Unsafe at Any Size

Losing weight is easy, right?  Eat less, move more, and you’ll lose weight.  But most of us have absolutely no idea what a portion size is.  I know I didn’t.   My husband and I had to reeducate our selves what a real portion looked like.  To do that, we used a few tools:

1. Pictures of portion sizes.  In the first Weight Watchers book, they show graphically what different portion sizes are.  For example, a tennis ball is about half a cup.  A deck of cards is four ounces.  I ripped those pictures out of the book and taped them to the refrigerator as a constant reminder of what different sizes are, right where I was preparing food.
2. Measuring cups.  You can’t just eyeball food amounts; the best way to know until you get used to it is to use a measuring cup. We would measure the food and then see what it looked like in the bowl or plate.
3. Smaller plates and bowls.  Reasonable servings looked rather lost on our plates, which we had bought with our penchant for large servings in mind. We put away our larger dinner plates and started eating meals on the smaller salad plates.  Our cereal bowls easily held 4 or more cups, so we bought and used smaller bowls.
4. A scale.  It’s hard to measure some foods, like chips.  A scale takes the guesswork out of it, and the temptation to round out the cup a bit… or add a little more after measuring out a cup.

Yes, this all sounds hard.  It WAS hard.  But it’s a lot easier now that I’ve done that work.  And it worked!  The first week, I lost over 6 lbs.

Last week was not great, with a 4.8 lb gain.  But I recovered a good chunk of that with a 3.6 lb loss this week, for a total loss of 103.  Keeping the bigger picture in mind is helping.

So what made the difference this week?  I didn’t really track very well, at least not formally.  But I did keep track of things mentally.  I made better choices under trying circumstances.  For example, my dad and stepmother were in town, and so we ate out.  One of the places we ate was The Ground Round; not my favorite place, but a big hit with the kids, meaning I wouldn’t be tempted to hit them.

Theirs was a tough menu.  No nutritional info online.  Everything was like an example from Kessler’s book The End of Overeating (yes, I worked that in AGAIN!)-cheese and bacon, and oh, more cheese, and would you like a sugary sauce, too?  The salads were the sabotage salad types, that look innocent.  It’s salad!  Lettuce!  How bad could they be?  Oh, they were bad all right.  The kind loaded with all the good stuff.  Candied pecans, avocado, and hey, who’s that?  Our buddies Cheese and Bacon!

Normally, I eat mostly vegetarian, but that just wasn’t working here.  Instead, I went for the single breast lemon herb chicken with broccoli, and splurged with the mashed red potatoes.  The normal order was 2 breasts, can you imagine?  It was a reasonable meal, with a bit of a treat (mashed potatoes really tasted like butter).  I stayed away from the kids’ french fries.

We had a substitute leader so don’t remember much from the meeting.  She was pitching the weight watchers foods like nobody’s business, and nobody was buying it at my meeting.  We know they need shameless commerce to keep the place running, but why prey on poor fat people who are looking for support?

I heard that in another meeting the leader said that the pre-Lifetime people were supporting the Lifetime freeloaders. For y’all not saavy with the WW speak, Lifetime members are those who have met their goal and have maintained it–and who don’t pay for meetings so long as they stay on track.  I think going for free is the only thing that’s motivating me right now to lose weight.

So good luck to you all on your weigh-ins this week, or however you are measuring your success!

I love all the berries in season now… strawberries, blueberries, blackberries!  They taste great, and are so cheap.

But let’s face it: berries all on their lonesome are… lonesome.  They want company.  They want shortcake.  Or… cheesecake!

Cheesecake is amazing stuff.  They say the Greeks made cheescake.  And their cheesecake was probably as detrimental to your health as ours, except you had to go to all the work of milking the goats, finding the honey, inventing graham flour for the crust, so you burned enough calories to justify it.

The Jell-o Sugar-Free Fat-Free Instant Pudding doesn’t require all that work.  Using an immersion blender means you don’t even need to tire your little arm whisking the pudding.  But it sure tastes good with those berries!  And at 70 calories, no fat, that’s only one point.

No, you won’t mistake it for The Real Thing.  But the berries out there nowadays are outstanding enough on their own.

Finding a meeting to join wasn’t hard.  I already knew where the closest Weight Watchers was–right upstairs from the Trader Joe’s, and near the Gymboree.  I could find the times online, which was convenient.

So, one Saturday AM, I simply told my husband to watch the kids… I’m going!

Entering the location the first time was unsettling.  I felt exposed and indignant.  But I went to the counter and chose my subscription option.  I chose to do the autopay, which means you don’t pay for every meeting individually and can use the online tools.  I felt this option was best for me because if I had to pay every time, I’d feel resentful about it, whereas if it was prepaid I’d be “wasting” it if I didn’t go.  They also reassured me that it was easy to discontinue it if desired, though I didn’t get to test that.

The first weigh-in was surprisingly matter-of-fact; no shaming, no humiliation.  It was a number, nothing more.  I received a packet of materials and sat in the meeting room.

I don’t remember the first meeting in particular, but in general they are not salesy, or preachy.  The emphasis was on member-supplied strategies around a program-suggested theme.  Above all, the environment was respectful.

After the meeting, there was an orientation for new members that explained the whole point thing.  For the non-WW crowd, points are the way Weight Watchers measures calories, skewed toward encouraging more fiber and discouraging fat.  Two foods could have the same number of calories but different point values if one had more fiber or less fat than the other.

All of a sudden, it made sense-points weren’t just some gimmicky way of counting calories copyright Weight Watchers, but as a mechanism for subtly encouraging different eating behavior.  You can pick to eat anything you want, but you’re less likely to be hungry if you pick healthier foods.  Let’s say you get 25 points per day.  You can eat a large fries for 13 points (500 calories), or a large baked potato for 4 (275 calories).  Do you want to burn more than half your points for one serving of fries?  Or if you’re dying for the fries, go for the small-at 5 points (230 calories), you’ve got a lot of room left for other food.  It’s not just then the amount of calories, but the quality and variety of sources.

The emphasis is not only on the numeric value of the points, but also on what’s called “healthy checks.”  You are encouraged to not only check points, but check off servings of vegetables, lean protein, healthy oils, etc.-again to encourage a varied diet.  We all know we should be eating more fruits and veggies, but for some reason I was more prone to eat them when I could check off I’d done so.

Armed with lots of literature and way too much information, I launched into my first week.

Trader Joe's Blueberry Fiber Mini Cakes

I had seen these Blueberry Fiber Mini Cakes at Trader Joe’s but had passed them by because their appearance is, well, not all that appetizing.  They are dark brown pucks of fiber, and and the few blueberries sprinkled on top do little to add to their visual appeal.  Also, I do my damndest not to look at any of the baked goods there because no good can come from baked goods.  Or so I thought.

I decided to take another look when my Weight Watchers leader brought them to our meeting and noted they are only 1 Point each, vegan, and natural-ish ingredients-no chicory root extract to pump up the fiber.

The first ingredient?  Wheat bran. Only 80 calories, and 1.5 grams of fat.  I’d love to tell you the amount of fiber, but as you can see from the pic the ingredient info was damaged in an effort to extricate the cake.  They also come in apple cranberry, which I would try but they were all snapped up!  I got the last box of the blueberry, disappointing another Weight Watchers meeting attendee behind me.

Visually, they are still are not a cake you’d want to bring home to momma.  Or call a cake.

But still, they are a snack I’d get again.  They are dense and filling, and chock full of blueberries.  They can satisfy a sweet tooth without triggering a sweet tooth attack.  And with the amount of fiber in each one, if they did somehow trigger a binge, it’d be a mistake you’d only make  once.