Commitment

Buff has started bringing cookies in the house, and Bunny has started grabbing a handful here and there, a couple of times a day (or three).

Mindless eating.

Bunny has Weight Watchers set up on a monthly autopay, but can never get to the meetings because of her job. She used to be able to make it to the Center in time to at least weigh in and maybe catch the last five minutes of the meeting, but she hasn’t even been able to do that for a couple of months. She gets stuck late at work, and traffic is awful.

It doesn’t help that Weight Watchers, a huge, global corporation, still runs its Centers like a mom and pop organization. They’re open only around meeting time, shutting down very soon thereafter, and there are only a few meetings a week. And only one or two Bunny even has a chance of making.

She tried to do Weight Watcher online, but she needs the forced weigh-in to stay on track. This isn’t working, and at this point Bunny’s not even following the food plan. Especially since the cookies arrived.

So. Bye-bye Weight Watchers, see ya later.

Hello, weekly weigh-in at the gym. This is good. That means she has to go to the gym at least once a week, something she has also not been doing in the last couple of months.

Bunny also commits to following the Weight Watchers food plan, counting her points, renewing her efforts, and keeping a food diary.

So. Let’s review the commitments Bunny makes today:

• Weekly weigh-in at the gym.
• Keep food diary.
• Follow Weight Watchers plan.
• Refocus and renew effort.
• No cookies.
• Make Trudy jealous when she gets on board that ship later this year.

Let’s do it!!!

Back in Focus

Counting Weight Watchers points is a task. Like all tasks, it gets tiresome and boring.

The first sign that the butter is slipping off the bread is when you stop entering the food you eat into your food diary. In Bunny’s case, the food diary is online, but it doesn’t matter whether you keep your diary with a software program, on an official form, in a little memo pad, or in lipstick on the wall of your house.

It’s the process that counts.

And ultimately it doesn’t really matter if you write down exactly what you ate, either. Bunny’s morning shake can be entered as “shake” and the points count. She used to write down every single ingredient and their amounts, and that got old fast. Nobody ever sees her diary. “Shake” is just fine.

It’s no big deal if she counts the number of servings of each kind of food she has consumed, either. There’s a place to mark down how many fruits you have eaten that day, how many protein servings, whether you’ve gotten in your daily dose of olive oil, and how much water you’ve chugged down. Even whether you took your vitamin. Stupidly, there’s a place to count your servings of veggies. The vast majority of veggies are unlimited on the Weight Watchers plan, so this seems silly to Bunny. She never bothers with that. And that works fine for her.

What is important, at least in Bunny’s case, is the process. She is successful when she is engaged. Fully conscious of what she is eating. This is 4 points. This is 1 point. I should order this instead of that, hold the whatever and put the do-dads on the side, please.

She starts to slip out of the habit when she gets lazy and stops keeping her food diary. It’s a task. It’s just another thing she has to do every day. Like putting gas in the car. Scooping out the kitty box. Unloading the dishwasher.

If she didn’t have to do those things, she wouldn’t. Same goes for entering what she eats in the food diary.

But it’s a matter of focus. Being fully conscious and aware of what she’s eating and becoming accountable.

And that most definitely does matter.

The slide begins when she starts eating without keeping track, at least in her mind.

She knows that if she stays within her point count, she’s successful.

She knows that she can go over her point count and still be successful. That leads her to just kinda sorta figure that she’s within a reasonably safe range, and skip the entry. THAT eventually leads her to stop thinking about how many points she’s consuming. THAT leads us to where we were the day before yesterday.

The good news is that Bunny is back on track. The picture we painted of social shame, physical misery, dread disease and ugly clothes has swayed her.

She is focused, she is engaged, she’s counting her points, and she understands what’s at stake. And she’s fine with it.

She seems to get tangled up and lose focus when she doesn’t know how to count a particular meal, usually at a restaurant. So we gave her a quick fix.

If it’s a reasonable portion of something that’s reasonably in line with what she should be eating, count it as 10 points.

If she ate too much of something ok, or ate some of something not so ok (like a piece of cake), count it as 15 points and move on.

Bunny gets 30 points a day, with an extra 35 points to bail her out during the week.

So Bunny’s back on track. Think good thoughts.

And thanks for reading. You’re helping to keep Bunny motivated. She doesn’t want to fail the nice people who take the time and effort to follow her journey.

Let’s keep the pressure on!

The Write Thing?

Bunny got a little lazy this week. She hasn’t been updating her food diary.

What that means is that she’s not exactly counting her Weight Watchers points.

She’s sort of guessing.

Estimating.

We think she’s getting a little cocky after two weigh-ins with unexpected weight loss.

Well, it’s weigh-in day again.

We’ll see…

LATER…

We’d like to congratulate Bunny on losing four-tenths of a pound!

We’d also like to suggest that if she had paid a teensy bit more attention to counting points, she might have lost the extra two-tenths of a pound that would have brought her to her first goal.

We’re just saying.