ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

So last weekend I decided to quit Weight Watchers and I canceled my subscription this Tuesday and I had my mind all made up that I was going to do this thing on my own and hey, screw their chart that says I need to lose 5 more pounds before I can stop paying.  And today I am writing yet another blog post that begins with the word “so”.  It’s what I do.

And so anyway, I had already paid up through October by the time I canceled my membership, so I figured, I like the meeting and I’ve paid for them, so I’ll keep going.  But I hadn’t really talked with my crafty friend about this, so I was afraid she’d be sad and disappointed, and I also wasn’t sure how I wanted to say goodbye to the people at the meeting.  I didn’t want our meeting leader, who is terrific, to feel like she had done something wrong, or that I’m rejecting everything I learned over the past couple years, or anything like that.  So when she weighed me this morning and asked how I was, I said I was “OK” and when she asked how my week had been I said “OK” because I didn’t even know how to bring things up.  I figured I would ask my crafty friend’s opinion before I went announcing anything in my group.

So the meeting leader says to me, “Just wondering, exactly how tall are you, anyway?  Are you like an in-between?”

I was surprised, but I told her I was five foot three and a half.  Then she said, “Well, I didn’t know if I should bring it up, but I heard you talking with [nice older lady] last week and saying that you felt like quitting because you weren’t at goal yet but you felt comfortable with your weight and didn’t want to keep paying to stay in the meetings without reaching Lifetime.  I just couldn’t catch you before you left, because I was helping some new people.”

She showed me a height and weight chart and explained that apparently the first time my goal had been calculated, it was with the assumption that I was five-three, but that if you’re halfway, it’s okay to round up.  I was shocked.  I could have been at goal this whole time instead of hovering just a couple pounds above where I thought I had to be.  The upper “healthy” weight for five-four is 146, which I’ve been safely inside for months now (lower, really, if you think about how they weigh you with your clothes on).  “Talk to me after the meeting and we’ll sort this all out,” she said.

It wasn’t a bad meeting, but I couldn’t wait for it to be over.  I sat with my high-school friend because my crafty friend wasn’t there yet, and we talked about healthy breakfast things to eat and other stuff, but I just kept thinking, thinking about what she had said.  After the meeting we looked at the chart together again and she said that she was really sorry that she couldn’t declare me retroactively to be at goal, but that if I could just maintain here for another six weeks, I would be at my Lifetime goal and I could stop paying as long as I didn’t go more than two pounds over my 146 that she now has put down for me. And I realized this made a lot of sense, particularly since I’ve already paid for October anyway.

Well, check this out, bitches.  I weighed myself at 140.6 this morning, and at the meeting I weighed in at 144.2.  Assuming my scale isn’t being a little shit, I’m in good shape so far.  Both those numbers are way, way, safely within the 146 she set for me.  So basically now I need to work on staying exactly where I am right now.  This may be difficult.  I don’t anticipate having problems after that, but I think I can rise to the challenge of hovering here for six weeks.  It’s weird, a week ago the thought of trying any harder just exhausted me.  But now it feels different, like you’ve been wandering in a dark tunnel for a long time and then you suddenly turn a corner and realize that you were really close to the proverbial light for a while, except that you weren’t staring it down the whole time.  And so feeling this close makes kind of a difference.  It kind of sucks that could’ve been at goal for months now and I had no clue, but I’m sort of glad now it worked out the way it did.  It was probably a good confidence booster for me to maintain roughly the same weight through a really undisciplined summer that included two weeks of eating Midwestern funeral food, catering all my own food for our wedding, Pronto Pups at the state fair, and now, a wedding cake for our friends.

“What if after the six weeks I lose more weight?” I asked her.  “I don’t want to focus as much on my food anymore, but I’d like to work on my fitness.  If I lose more weight will I get in trouble or something?”

“Not after the initial six weeks,” she said.  “And not unless you start getting underweight according to the chart.  We’ll ask you to start taking in some more calories if that happens.”  Yeah, I don’t really think I’m going to have that problem.  I told her thank you so, so much for talking to me instead of just letting me leave.

I felt like crying and laughing at the same time.  I know how weird that sounds.  And after I left, I had this weird feeling for a while, like I wasn’t sure if I was completely happy about it.  By later in the day, I had chatted with my crafty friend a little and decided that this was probably just because I’d made up my mind on sort of a difficult matter and then had it suddenly unmade for me.  And when I made it home later after wandering around City Market with my crafty friend and her husband, I felt better.

This is a nice thing, even though it caught me off guard at the time.  My meeting leader actually liked me enough to help me be able to stay, even though you’d think it would be in their best interests to keep me paying.  Although, maybe they figured since I’ve paid them almost $900 over the past couple of years, I’d done my time.  Either way, it was nice.  She told me she considered me such an inspiration to the group that she’d love me to become a meeting leader sometime after my goal.  This kind of surprised me.  After I heard more, I learned that the reason for this is that I am that person who never shuts the fuck up and is always raising my hand and talking about how when I was a fatty I used to do shit like stand at the fridge and eat ice cream and cake out of it with a masonry trowel.  Apparently oversharers like this are popular with meeting leaders because lots of Weight Watchers members prefer to sit there like mopes and it helps the meeting feel less like a healthy funeral when there are a few blabbery people there.

So.  Fucking A.