Weight Watchers

I couldn't decide what to write about today. Health care was one possibility, but that would have been a depressing entry. Suffice it to say that we are trying to stay healthy! Which brings us to Weight Watchers.

I first joined WW in 1976. I was 16 and wore a size 16, which seemed enormous at the time. (These days, considering how fat the population has become, I'd probably be one of the skinny girls.) Flash forward 32 years, ignoring the dozens of failed attempts at WW. September 2008 I joined one more time, in order to become a skinny, healthy mom to my two boys. And at first it went really well. By February 2009, just before we moved to Ridgecrest, I had lost 33.4 lbs and was feeling great. Then I missed a few meetings, couldn't find the bathroom scale in the sea of moving boxes, ate a few too many comfort foods. By the time I got to a meeting I had gained 9.4 lbs! In 3 weeks! This seemed so unfair. I desperately NEEDED milkshakes and other forms of chocolate to survive Ridgecrest.

This is where my 30+ years of experience on and off WW helped me out. I know that losing weight and gaining weight is not about fair. Losing weight and gaining weight is about calories consumed and calories expended, how much muscle you have, maybe how your endocrine system is working, that kind of thing. There is no rule that says if you're a nice person who had to move somewhere icky, you can eat a lot of chocolate and not gain weight. Sadly, there are a LOT of enormously fat people in Ridgecrest, so there must be a lot of people who believed in that rule, to their detriment.

So I got back on program. I am grateful that Ridgecrest at least HAS Weight Watchers. WW is a lot of places, but it isn't everywhere. Ridgecrest has two Thursday meetings, one Friday meeting, and one Saturday morning meeting. Saturday is the only day that my husband is home to babysit, so that's when I usually go.

The first meeting I went to, I was kind of dismayed. Ridgecrest WW isn't using computers yet, so I had to fill out all the paperwork again and I didn't get a nice little computer-generated label to put in my book, but rather had to depend on the weigher's math skills. The WW room is small and cramped (is this becoming a theme?).

But the people won me over. Mary, the Ridgecrest WW leader, is inspiring and supportive and an all-around nice person. Julie, the receptionist, is another friendly face. But the best thing about the meetings is the other WW members. When I started coming to meetings, I had formed an opinion of Ridgecrest as a place where people just eat and smoke and don't exercise and vote Republican. It turns out that some of them do other things, including coming to WW. I don't really know my fellow WW members, but I hear them talking, and I can tell they're intelligent, thoughtful, and trying to better themselves. I find this heartening. WW is definitely a bright spot in my life in Ridgecrest. And as of today I have lost 41 lbs!