God DAMN that is a big fat ass! (Weight Watchers)

Member Name: fromage

Product:	Weight Watchers
Date:	09/08/03 (3942 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to understand, etc, etc

Disadvantages: Quite costly

'Obesity. Corpulence. Adiposity. Whichever word you use it amounts to
the same thing...Being a big fat-ass'.

I am a big fat-ass. According to those charts doctors and nurses have in their little treatment rooms, I am currently nearly two and a half
stone overweight. In common with most people in this condition, I am not particularly happy about it.

But, alas, I love to eat, and I'm good at it.

I realise that this may seem far from unusual. Most people, if asked, would declare that they love to eat. Mother nature, in her infinite grace and tenderness, has blessed man with an infinitely subtle and refined palate to ensure that we have the chance to enjoy the alimentary process, which is, rightly speaking, nothing more than a mundane physical necessity.

Thus we spend hours of precious time cooking, tens or even hundreds of pounds in restaurants titillating our tastebuds; we even tolerate hours of programming every week subjecting us to supposedly charismatic genius chefs showing us how exactly to satisfy our loved ones in the kitchen (compare this gustatory sophistication with, for example, the average dog, and you'll see how elevated and fastidious humanity is in the realm of the senses. I have a dog, and the number of times I've seen her happily wolfing down stinking meat, chewing vile, dirty bones, even scoffing cat faeces with obvious gusto, is all the evidence I need).

But for me, eating is something more than just a pleasant few minutes
savouring a modestly sized meal with a nice glass of wine. To me, a portion of salad and a piece of fruit does not constitute a lunch. Between myself, and people like, as an example, my sister, who will eat two chocolates and decline a third, there is a gulf of incomprehension. Eating for me is a problem, and its effects spoil the quality of my life.

For I am an eater among eaters. Perhaps it's a symptom of a slightly
addictive persona
lity. Perhaps it's insecurity, boredom, or one of a host of possible psychological factors. Perhaps it's a genetic predisposition to gluttony, a hormone imbalance, a thyroid problem. Perhaps I'm just plain greedy. I don't know.

But I know the effect. I cannot resist cakes. I love eating crisps.
Three meals a day is not enough for me. I can't walk past a newsagent without thinking about going in and buying chocolate and crisps (how can anyone eat a Mars bar without having a packet of crisps to balance the sweet with the savoury?) A small meal is a waste of time. One beef-burger is too little of a good thing. Roast potatoes don't taste right unless cooked in lard. The best thing about Glastonbury is the hog roast. I never order a medium pizza. The words 'a small portion of chips, please' just will not come out of my mouth.

In short, I love food. Passionately. And thus I am currently, and have been for most of my adult life, a great big fat-ass.

With my fat-ass, anti-diet credentials thus established, let me tell
you a bit about Weight Watchers, and my experience with the points diet that is the mainstay of their product. Whilst I am currently a distinctly portly man, during the summer of the year 2000, and for a good 18 months thereafter I was, compared to any other point in my adult life, positively sylph-like.

Those were heady days. I could hop on a set of scales without
apprehension. Doctors would admire my physical condition rather than shake their heads and mutter their inquietude about my blood pressure. Looking down my body I enjoyed a full, uninterrupted view of genitalia and toes. When I had a bath my belly wouldn't stick out of the water like a hairy island, and when it drained the water would not be completely dammed by my waist and buttocks. Any clothes shop I cared to go into would stock clothes my size.

A short digression, if you'll indulge me: How I resen
t fashionable
Clothes shops and their body fascistic policy of excluding people who don't conform to the slim, healthy, wealthy lifestyle with which they like to associate their product. If you are above a 38 inch waist (or a size 18, if you're a woman) you don't deserve to wear the most modern designs. It's an unspoken prejudice that really, really irritates me. The message they send is basically "Keep out, you gross, unattractive people, there is nothing for you here. Go elsewhere and don't make our target consumer look at your unsightly body fat". River Island, French Connection, Gap, even Next, for God?s sake, anywhere with the slightest pretension to exclusivity buys into and helps perpetuate this shallow and offensive image obsession, which is unhealthy, mean spirited, and just plain wrong.

Anyway, as I was saying, for a while there I was quite thin. And that
Happy state of affairs came about almost entirely through the auspices of the Weight Watchers plan.

A few facts and figures will help clarify matters. As of January 2000, I was at my (as far as I'm aware) highest lifetime weight of 17 stone 3 lbs. I had a 40 inch waist and was well on the way to having what one of my female work colleagues is accustomed to describe as 'saggy man breasts'. I also had high blood pressure and occasional asthma. Everything (particularly the man-breasts) was telling me the time had come to make some kind of concerted effort to sort my life out, so, I allowed myself to be persuaded (by my wife ? has any man, ever, unprompted, just decided off his own back to go to a slimming class? If you have, and you read this, I salute you) that we should sign up for Weight Watchers.

At the time we lived directly across the road from the local town hall where the meetings were held every Wednesday night, so attending could not have been simpler. Weight Watchers meetings are fairly ubiquitous, so wherever you live
you can be fairly certain that there will be one within walking distance. I now live in Cheltenham, and when I came to look for a local meeting on the internet I found more than a dozen within an easy cycle ride. (although, sadly the very closest ones to my house are at times which I cannot make). Meetings tend to take place at lunchtimes and evenings. In my experience, in most reasonably populated areas you will be able to find a meeting to fit in with your lifestyle.

Evening meetings tend to start at 6:30 and finish no later than 7:30, so there is plenty of time for dinner afterwards. Weighing itself takes from 5 minutes to quarter of an hour depending on queues (for some reason at the moment attendance at my meeting on a Tuesday evening is very low - seasonal factors seem to affect people's willingness to attend).

The format of a meeting is: queue to pick up a card which is the club's record of your weight and payments (you also get a record card of your own which you have to bring to meetings). You then queue to pay. If this is you first meeting there is a one off registration fee of £9, plus the regular meeting fee of £4.75. You then queue for the weighing experience itself. The people at the scales are invariably kind and sympathetic, and there is always a ?leader? ? someone who has successfully completed the Weight Watchers plan and is now paid by Weight Watchers to organise the meetings and motivate the dieters. Once you have weighed your new weight and the loss or gain on last week is marked on both of your cards, and you?re free to go and eat the biggest dinner you can imagine. Or not, if you?ve gained and feeling bad about it.

You can stay around afterwards for the motivational meetings which run once the weighing is finished, in which, if you?ve lost a pound or two there is an opportunity to revel in the admiration and envy of your peers, and pretend to commiserate with those who?ve ?struggled? that week. If you?re on
e of the strugglers (and I am often a struggler at the moment), the meetings do seem to help a tiny bit with motivation, provided your leader has at least a minimum level of charisma and motivational skill (Happily my current leader, a very nice lady called Vicky, does. Sadly I have endured meetings run by others who do not ? a desperately boring and depressing experience).

The other thing you will almost always take away from a meeting is some form of printed matter, which contains information about dieting, tips, menus, and exercise suggestions. In the first few weeks you carry away a rainforest?s worth of manuals, menus, motivational literature etc. After a time things settle down and you get only a tracker (to record what you eat and enable you to calculate when you need to stop), and the odd leaflet of seasonal hints. For example a couple of weeks ago I got a leaflet to take with me on holiday, with a translation of the phrase ?Could you recommend a low fat dish?? in four European languages. (The French is ?Quel plat est le moins riche en grasse?? Can you imagine the look you would get from a French waiter if you tried that on them? I certainly wouldn?t dare).

Now, as the financially acute among you will have noticed, £4.75 is a ludicrous sum to pay to hop onto a set of weighing apparatus for ten seconds (particularly if the judgment of the scales is harsh). Five meetings would pay for a decent set of bathroom scales. Worse, if you miss a meeting, without declaring it a holiday week and warning your leader in advance, you have to pay for the missed week as well the next time you go.

However, if you approach Weight Watchers with the right attitude, and follow the plan (which is simply based on limiting the number of calories and saturated fats in your diet), it works. Back to the statistics ? I started in January 2000 weighing 17 stone 3 lbs. In the first week I lost 7 lbs. The second week (due to a weekend away and several sausage rol
ls) I lost nothing. The week after I lost 5 lbs. I lost a stone in the first month, and by the time I went on holiday in late June I was down to the lowest weight of my adult life, that being 12 stone 12lbs. And believe me, I considered that worth £4.75 a week and more besides.

Not everyone loses weight that fast (not everyone loses weight at all). 2lbs a week is considered normal, and is what the plan aims for. Men, I have been told ad infinitum (by women), lose weight more easily than women (envy?). But, as a general rule, if you stick at it, you make it.

But it only works if you are prepared to follow the plan and be honest with yourself. It gives those of us who eat and eat and don?t know when to stop a system whereby we can monitor and learn to control what we relentlessly shovel into our mouths. Armed with the certainty that, no, you really can?t have that cheese sandwich, Mars bar, and packet of crisps and expect not to gain weight it is surprising what you can accomplish. And while sausages are without question the finest meat product available to mankind (it was Richard Stilgoe who described the sausage with the divine couplet
?The gastronome?s nirvana, The carnivore?s banana?), it is a sobering fact that one single quality sausage, such as a Porkinson Banger, is every bit as fatty and calorific as a snickers bar. Since learning that fact I have ceased to have three such sausages with bacon, beans, black pudding and fried bread every single Sunday morning.

So I recommend Weight Watchers, but with this qualification. You?ll only really get out of it what you?re prepared to put into it. I?m going to meetings again, having slipped back into old habits and thought patterns, and piled on the pounds over the last couple of years. Going back up a waist size was what made me realise I had lost control of my eating, and needed to do something to sort it out. And for me, going to meetings and knowing that if I eat what I want, when I
want it I am going to be faced with incontrovertible evidence of the consequences the following Tuesday, is the only motivating factor that?s ever allowed me to contend with the insatiable demands of my great big stomach

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