Hating The Scale

I used to work for Weight Watchers. What started out as a whim turned into something like five years in the biz. And I am thinking about how this time of year, everyone and their sister shows up to sign up at meetings, desperate to finally do something about their weight.

I've always battled a weight problem. Food was my childhood substitute for all the stuff that I wasn't getting that I needed and which every child needs. Not only did I love to eat but I learned to cook and bake which was (and is) a very valuable skill but it didn't help with the extra weight.

Everyone who has been a fat child knows what a special sort of hell that is. The teasing and the taunting are something that follow you around forever in your mind, at least.

When I was going into the sixth grade I got something that down south we called ground itch but I think it is really known as creeping eruption. Although medically I believe it is called Cutaneous larvae migrans which is a far step from ground itch.
What this nasty thing is (and it is nasty, no matter what you call it) is hookworm. We used to run barefoot everywhere and every kid I knew down in Roseland got the damn thing at one time or another. These larvae would make their way under your skin and burrow tunnels that showed up on the surface of your foot or wherever you'd contracted it as red streaks that itch like a son-of-a-bitch. Like you cannot believe how much they itch.

Anyway, so I got this on my foot and the doctors and my parents got my treatment screwed up (and in those days, the treatment was freezing the tunnels with freon- I am not kidding) and on top of the hookworm I got infections and my foot was basically a puss-filled, itching mass of nastiness and I was on crutches and because of all of that, I managed to lose a lot of weight.

After that, I kept my weight down by various means, none of them especially healthy, although I never did go into any long-term eating disorder. I don't have the dedication for that. But I flirted.

After my third child was born, I discovered Weight Watchers for the first time and it was a major revelation to realize I could actually EAT and lose weight and not only that, I fell in deep love with my Weight Watcher leader who was a man and who was funny and serious and compassionate and hysterical and realistic and just a joyous person.

When he decided to quit leading meetings, I decided to start. I went through the training and I became a leader and also clerked at some meetings. It was work I mostly enjoyed, although there were things about it I didn't like. It was hard, at first, to get up in front of a group of people and try to be the leader I wanted to be. Being a Weight Watcher leader is like being a cheerleader, a counselor, a priest, a friend, a health-care worker, a comedian, and always, always a good example. You have to keep your weight at a certain level (and Weight Watcher's weight charts are sensible) and you really have to believe in the program to help it work for others.

And I did.

I loved the program. It seemed to me that it would serve anyone, whether they were overweight or not, because it taught you a sensible way to eat within your own preferences. You ate real food, you learned from the very beginning how to make good choices and how to eat in restaurants and I saw the program work for people who did all their own cooking as well as people who probably didn't know how to turn on their stove.

I was fired up. I was into it.

My favorite class was one I did in Thomasville, Georgia. Those ladies (and it's almost always ladies) were sweet. I had eighty-something year-olds and I had twenty-something year-olds. I had black ladies and white ladies. I had nurses and waitresses and ladies who wore diamonds so big they took them off before they weighed in.

Really.

The women I worked with there were great, too. Somewhat older women and all good Christians and you'd have thought that I didn't have anything in common with any one of the Georgia ladies, but somehow, they took this old hippie and embraced her and I fell in love with them too. Sometimes, especially this time of year, I would have classes with over a hundred people in them.

It was great.

I cracked jokes, I was slightly profane, I was sincere, I was funny and caring and compassionate. I was never as good as my old leader had been, but I tried my best to follow the spirit of what he'd done.

And it was all fine for several years but the business end of the whole deal started wearing me down. The corporation asked more and more of its employees with no increase in compensation. And I am not good with random rules and regs. I hated the conventions. I did not love all my fellow employees. There are all sorts of Weight Watcher leaders. There are the ones who shame you, the ones who insist on perfection being the only way to success, the ones who like to spend the entire hour telling personal stories. And for every leader, there's a whole passel of members who like their particular style. But frankly, some of them drove me crazy.

One of the women I worked with had been doing meetings for at least twenty years and she especially made me want to scream. She was a like a drill sargeant and her meetings were run like boot camp. She also did things like give away products which was strictly forbidden and she insisted on everything going her way. One time I told her it must be really great to know the right way to do everything in the world.

"It is," she replied, without a trace of irony.

And eventually, I grew weary of it all.

Not my ladies, so much. I never grew tired of seeing them rise above their struggles and when someone actually changed their life with my help- well, there's nothing to compare that to.
But I got to the point where I just did not want to hear one more excuse for a weight gain instead of a loss. First of all, our bodies aren't machines and we can't lose weight every week. Just doesn't happen like that. Secondly, I do not need to know how long it's been since you had a bowel movement, okay?! Really. Don't need to know, don't want to know.

I also did not want to hear why it's impossible for you to eat breakfast. Impossible. Or why you had to go out and drink four margaritas. Or how at Christmas you HAVE to put candy out because you have this bowl you love and that's what you do every year.

But what I really got burned out on was seeing how hard it is for anyone to actually lose weight. People desperately want to lose weight. They will cry when they sign up and tell you their stories and sometimes I cried with them. And they will start out with motivation and determination and even lose massive amounts of weight and then something happens and they begin to forget all their good habits and go right on back to their old ones.

Because let's face it- if it were just a matter of following rules, we'd all be thin.

But food and eating are complex. And it's not just a matter of learning new rules and following them. It's a process of changing your entire life.

Which takes more than a meeting, more than a dietary guide. More than I could give folks, a lot of the time. Which grew depressing and which made me feel inadequate.
"If you'd just do what I say!" I'd think. "Just follow the damn program!" But although it's a simple program, it is not easy.

Losing weight is not easy.

It requires changes that are sometimes almost impossible to make.
And the thing I hated the worst was the look that would come across my member's faces when they'd step on a scale and realize they'd gained weight again and to see the agony and the defeat and the shame and the sadness on those faces. No matter how encouraging I tried to be, no matter how much I tried to tell them that this is a process, a long process, that they could do it, I knew they could, they would become discouraged.

And so did I.

And that's all I'm going to say about this for right now. I have things to do and places to be but I want to finish this up. It's long. Might as well be in two parts (or three) anyway.

After all, it's a process.