Back to square one

So here I am, back on Weight Watchers. I tried this last year, but quit for a number of reasons. I think that this time I’m just going to go to the meetings for long enough to pick up all the supplies, and then I’m going to switch over to the on-line version. Mostly because the weigh-ins make me crazy, and I’m finally at a place where I’m trying REALLY hard to focus more on doing things that give me more energy, as opposed to doing things that will make me thinner. :P (Of course, I’m also secretly hoping that as I get more energy, I’ll also get thinner! LOL)

Part of the reason I quit last year though, was b/c of those damn weigh-ins. I had a mild eating disorder in college (a “mild” one! Is that like being “a little” pregnant?! LOL), and I pretty much had the behavior under control by the time I got to the meetings last year, but those weigh-ins felt SO humiliating that suddenly I found myself bingeing and starving and bingeing and purging and bingeing . . . ::::sigh:::: If I lost weight, I should have lost more; if I’d gained weight, then fuck it, I was obviously bad and defective, and why bother trying?

So when I went to the meeting this week, I just told the lady, “I don’t EVER want to know what I weigh. I’m not doing this for my weight, and I used to have an eating disorder, so knowing will make me nuts.” She was very nice about it, actually. My mom pointed out that this is Los Angeles after all, and it’s probably not the first time they’ve encountered this! So she didn’t even give me the little book (the one where they write your weight in it every week, and theoretically you take it home and happily chart your progress!); she stuck it in the file and said, “When you come in, don’t even get it out; just let your weigh-in person know, and have them go get it for you.” I LOVE that lady!!

So now I’m counting points and trying to stay within them. The hard part is that as soon as I feel like I “have” to do something, I will immediately do the opposite. So I keep reminding myself that this is just a choice, like anything else, and anytime I want to I can choose not to do it. If I eat an entire bag of chips, it does not make me a bad person; it’s just a different choice that I made. Not good, not bad, just different, with different consequences. (I actually thwarted a binge yesterday by thinking that over and over as I ate. I still ate too many chips, but it was twice as many as I should have eaten instead of 10 times as many! LOL Baby steps and all that . . . )

So now I’m starting this blog back up with the idea that (sort of like those WW weigh-ins), I can chart my progress. Except now I’m charting mental and emotional progress. My body will respond to whatever state my mind and emotions are in and obviously working from the “outside in” hasn’t gotten me very far. So now let’s try working from the “inside out.”