I went back to weight watchers (the cult) last week, and today was my first weigh in. I'm very pleased to announce that I've lost 3.8 pounds in the past week, even though I know that most of that is water weight. Even so, I feel better and I'm eating better now that I have a little structure.

I first went to the cult before my wedding. I was overweight and had been for a few years, and I desperately didn't want to have to look at my wedding photos years down the line and think to myself "ug- I look so fat in that photo..." So I went and weighed in week after week and ended up losing about 25 pounds. It was good and I felt good and that was that. Then I got pregnant and stopped thinking about portion size and low fat and high fiber and I just ate. Eating bland, starchy foods made my nausea better in the first trimester, and eating helped me emotionally cope with the massive changes I was going through. I didn't blow up too much while pregnant, but enough that I couldn't just drop those pounds without some sort of outside assistance. And I've been trying, but not hard enough. See, there's this thing called chocolate and I can't seem to break the habit.

I used to skip the meetings and just weigh in, but now that I'm making a new start I think I will do the meetings again. The problem before was that the meeting leaders were just so strange and uninspiring. There was this really wierd one who I swear was a tranny, or at least aspired to good tranny fashions. I used to spend the whole meetings examining her throat, looking for the scar from where they removed her adam's apple. Not that I think trannies are inherently strange, it's just having a tranny lead a weight watcher's meeting that is so off. It was like having Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie coaching you through a weight watchers meeting. Like I said- strange.

Now they have Patty, the overenthusiastic leader. I like her so far, or maybe I like her energy. And she actually wears decent clothes, not the drapey polyester Dress Barn dresses and pearls that Miss Thing wore. She has this incredibly loud voice. It's almost like she thinks she's leading a cult meeting at Madison Square Garden and the PA system is on the fritz. Seriously- last week I counted two women who popped some tylenol within minutes of the meeting starting. I can't imagine coming to a meeting hung-over. holy cow, that would be painful.

Not being from this area, when I first joined the cult years ago I approached it as an ethnographic experience. Attend and observe, but don't participate. Maybe because I've lived here for five years and am not as impressed by the Connecticut experience, or maybe I'm just more mature, but I'm trying to avoid that trap again. Feeling superior doesn't make one superior, you know? I used to just sit and watch, but today I was there with them, shouting out my weight loss total and enjoying the talk. I even won some fat-free puddings in the raffle.

I'm really trying to do something big here. Or perhaps just do something less big than it was last week. But I'm not going to observe any more. I'm going to participate. damn it.