somewhere between hot cheetos and whole30

Confession: I joined Weight Watchers. Why is this a confession and not just a statement of what-I-did yesterday? A bunch of reasons:

Canned fruit platter anyone?

Feminism: As I’ve said before, good feminists are supposed to love their bodies and, if they want to get in better shape, train for triathlons or something. They’re not supposed to give money and energy to the Weight Loss Industrial Complex. Despite feeling a bit doughy these days, I do actually love my body. I don’t always like it, but I love it. Once you hit a certain age and/or have survived a disease or two, you have genuine gratitude for every day without organ failure. But I’m not so great at treating my body like I love it. Eating M&Ms (which, let’s be honest, are the Charles Shaw of chocolate) by the truckload is not love.

It's a salad bowl and a melting pot!

It’s so middle-brow: Weight Watchers sounds like something a forty-year-old mom should do, not a vibrant young person like…oh wait. Again, I feel like my cooler peers do CrossFit and Whole30. But my former Parenting for Social Justice group was quick to point out that Whole30 is classist because almonds and free-range chicken are expensive, and making everything from scratch requires a lot of leisure time. If you’re truly poor, you’re probably not joining Weight Watchers either; you’re living off ramen and Hot Cheetos and various combinations thereof, and there’s a certain pride in that. But Weight Watchers is like Phantom of the Opera or Jodi Picoult—to be ridiculed because it’s for the masses, but not necessarily the oppressed masses. To which I say fuck that thinking.

Why can’t I just eat a fucking salad? This is the big one. I’m a firm believer in the Michael Pollan Diet: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. If the solution is simple, what’s my problem? That’s what I wondered during so many shame spirals. Despite a predictable high school and college history of disordered eating, I managed to eat (pretty) well and exercise regularly for about 15 years afterward, so it stood to reason that I should be able to do it again. But should is not is.

Yesterday I had a small epiphany: In every area where I’ve had success, I’ve had help. Writing a book. Raising a kid. Recovering from cancer. Getting my head straight. I’m completely open and shameless about my writing group, my co-parent and family, my team of doctors and my therapist. So if I need some nutritional coaching, where’s the shame in that?

The shame is in 1995. Food and I go way back, and I realized I was applying my old-timey value system to a current problem. When I catastrophize about all the ways I could fall apart in life, I usually tell myself Well, if it [whatever it is] got to that point, I hope I’d be brave enough to ask for help. That’s the only guarantee that any of us won’t end up on an episode of Intervention or Hoarders. I could wait until I had 200 pounds to lose instead of 20, but why not save myself some suffering?

When I think about what I’ve learned from my miscarriage spin-out (in which I sought minimal help) and my cancer experience (lots of help), it resonates with what we say every day at Homeboy: Healing happens in community. Eating a lot of mediocre chocolate happens in private.

All the ick of canned tuna, all the horror of a whole fish looking at you.

Also: Meet people where they’re at. I’m not a naturally thin person who can eat based on logic. I’m someone who can be “normal” five days out of six, but on the sixth day I turn into an exhausted, ravenous monster who happens to work above a bakery, which is a dangerous combination. That’s where I’m at.

Feeling inspired to eat a croissant instead.

Also: Do what works. What I’ve been doing—trying and failing and trying and failing—doesn’t work. Or it works for five days out of six. Weight Watchers doesn’t work for everyone. It doesn’t work for people with extremely slow metabolisms or people with mean Weight Watchers group leaders. But it worked for my sister, who joined a little over a year ago and lost all the stress weight she’d put on during the (super stressful) year before. She shed pounds and also a lot of shame; WW became her therapy, despite all my years of proselytizing about actual therapy. To her credit, she never evangelized about Weight Watchers. She is a better woman than I am.

I feel really conscious of the fact that Weight Watchers has been “her thing” and here I am blogging about it before attending a single meeting. As most people with siblings know, almost everything is subject to becoming battleground for sibling rivalry. So in addition to not attending the same meetings as my sister, I’m going to try to be low-key about this in general, and to fight my flare for drama. I don’t particularly want Weight Watchers to be “my thing,” but for a while I would like it to be my body’s thing. I’ll let you know how it goes. But I’ll try not to overshare. Too much.