The Mighty Kymm-Sweet as a Biscuit-27 August 2002

27 August

So yesterday I started back on Weight Watchers, only without the meetings. It's so hard to get my ass to them, but now that I have a scale at home, I can do it properly myself.

On Saturday I decided to get on the scale and see exactly how much weight I have gained in the months since I stopped doing it and started eating like a truffle pig. I braced myself to have gained back everything that I had lost, which was nearly 18 pounds.

Five pounds. Five! Pounds! In four! Months! Just imagine how much more I could have been eating! Considering how many of those 600 calorie chai crème frappuccinos I have sucked down, that five pound gain is well-nigh impossible. However, when I got off the scale, the needle went right back to zero, and it is a Healthometer, which is an excellent brand, so I have decided to believe it implicitly.

I've gotta tell you, if I hadn't decided to go back on Weight Watchers already, a couple of pictures that Katie took of me with my camera would have done it for me.

They are approximately the ugliest pictures of me ever taken, and I can't even say that the camera adds weight or ugliness or anything, since all of the pictures of everyone else, Katie and Bonnie and Molly, all look exactly like them. So I have to accept that that it what I actually look like.

Which is basically, a sperm whale. Except worse, because at least a sperm whale hasn't got fat arms. I deleted the ugliest one immediately, but the next ugliest one I am saving, and maybe, someday, if I ever lose the weight, I will show it as a "before" picture, but not until there is an after.

My God, though, it's a pretty big slap in the face to see what you really look like when you are not posing yourself carefully to keep the major ugliness disguised. I mean, candid shots are fine when they are other people, this is why I am the photographer. My point is that my mental picture of myself isn't that. It's not me skinny, but it's definitely me about fifty pounds less than I am at this moment.

So when you have this fairly chunky picture of yourself in your head, and you suddenly realize that you would be thrilled to actually look like you think you look like, well, it gives a girl pause. And it sends a girl back into the arms of Weight Watchers, begging for forgiveness.

The problem with dieting, and I know that you are going to be shocked at this revelation, but time has to actually pass for weight loss to occur. I know! Who ever heard of such a thing! I mean, I decide to lose weight, I daydream about how great it will be when I have lost weight, I work really hard on staying in my points and so on, and then...nothing. Well, not nothing, something, but in terms of what I have to lose, two pounds or six pounds or twenty pounds might as well be nothing. I have to keep on doing it just like that for months and months! Who thought up this process, it totally sucks rotten ass.

If I decide to lose weight, my making such a decision should just make it so that I can unzip my body and step out of it, all lovely and thin, because if the hardest part is deciding, then I have already done the hardest part, and it should be done already. The hardest part is not deciding, the hardest part is carrying on with it for the year and a half that it takes and not getting bored with it, that's the hardest part. The hardest part is the sheer monotony. Which is why the best diet I was ever on was the one that I didn't notice that I was on, but in the last decade or so, I haven't managed to do it again.

Of course, the key is that the time passes anyway, and all of a sudden you look at your neglected weight chart, and realize that if you had kept on it, you'd be down another thirty pounds from when you stopped, rather than gaining five pounds of the loss back again. And trust me when I say that I'm grateful that I only gained back five pounds, but had I not slid off the wagon, I would be that much closer to my goal, rather than having wasted these months and having to re-lose a fiver that I had already lost. Because the time passes anyway. And I'm 38 years old and my arms look like Christmas hams. I don't particularly want to look like this when I'm 39.

I wrote this long before posting it, and before I managed to do so, Jen wrote a very similar, and excellent entry.

(bonnie)