A Core by Any Other Name

Well, first off, I'm down another 2 pounds this week, which puts me just under 155... I continue to be astonished at the actual numbers I've lost, while still continuing to be frustrated with how bad I look. (In case you were wondering, Thomas was also down this week, 2.6 pounds - he can never let me have a good week without showing me up, can he?? - which officially puts him 5 pounds under his goal... 170 pounds. According to him, he was in junior high the last time he weighed that little.)

Last night's meeting was the big kickoff for the "new" Momentum plan for Weight Watchers.

They've "combined" the two plans, Flex and Core, and instead of calling it the Flore plan (funny, but not catchy, especially since "flore" was never an official plan and wouldn't be funny to new members... altho honestly, if Momentum, Simply Filling, and Filling Foods were the best marketing they could come up with, they really need to reconsider the employees in their marketing department...)

In the end, very little has actually changed.

They're restarting everyone back on a points counting plan (points are still calculated the same was as ever...) with vigilance about portion control. Then they're stressing using the Filling Foods (i.e. Core food list) to stretch your points out and to help manage hunger.

If you're a die-hard Core fan (as Thomas and I are) in week 6, they re-introduce the concept of Core, but are now calling it the Simply Filling technique. Our leader, who is a big Core fan herself, handed out the week 6 books for those of us who follow Core (which is like 2/3 of our meeting, and we've all been successful with that plan!) The Week 6 book - 24 pages long - spends the first 12 pages talking about why you should track your food and measure your food, and no, really, we mean it, you should track your food! Honestly! Here are some suggestions about how to track, when to track, what to track, why you should track. Page 13 - 14 are "Well, if you're not going to track, regardless of what we say, here's how you should go about not tracking." and then the rest of the book is recipes and indexes. This is me, making a squishy face here.

Back when I started following Core, I was talking to a friend, who said to me, "I'd never be able to do it. I don't know when I'm 'satisfied'... honestly, if I'm not stuffed to the gills, I'm hungry."

I guess a lot of people have that problem.

Thomas and I instituted a bunch of personal rules to get around the problems of recognizing hunger patterns. The first of which was; Never take more than a single serving. You can always go back for more later, but the first serving is a serving size. Because we were on Core, we didn't measure closely, but mostly called things "good enough." Second rule was; If you finish your first helping, wait 15 minutes after you finish eating before getting anything else to eat. Generally speaking, 15 minutes was enough time for our brains to recognize hungry/not hungry and if we weren't hungry, we'd usually gotten involved in something else by that point, and forgotten that we'd been considering a second helping of food.

These two rules worked well for us, and obviously, we're both poster-children for "results not typical..." (I asked my leader one time what was "typical." She leaned in close and spoke in a low voice, "The typical member comes in, loses five or ten pounds, gains back 8 and we never see them again. Sometimes they let the monthly membership fee roll over for six months before they cancel it...") but I guess it doesn't work for everyone.

There are certainly dieters out there who will follow the letter of the law that allows them to eat the most amount of food, be mad when they don't lose weight, and complain that they're "following the plan!!" Core definitely opens itself up to the possibility of abuse...

I think there's no way that any plan will ever be able to help these people. They want to lose weight, but they want it the same way I want to win the lottery. (No, I don't buy lottery tickets... doesn't keep me from daydreaming sometimes about what I'd do with 58 million dollars...) They want to eat what they want, when they want it, and still lose weight, and I hate to say it, but that doesn't work. (If it did, we'd all be thin... ) So, Weight Watchers is tweaking their plan... to help those people who are falling right on the border between just wanting to complain about their weight and actually managing to do something about it.

Losing weight is not easy. It's not simple. And it's not for wimps. "Life isn't fair, your highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something."

Weight Watchers is selling me something. And I'm still buying it. But I think of it more like Lowes. I can go to Lowes and buy all the materials and tools to build a fence. They can help, they can advise, they can teach, but in the end, I'm the one who has to build the freaking fence...