No, let's not discuss it.

You may be surprised to learn, dear reader, that I do not tell most people I know in real life about my weight loss efforts. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that many people are absolute conversational dullards who will want to discuss the ins and outs of weight management in the most mundane possible way for the next half hour. The second is that I fear people will want me to join in the sport of bashing the previous, heavier version of my body, like the way people want you to rip apart your ex, but you're like, "But I loved that person." I refuse to join in any body bashing. The third reason, especially when dealing with women, is that I don't have the energy to cope with the "You're so good, and I need to do that, too," reaction. I'm very busy and have neither the time nor the desire to conduct concurrent crash courses in Feminism 101 and First-Year Self-Esteem.

And that's the story.

Mnph...Food...Hangover

Yesterday, my husband defended his PhD. (Hurray!) It was a strange, unstructured day, a day with lots of food around, a day when I ate ALL that food because I was nervous/celebratory. In a word: Regression.

(A pause to emphasize that this was a fantastic, momentous day! Happy!)

Despite my efforts in packing a favorite salad for lunch, here is what I ate yesterday:

• pie (yes, at breakfast)
• cereal and soy milk
• coffee
• 3 cookies
• some of that salad
• a giant falafel wrap
• iced coffee (at 4:30 PM! Then I wondered why I couldn't sleep...)
• fried Indian appetizers: half a samosa and 2 pakoras
• masala chai (tasted traditional, i.e., made with half-and-half in place of milk)
  
• naan
• coconut rice
• channa saagwala (mmmm, spinach, chickpeas, spices, and loads of ghee)
• kulfi

Immediately after dinner, I felt sluggish, bloated, heavy, gross. My mind was dull. I recognized this sensation and instantly realized that I hadn't felt it since I began WW. I used to feel this hyperglycemic stupor fairly often after a restaurant meal. Also? I'm mildly lactose intolerant, but yesterday I did a marvelous job of pretending I was not.

I didn't feel well as I tried to sleep last night. My gut felt heavy, my mind was both dull and racing, muscles achy. I dreamed all night that it was Christmas and I could not get away from holiday cookies and eggnog. At one time, these would have been heavenly dreams, but last night, they were nightmares.

This morning is the strangest, though. I feel what I can only describe as a food hangover. Its symptoms are different from a regular hangover (so I'm told, I was never a big fan of alcohol). I STILL feel full and slightly queasy. My mouth is dry and has a bad taste. Brain racing and slightly foggy still.

This experience is an excellent affirmation for me of the effects food has on my body and mind, and also of the improvements to my own well-being thanks to WW.

I think a little tea with a little honey and a slice of toast will suffice for breakfast. I think I will stick to monastic food today.

Things I learned during the first 5%

I learned a whole lot about weight loss, maintenance, and food as I dropped the first 5% of my original body weight. Here are some of the gems.

1. Healthy food is not necessarily low-calorie food. This is a key error I was making all along.
2. Hershey's is just not worth it. Ghiradelli dark chocolate is. Scharffen Berger? Really worth it.
3. The hot dog/cheese/peanut butter/pizza seems like it will be filling, but it really won't. High-fiber, high-water-content foods are filling.
4. Support is necessary to lose weight. I would not be able to do it by myself.
4a. Do not discuss weight issues with my parents, who try but fail to be supportive. They programmed my food issue buttons; of course they know how to push them!
4b. There are friends with whom I should not eat out. They will try to push the fried appetizers and dessert on me. They may comment excessively about the healthfulness of my food selections.
4b1. DUDE. I don't comment about your food--except maybe flavors and textures! Do not comment on mine!
5. Rolls have more Points than I think. They can destroy a day's or a week's hard work. Ditto for the restaurant bread basket.
5a. It's advisable to have a small snack before dining out, so that I will not face the bread basket when faint from hunger. I could never win that battle unprepared. The bread basket is an admirable foe.
6. It's not really about willpower. It's about preparation and analysis.
7. My favorite mantra from the WW leader: What you did last matters less than what you do next.

Two highly practical points:
1. It's good to keep some Applegate Farms Chicken & Sage sausage in the freezer, so I can microwave one or two when I get that NEED MEAT NOW! feeling. (Just 1 Point per sausage! So satisfying!)
2. If possible, urinate just before weekly weigh-in. Just a little water retention can cause a 1-2 pound weight increase on the scale.

Getting back on the wagon: let's define.

Here's the scenario. You are taken out for lunch. You see the bread basket and, starving, estimate maybe 2 Points/roll. You eat two.

You discover later that the rolls at this particular Small Chain are double the points you thought. This means you are out of Points to eat dinner. Moreover, because you've already eaten out twice this week (happy birthday!?), you have consumed your allocated 35 "floating" Points per week. You can only earn so many Points from exercise, and anyway, you are incredibly sore and need to take it easy today.

If you skip supper, you will feel cranky and stressy and maybe end up just eating loads of high-carbohydrate foods later. If you don't skip it, you are guaranteed not to lose weight today. I mean, the point of counting Points is to stay within them.

Which is it? How does one get back on the wagon in time for dinner? This scenario keeps knocking me off my wagon this week--again, happy birthday?--and, because I'm not sure how to turn it around, I end up off the wagon well into the next day.

Eating Too Many Calories Is Not a Moral Failing.

I ate too many brownies last week. I made Valentine's brownies for my husband and then ate a lot of them myself. I discovered that all that sugar and chocolate put me on a horrible energy-and-mood roller coaster ride. On Sunday, fatigued, pale, and puffy, I got off the ride. I ate whole grains, nothing refined. I felt better within 24 hours.

I shared my story of brownies and redemption at the WW meeting, and rather to my surprise, the leader congratulated me both for my insight on how the brownies made me feel, and for taking the next step, ie, recovering and moving on. She emphasized throughout the meeting that what you already did is less important than what you do next. I liked that a lot.

Meantime, today my parents took us out for lunch for my birthday. They are so weirdly moralistic about calories. My dad was once overweight and then lost a bunch of weight (using WW without meetings) and has kept it off. Ever since he has had the self-righteousness of the converted, wielding judgment about food, fat, and exercise with a traditional pastor's relish of fire and brimstone.

Mom is currently trying to lose weight. Last time I saw her, she beat herself up all day for eating a spanikopita and then discovering, by looking through my WW food guide, that it was more Points than she thought. She is not even doing Weight Watchers. At the time, she had not even started her own weight loss efforts. For the rest of the day, she went on and on about how awful she felt for eating the spanikopita. Her righteousness is inner-directed, channeled into guilt. "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you..." Over the holidays she made fun of Oprah's weight. I told her not to pick on people for weight. As usual, she felt guilty, but perhaps more powerfully, she felt embarrassed for picking on Oprah because she herself is overweight.

Why is weight an OK target for ridicule? Oh, right! It's NOT! No matter how fat or thin you are!

I'd forgotten some of my folks' strange fat-moralism until my own WW journey began. I mentioned to my mom that in weeks 3-4 I gained 2.4 pounds back, and she was disappointed on a level far beyond what was acceptable. Everyone who's done WW assures me that gains here & there are normal and part of the process; what we're aiming for is an overall downward trajectory over time.

At lunch today, I mentioned a previous lunch FAIL. I had ordered a salad wrap in a food court, thinking it would be more healthful than a delicious, delectable Indian dish, only later to discover that my unsatisfying wrap contained a sneaky 1400 calories. My mom turned pale, and asked, with something akin to terror, what caused all those calories. "The dressing," I replied, matter-of-factly. Dad replied in a moralistic, preachy tone, "Salad dressing is bad. You have to be really careful." I snapped back an "I KNOW." A little support would have been nice, a little, "Wow! That's a crazy salad story! It happens, though." But no, JUDGMENT.

I could go on longer, about how my mom saw me looking hungry waiting for our food at the restaurant and tried to foist more bread on my plate, about other awkward, contradictory food events today, but...eh. I guess I just have to stop talking about my weight loss process with them altogether. Cut 'em off.

The results of Points FAIL

I gained 2.5 lbs since my last meeting. I would be lying if I said I were not disappointed and not kicking myself. Intellectually I know I just have to take my lumps and move on, get back on the horse, stiff upper lip. But I'm having a rough couple of weeks.

The disaster that is grade 7 ELA substitute teaching has me feeling like I'm a Bad Teacher and I should Not be making this career move. On the other hand, the lead teacher did try to cajole me into staying the rest of the year, and the other 7th grade teachers also look fed up, wiped out, and exasperated this week. This is one tough group of kids. Again, intellectually, I understand this. But at the end of the day, I feel like a fat, failed teacher.

Emotionally, I'm feeling down, stressed, insecure. Does not help that it's the Worst Time of Year and the Worst Time of Month all at once, a condition for which my friend R. says, "Just write 'S.W.' on the calendar for the week." S.W.? "Suicide Watch," she explained.

Ah, gallows humor, so necessary in mid-February.

Why now?

I spent a long time feeling perfectly content at my overweight weight. Ann, whose thoughtful blog everyone should read, got me wondering why I suddenly joined WW and embarked upon this Journey of Weight Loss.

There was one immediate reason: My new health insurance gave me coupons to go for free. There were other more superficial reasons, too, like the fact that all the MyPyramid effort left me feeling tired, hungry, and alone. Clearly I needed an established system, and WW has been around for 45 years. That's quite a bit longer than I've been around.

OK, fine, but why the decision to lose weight? I think it has to do with my Saturn return.

When I turned 30 last February, I examined my life carefully. I decided to make a complete career change, complete with graduate school and everything. I decided not to take crap from people anymore; I was too darn nice. I also decided to get a new, adult wardrobe.

In a sense, everything I've started since my 30th has been about becoming the shaper of my own life. I'm a go-with-the-flow gal, but I decided it was high time for ME to be the one in charge. Part of shaping my life, I decided, was shaping my own body, and with it my own health.

I've been proofreading an oncology nutrition textbook, and let me tell you: Obesity increases the risk of every single kind of cancer, and they don't even know why. Don't get me started on heart disease.

Actually, DO get me started, because all my grandparents save one have had major heart disease. Grandpa F., a foodie like me, was so obese by the end of his short life--I don't think he reached 70--that he could not walk. He could not leave the house. He had gigantic, edemic ankles that were always in pain. He slept with an oxygen mask because of the apnea. His world grew sad and insulated. Like me, he ate only fresh, nonprocessed food. He died and left Grandma F. to fend for herself with breast cancer. She was very thin, but if I have the gene and the extra fat, my risk is automatically increased.

Grandpa C., a living miracle at 81, has had several massive heart attacks. Grandma C.? Quadruple bypass surgery. Now, I'm not saying that all of these problems are caused by weight. What I am saying is that I have a tough genetic history that does not need to be encouraged by extra weight.

I have a tough genetic history, and two docs pointed out to me that a person in her 30s will gain weight eating the exact same food in the exact same amounts that she ate in her 20s. Because I had gained weight in my 20s, when youthful metabolism was still running high, I was likely to end my 30s even bigger. I decided not to test this out. I had a vision of becoming Grandpa F., spending life between bed and kitchen chair, painful purple ankles. I am most happy when I'm dancing to music I love, walking outdoors, canoeing. I have to move. I must go outside. It is my nature.

Melodramatic visions aside, this is really about being the one in charge of my life. I am lucky, in a sense, that I've never been on a traditional "diet." I am free of the diet mentality. The older women at WW are constantly being reminded to lose the notion of "diet;" I'm like, "What's a diet?"

On the other hand, I have always gained or lost weight without really knowing how or why. I mean, yes, caloric intake greater than caloric output = gaining weight. Caloric intake less than caloric expenditure = losing weight. I get that. But it would happen to me, randomly, without my conscious choice of gaining, losing, or maintaining my weight. I decided that this was not what I wanted. How could I be in charge of my life if I was not even in charge of my own fat cells? If I was not aware of how the food I ate was affecting them?

I think my mentality--I am doing WW to learn how to take care of myself and to be in charge of my own destiny-- is much of what is breeding my success. My weight loss of about 2 lb/week is exactly on target for what WW says to expect. Other people are not having as much success, and I suspect that they are coming at the program from a different angle. Their headspace is different.

So, to return to the beginning: This is all because of my Saturn return.

It takes me a little while to get it.

I went for a nice, peaceful walk today. I chose the quieter area available to me, the arboretum with its paths through the woods. I wanted to commune with the winter songbirds and, also, to walk on paths shielded from the wind by tall pine trees. I saw two friendly chickadees, one determined woodpecker, and a fat tufted titmouse. We watched each other, which is the interesting thing about birdwatching.

Anyway, I returned home in a particularly peaceful frame of mind with a particularly open heart, and there in the mailbox was an advertisement for Shambhala Sun, a Buddhist magazine. And there, nestled in the marketing materials, was a letter from my teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, writing about mindfulness, about how mindfulness is the miracle that makes happiness possible. And then it hit me.

To a certain extent, I've been seeing my WW process as a battle, as a fighting to stay within my point ranges and burn those calories through exercise. But the combination of birdsong and Thay's message reverberated, and shook loose this idea: What if I reframe this undertaking as a sort of mindfulness? What if I see this counting points as a form of food meditation, intended, as all forms of mindfulness, to create health? Why, it becomes a whole different thing, doesn't it? So this is my new frame: mindfulness.