That's a Wrap

I've figured out the secret of how people lose weight on the Weight Watchers diet... it's that they have so much frigging supplementary materials to read that they stop eating for a few weeks while they read it all. Then, as soon as they started eating, they gained it all back.

I'd like to think I was kidding, but HONESTLY, the amount of reading material I brought home is of the quantity (and almost quality) of what I used to bring home from COLLEGE. Jesus.

There is a substantial gap I see in the plan, at least as far as it's going to work for Thomas and I. The big one is that he gets 38 points a day and I get 27. That's a whole frigging extra meal a day he gets. He says he's concerned about it because he didn't eat any differently yesterday than he normally does. I say that he hasn't stuffed an entire dozen doughnuts into his stomach recently either. Maybe he doesn't eat any less regular food on the plan, but he's also not buying box of moon pies (they're on sale!) and eating two or three of them while watching tv. He says he doesn't even want to know how many points a moonpie is. (It's 5 points for one, I looked it up...)

The other problem I'm personally having is obsession. Healthy or otherwise, all these plan materials are OBSESSED with food. Every single picture in them has someone eating or drinking. I don't want to have to think about what I'm eating every single time I pick up a fork. Now, maybe that's part of my problem. I don't think about what I'm eating very often. I'll sit down with a box of crackers and without really being aware of it, I'll eat almost the entire box. We'll see how it works out, I guess... maybe I need to be more aware of what and when and how often. It does, however, seem slightly counter-productive, as when I look at or think about food, I get hungry.

Last night, our grocery bill was about double what it normally is. $239. Holy jumping Jesus... but we had to restock a lot of basics. I suspect we also overdid it quite a bit and next week we'll only need to get Thomas's frozen lunches and refresh on fruits and vegetables.

(As a side note, I find it mildly amusing that Darcy is underweight for her age group. The doctor said we should move her back to whole milk for a while.)

While I'm bitching: I'm not big on this whole grain thing. I HATE wheat bread. Like, with a passionate hatred not unlike that I feel for the slimy things that run out from under a sock that fell on the laundry room floor and you didn't notice until like a week later. I'm probably going to have to get used to it, but for the time being, I'm still eating white bread.

Anyway... let me move back to the basics.

I'm weighing in at 218 pounds (I've been guessing and poking at my diet since Christmas, but I'm not sure how accurate my dad's scale is, so it's either off, or I lost 2 pounds already.) My '10% goal' is to get down to 198...

I'm not sure how I feel about the meetings yet. But there were a LOT of new people yesterday (shocked! I'm shocked, I tell you, that the 2nd of January had a lot of new members) and I might be a little more comfortable as things settle out. I'm committed for 10 weeks, at least... My dad said he wouldn't buy anymore of the 10 week passes unless we used all of this one...

I am planning to commit to this for at least 26 weeks (6 months...) and we'll re-evaluate once we get there.

Pre Meeting Thoughts

We're going to be going to our first Weight Watchers meeting today, after Thomas gets home from work. Wednesdays are usually our grocery shopping days, and we're still planning on doing the shopping today, after the meeting. The meeting is at 6-6:30 and we're supposed to stay for a 'first timers' meeting after that, so I don't expect to be home from the shopping until maybe 8 - 8:30, which means I probably won't be inclined to write anything immediately after the meeting.

I hope Darcy won't give us too much trouble. She had to go to the doctor today for her year 4 checkup and various shots and stuff, and she's really PO'd at me now. (I did warn her that the shots would hurt. I always hated it when I was a kid and the doctor would say "Oh, you'll feel a bit of a pinch." Bit of a pinch my eyeball! Fracking hurts, is what it does.) And the Weight Watchers building is in the same industrial park area as the Doctor's office.

Today, Thomas took all of the leftover Christmas chocolates into work and dropped them off in the food bin. I doubt they'll last long. But from now on, we are on... a diet/food plan/health regime... whatever the fuck you want to call it.

I know that Weight Watchers (and really, all of those diet programs) don't want you to call it a 'diet.' That diet implies that eventually you can go back to eating whatever you want, and a health change is a better way of thinking about it... bah. Semantics. It's like saying someone who is dead is 'presumed to be having a bad day." It's a diet. With all the suckiness that goes along with dieting. And I know, I'll never be able to go back to eating whatever I want.

Does anyone really want to eat a damn carrot stick? No one I know would want to pick some lowfat yogurt over a chocolate bar. Do be serious. It's like saying someone would chose a $3 coupon to B&N over a check for $1 million. OK, maybe I'm exaggerating here a bit.

I'm in a bit of a mood, though. I'm not even really sure why... stress probably. The whole household was sick with some bronchial thing during the holidays, we were short on cash and barely made it to our next paycheck... and of course, my best friend, Carole, had her baby... which is all nice for her and everything, but makes me really fucking jealous, and I don't want to be. I want to be happy for my friend, with her son and all, but... at the same time, I really want another baby, I really do. And we just can't. (Also, some other friends are getting separated/divorced and while that shouldn't affect me... it still is. I'm not happy about it, and it's not fair of me to be angry that they're doing it, since it's certainly not about me... but I'm happy and comfortable in my world where marriage is not the great evil, and I don't like it when someone butts in and makes it wrong. And so help me god, if Ed says anything about it, I will kill him. He's always been really anti-marriage and it drives me nutso!)

But, hopefully, the meeting will go well, and then we'll do our grocery shopping, and then I'll clean out the cabinets of all the stuff we really shouldn't eat anymore. Fun fun. I think I'll donate any unopened food to the families who were in that fire last night. That'd be a nice thing to do, I think.

hack n slacker

Yeah, I've been slack about writing here, but hey, what's to say...

Thomas, Darcy and I have all had some horrible Mongolian Death Virus for the last two weeks. You know, that always happens... Thomas takes vacation from work and one (or all) of us get sick. Or injured. Or someone on his team at work has to have surgery, so while he's 'on vacation' for a week, he's still working half-days that he doesn't get to take later. We're all on the mend... just in time for him to go back to work tomorrow.

Sigh.

Anyway, I did eventually tell my dad that we wanted the Weight Watchers for Christmas. Woo, exciting Christmas this year... he got us each 10 week passes to the meetings, and if we use all those, he'll get us 10 more, and then 10 more after that, for a total of 30 weeks (leaving 22 weeks for us to get, if we want to... )

And my stepmom got us 2 boxes of those 100 calorie packs popcorn. I hate microwavable popcorn. It smells weird. When it doesn't burn. But whatever. (as a note, the stuff tastes weird too, for the 100 cal packs. sweet, somehow. Like popcorn doesn't have many calories to begin with, so they had to add sugar to make the right calories fit into their snack pack size? I dunno. Tastes weird.)

So, we plan to start going to our meetings this week... and we haven't been walking because we've all been sick as hell... it's one of those things, really... I mean, hard to walk when you're coughing every other breath. So, while I wish we could have kept up with it, it wasn't possible. So we'll start that again this week.

I also got a Weight Watchers cookbook... why, tell me, is dieting so freaking expensive? Half the things in this book take weird, esoteric ingredients that I do NOT have laying around the house. What the hell is Wheat Germ, anyway?

I popped on the scale while I was up at my dad's for Christmas... 220 pounds. So, with my 'ideal' weight being around 113-135 and my 'goal weight' being 145, that's between 75 and 107 pounds to lose. Yeargh.