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...

Remaining Flexible

But (butt?) first, a completely gratuitous picture:

Now that that is behind us... moving right along...

Thomas and I have been on the Core plan for almost seven months now. Which is, honestly, about six months and three weeks longer than I had originally speculated we might be able to do it. From the outside, Core looks highly restrictive, and I couldn't even begin figuring out how to cook with the foods on the list of approved items.

It took a while, but slowly, I've gotten the whole thing down. And I stopped being afraid of food, which is a good thing.

Back on Flex, I got so scared, thinking I'd be hungry at night. That was the worst thing I could imagine was getting to 9pm and being hungry and having no points left. (I know there are a lot of people who preach that you shouldn't eat past 7pm or whatever, but I don't really believe that foods are suddenly more fat-producing after dark, like some sort of caloric-gremlin.) I spent too many days back when I was poor going to bed hungry. I cannot go back there, cannot go back to being that woman in her early 20's who was constantly out of money and food, cannot go back to laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, being hungry, and pretending that she didn't desperately want to cry.

I was so afraid of this happening to me that I'd eat almost nothing all day. Two point breakfasts, four points for lunch, a 2 point snack around 3pm... leaving me 19 points for dinner and evening snacking. Dinner would be 5 - 8 points, and suddenly I have 11 points for post-dinner snacking? I still don't believe calories grow fur and fangs after dark, becoming lycanthropic fat-inducers. And yet, the points I was eating after dinner were not healthy choices. Crackers. 100 calorie packs of oreos. Mostly highly processed flour and sugars. Empty calories.

So, we switched to Core, and while Core was restricted in what I could eat, I was free. Free from having to write down everything I ate. Free from having to measure anything. Free from being hungry. If I was hungry, I ate something. It really was that simple.

Of course, Core has some serious drawbacks.

The first drawback is that nothing is easy. If I want something to eat, I have to prepare something. Even if it's just chopping vegetables or fruit (I do NOT bite into apples. I have too much dental work for that, thanks!). Popcorn, I guess, was easy. But for the most part, eating required dirtying dishes. Plates, bowls, pots, pans, knives.

Cooking takes time. This would be why a lot of people hate it. I'm not a lot of people; I like to cook, and I do find the act of chopping vegetables to be soothing. However, even us stay-at-home moms have our off days, and there are days when we run errands and don't get back to the house until 7:30 and everyone is hungry and staring at me to fix this problem, and dinner's at least 45 minutes away.

(I know, if I really wanted to, I should have prepped a couple of extra servings of things, put them on plastic freezer plates, and had Core tv-dinners. I know. I should have done, but I never seemed to get around to it.)

I was having to fix three meals a day for me and family, plus packing away Thomas's lunch for the next day. None of these chores are particularly onerous, but after a time, they do build up to a "Don't I ever get a BREAK?"

(Yes, even I get bored/tired/cranky... I shall leave space here for you to be astonished.)






Ok. Wow, I can hear your sarcasm all the way over here. Impressive. ::wiggles a finger around in her ear:: It wasn't necessary to shout.

Another drawback to Core was this Atkins-ish obsession with avoiding bread.

that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only
-- Deuteronomy 8: 2-3

Well, we may not live on bread alone, and we may even be able to live without bread. But my god, I miss it sometimes. There have been many times where I've ached, not for chocolate, or ice cream, but for something as trivial as a cheese sandwich. A bagel. A dinner roll; you know the kind, with butter melting on the top, full and puffy and yeasty.

Bread is fairly high in points, unless it's wheat bread, in which case it's only moderately high in points. (I still find wheat bread to be utterly revolting.) And no, that "lite" and "diet" breads they sell really don't cut it. I don't know why they're the way they are, but they don't toast right, and they just don't satisfy. Using two slices of diet bread on a sandwich isn't having a sandwich, it's using two thin pieces of cardboard to hold your sandwich fillings together. You may as well just dump the sandwich into a bowl with some lettuce, call it a salad and have done.

I've also been missing cheese that contains actual fat. Gasp! I may well combine those things at some point this week and have a grilled cheese sandwich.

But in the meanwhile, I'm going to have a dinner roll.

I was glad we did Flex first, as it taught Thomas and I things like portion control... and I think we both need a refresher in that. I don't know about him, but my portion sizes have been slowly creeping again. You don't have to measure in Core, but I don't know that this is license for unrestrained eating.

And, of course, both of us have slowed down in our losses. Thomas has gone from his 1.5 - 3 pound a week losses back to a steady loss of .8 pounds. I had a nice loss last night, however, of 1.2 pounds, which pushed me over into my 55 pounds lost bling! (yay bling!) But, on the average, my losses have continued to get smaller, resulting in my average weight loss creeping steadily down from 1.8 pounds a week to 1.3 pounds per week. (And over the last 6 weeks, it's barely made it to a pound a week.)

So we thought we'd shake things up a bit, with Flex. We probably won't stay here for more than a week, or two at the most.

Of course, I thought that with Core.