on a simple slide-rule formula. I know this is a shabby reason to have sex, but true motivation for so many things so often comes from unexpected places. “If you have more sex, you could eat more.”

Someone’s head was shaking. “I don’t know about that,” said Player 3. “It depends who with.”

This got everyone’s attention. Did she have someone specific in mind? Are there particular people named in the Weight Watchers manual that qualify for Activity Points while others do not? Somehow I must have missed that page.

“You need to have sex with a stranger,” she declared. “Sex with your spouse – or a longtime partner – is the same as walking up a flight of stairs. Sex with a stranger is like sprinting up the wall of your garage.”

We all nodded. Not that any of us would know firsthand.

Bra Heaven

I didn’t mean to lose 18 pounds. I meant to lose five. All I wanted was to get out of the large Kelly green tie-dyed cotton shift that I’d bought to wear over bathing suits because it was big, stretchy, shapeless (and the only thing that fit me), and back into my own clothes.

But I joined Weight Watchers with two friends who started losing pounds hand over fist, and, as usual, I didn’t want to feel left out.

It only took a few weeks before I could fit into all my old clothes, and then in a few more weeks those clothes became too big so I had to dig out older clothes that, yes, fit, but were so old they were shamefully outdated. One of my Weight Watcher friends gave me some now-too-big-for-her clothes (which was irksome but I took them anyway) and between those and dropping a bit of coin at The Gap, I got through the winter on my tight budget.

When spring arrived and sweaters were shed I had to face the honest truth. My bras had to go.

There’s a lingerie shop in town that’s not cheap, but it’s the only place I’ll go for bras. The women who work there are breast wizards and one of them has spent so much time assessing and adjusting me over the years that I feel like we should be dating. I walked in last week and (borrowing a phrase from a friend) said, “I lost 18 pounds and my breasts really took a hit.”

“Off with your shirt,” she commanded, and sent me back to the fitting room. She looked me hither and yon. Then, “Let’s start with a 34C.”

She was already out on in the racks when I called after her. “Don’t bother,” I said. “I’m not a 34 and I’m not a C.” My old bras were 36Bs. They were just a touch roomy.

She brought back four bras, all 34Cs and each one fit as if it were custom made. This made no sense to me. My breasts had gotten smaller, not bigger. How could I have gone from a B-cup to a C?

My tennis mates explained it all the next day during our Talk About Our Undergarments Break (usually taking place between Warm Up and our first Fun Tennis Game With A Stupid Name). “When you go down a number-size, you increase a cup-size.”

They all knew this. Does everybody? I’ve been wearing bras for almost 37 years and this information is brand new to me.

I’m out of work right now and I know that spending $80 on two bras is probably not the most prudent decision to make. But I swear to God, what I really feel like is that I'm the $80 beneficiary of an $8000 boob job.

Meet My Pound of Fat

I feel it most when I’m lying in bed on my side. Or when a man in the grocery store smiles at me. That’s when I notice the part of me that’s missing.

Like most transformations, losing weight changes everything and changes nothing. I’m always hungry. I’ve always been hungry.

People who haven’t seen me in a while want to know what I eat, what kind of exercise I do. I’m always happy to relay my daily food intake in excruciating detail. But The Pound of Fat is my real secret weapon.

The first time Davida the Weight Watchers Leader passed one of these around the room I sat in silent awe. It was the size of my nine-year-old’s sneaker. Not the size of my computer mouse. Not the size of my coffee cup. I’m talking about a size-four Nike Dunk high top. I never imagined A Pound of Fat would take up so much space.

I lost 18 of these bad boys this year.

I look at The Pound of Fat and can no longer say to myself, “So what if I gain a pound or two. What’s a pound? It’s nothing, right?”

We’re all a little dazed when The Pound of Fat makes its way up and down the rows. We’re all thinking the same thing: Hmph. That sure is something.