dianaschnuth

“If you could have any food you wanted this week,” my relatively new Weight Watchers leader asked the group, “Any food at all, what would it be?”

“Chicken paprikash!” answered one woman.

“Ice cream,” said another.

My response? “Sushi!”

The point of that question had been to get us to think about being more active, then using our Activity Points toward a kind of a splurge or reward food. Or, rather, to use that food as a dangling carrot of sorts to get us to earn that many APs during the week, so we could eat our reward food without guilt. That struck a few different chords with me:

#1 – Last week’s meeting included the phrase, “Don’t reward yourself with food. You are not a dog.” Doesn’t this sort of count as rewarding yourself with food? Also, if someone wants to lose weight, shouldn’t they be banking their Activity Points instead of eating them? Creating a deficit?

#2 – Funny, isn’t it, how my OMG-I’d-love-that food has become a healthy choice, rather than a splurge? Granted, if she’d asked on a different day, I might have said prime rib, which would be considerably more Points than salmon and tuna sashimi. But, today, my brain threw out a healthy option, and I consider that a win.

I haven’t been attending meetings since I got the edict that I couldn’t run anymore. To keep up my lunchtime activity, I started attending the Tuesday yoga classes at my work, which conflict with the Weight Watchers meeting. I weigh in, then go straight to the Fitness Center to change into my yoga gear.

Today, though, I got a flu shot in the morning, and my shoulder was so sore (and still is) that I opted to bail on yoga and attend the meeting instead. The week before, someone in my department ignored the fact that I had my yoga time blocked off on my calendar and scheduled a meeting that conflicted with yoga, but not with my At Work meeting. The week before that, yoga was rescheduled for Wednesday instead of Tuesday; that was my first meeting in months.

At first, going back to meetings was a treat. There were a few Lifetime members there that I remembered, and a few Oldies But Goodies like me who are still fighting the good fight after so many years of watching the scale barely budge. After attending a few meetings in a row, though, I remembered how much I loved how my old leader ran the At Work meetings; this new leader does it different, doesn’t give anyone a chance to speak up and brag about their Non-Scale Victories, is too cheery and peppy, and — although I know this shouldn’t matter — only had 30 pounds to lose to hit Goal when she first joined, as opposed to our old leader, who lost over 100. I remembered that I’d been getting bored with meetings, and that’s why yoga trumped them hands-down.

So, if meetings are so old-hat to me… why am I still losing so slowly? If I know what to do so well, shouldn’t I just do it and be done with it?

It all comes down to planning and sticking to that plan. Even when I’m at home. At work, it’s easy: just don’t hit the vending machine. Eat the lunch I brought. Plan ahead for that weekly team lunch. Drink lots of water and tea. At home, though, it’s easy to start shoveling in the diet snack foods and the frozen meals and the diet brownies and canned corn and light ice cream…

My plan this week is to have a big loss at the scale. I know, duh, right?

No. Usually, if I make a plan, it’s process-based. Eat all my fruits and veggies. Do some activity every day. Don’t eat after Connor has had his dinner. Don’t use any Weekly Allowance Points. Something small and measurable — and if it doesn’t translate to a loss on the scale, well, at least I changed up some habits.

Thing is, those sorts of things work for a few days. Then I get into a mood, or I have that lapse of judgement, or I go out for lunch and eat all my daily Points in one tasty burger. And it’s not that those things cause me to go all-or-nothing; it’s just that I end up making it that much harder to stick to my mini-goal for the rest of the week, depending on what that goal was.

Next week, I go back to yoga, and go back to dashing in and out for my weigh-in. We’ll see if that weigh-in reflects a renewed vigor for the program, or the same old one-pound yo-yo.