Having recently reached new milestones on Weight Watchers, I’ve started to think back to past attempts on plan. As I mentioned in my intro post, this is not my first time having been on plan nor is it the first time that I have shown a successful first several months following everything to the letter. To see where this started, let’s go back about 20 years. I was fifteen, I had been pudgy for the prior decade, and I had a problem with overeating to the point that my mom resorted to the humiliating act of putting locks on the cabinets and freezer for a time. During this time, she seriously thought I may have had Prater-Wili Syndrome though my habit of overeating was part genetic – she eventually had a gastric sleeve put in years later – and part out of boredom and stress. Growing up in small town upstate New York, there wasn’t much to do minus eat, watch TV, and to go to the library for my two escapes: books and the Internet.
I don’t remember the exact why of how things transpired, but when a checkup showed that I was carrying 222 pounds on a 5’5” frame it was a cause for alarm for her. I don’t remember if a doctor’s note was involved (probably not) but we ended up signing up late that Winter under the allure of this newfangled concept of Points. Mom had tried it several times prior but things such as food exchanges and certain foods being discouraged were a total no-go. “It’s so much simpler now,” she exclaimed. Soon enough, we were clearing out 5:30 on a Monday night to go to the only meeting in our area, one town over across the Connecticut state line in the basement of a Methodist church. Our leader was this guy Rich, a blatantly flamboyant man who lived somewhere near New Haven who brought a unique energy to the meetings and seemed to relate to me instantly being one of the few male members of the group. He would exclaim about new finds to the group and we would hang onto his every word, even the ones that weren’t fully feasible as was his near-obsession with the local Connecticut chain Duchess, a chain I had never heard of prior. At a time when I had a strained relationship with my own dad and even authority figures at school had turned on me, Rich was someone to strive being like and I can say that at that point he made me a better and more motivated person.
Through some early struggles, the pounds began to melt off and by my birthday that August I was 180 and had to look for new clothes for my penultimate year of high school. Monday nights had become my favorite time of week and everything was clicking on all cylinders. I had set my goal for something in the 140 range and I just knew that if I stuck to things I could get there, what’s the worst that could happen.
Moving six weeks into Junior year of high school because Mom fell head over heels for an ex-coworker happened. A coworker who didn’t necessarily care and kept such exotic junk food as Nutella around the house. A transfer from a high school where school lunches were practically inedible (which encouraged me brown bagging it) to a high school with such fun things as an amazing popcorn chicken I wish I could find as an adult. Our meeting transitioned from Monday nights at a church to meeting shopping at a suburban strip mall storefront. My mind entered maintenance mode though I knew that if I could click with the right leader I would be down past 150 for sure.
This picture hangs in my Dad’s living room in an exurb of Atlanta. This is my high school senior picture, taken July 1999. I was around 180 or so and even today is one of my favorite pictures of myself. Maybe it was how relatively thin I looked, maybe it’s that this was the summer that Sun-In made my hair look red rather than blond, but I looked good. If I could’ve kept at that, I would’ve been on track. If I could’ve found a leader I could connect with even a tenth as well as I did with Rich, I would have probably reached a healthy weight and my life prospects would be a LOT different.
What happened? A hellish Senior Year where circumstances smothered the budding friendships I had made the year prior and overreach by assorted authority figures made things worse. I gained a little weight, “12 pounds for 12th Grade,” I joked, “better this than if I had a Freshman 15!”. Then my mental health went south as things got worse and the district psychiatrist had a grand idea to put me on a drug to help with assorted issues. While I was on said drug, I stick to plan to a T doing nothing different than I would have done prior.
The first weigh-in after starting the drug, I heard four words I did not want to hear: “You went up 8.” That is a gain of over a pound a day without any major changes in diet or anything nor was there the leeway that now exists – no weeklies, no FitPoints, no rollover, nothing. I was in absolute shock wondering what could’ve gone wrong. The next week showed a similar, but slightly smaller gain. Nothing was different, I wasn’t lying about my points intake, something went wrong.
In one month, I gained just under 30 pounds, more or less canceling the work I had done a year and a half earlier; eventually, said drug had “extreme weight gain” added to its side effects list. Soon enough, I left Weight Watchers for a carousel of diets and nothing seemed to work; I remember one where you could have no carbs for 23 hours a day but could pig out for one full hour a day. A few later tries had some success but the bloom was off would be off the rose for many, many years.
Today, that church no longer holds a meeting and one living in my old hometown has to drive over 20 miles for any sort of meeting. I have no idea what ever happened to Rich but if I could thank him, I so would. Even though it was gained back, who knows where I would’ve been had I not lost that initial 40 pounds.