Columns, Opinion

TAMOLA: About Weight Watchers

You know those Pinterest quote boards or your sorority sisters or whatever who talk about loving wildly and doing everything to the extreme and living in the moment and all. You know, that stuff.

That’s kind of how I am with food.

I love food. I try to tell myself whenever I am out at a restaurant, that in an hour or so I’ll be done with the meal anyway so I should get a salad, but then I can only think of that moment and go NAH GONNA GET A FRIED EGG BURGER, but good effort, brain.

My mom knows me very well. When she found out that I would be working at a frozen yogurt store, she said, “Katie…don’t eat the yogurt.”

I responded with, “……….” This is my typical response for situations that entail me knowing, but not willing to acknowledge, that I am a mess.

Carolanne knows. She just knows.

Anyway, I, like most of the customers I encounter, walked on in and thought frozen yogurt. It’s not ice cream. It’s made with skim milk, which is basically kale. Calcium builds strong bones. So I’m basically a healthy tiger. Tigers are apparently my animal standard for health. I’m making such good choices for my body!

No. No. No. Absolutely not. Not again. Bye.

Let me explain. So to reverberate, many people come into my job and talk to me about how the yogurt is a great alternative to ice cream. This I can definitely agree with.

However, last year at my job, they also hired me as the in-shop baker. Tasks included baking mochi (A Japanese rice cake), two different kinds of granola, cream cheese brownies, cheesecake, pumpkin cheesecake, among other things. So you know, I was also eating massive amounts of the cheesecake every day, five to seven times a week.

I don’t even like cheesecake. Alas, a wise man (probably my dad who heard it from another dad because this is such a dad thing to say) once said—if it’s free, it’s for me! I have that company in, that fast track to the diabetes. I continued to do this for a semester or so and didn’t realize that I gained 20 pounds until I went home and my mom as delicately as possible was like, “………..” when I asked her if I looked like I gained weight. This is the kind of situation that makes me feel like parenting is cringe-worthy. My poor mother.

So then I joined Weight Watchers. What a riveting experience. As a 22-year-old, I felt this weird stigma/shame for being on such a serious diet. Also, the U.S. News & World Report Number One Plan for Weight Loss breaks the bank. A three-month commitment was like $60 and then they email you about 17 times a day if you don’t renew your subscription. The experiences I’ll hold closest to my heart would probably be those that involve my “point-tracker” app passive-aggressively yelling at me whenever I didn’t reach a weight loss goal.

This message pops up on your screen:

“Oh…looks like you gained some weight.”

Are. You. Kidding. You sound like a disappointed grandma. Just give it to me straight, Brenda. Tell me to stop eating cheesecake or to offset it with a string bean or two. Damn.

I no longer am doing the whole Weight Watchers extravaganza because I just am not able to commit. It was great though. Shout out to all you fly humans doing Weight Watchers. I hope you save up all your activity points and treat yourself to several shots of tequila.

With diabetes affecting 29.1 million Americans and also being the seventh leading cause of death in this country, according to the American Diabetes Association, there are many reasons why I and others should make more of an effort to be healthy.

However, nothing is more annoying than listening to other people telling you that you have to be healthy. I think we all know that we shouldn’t binge-drink, binge-eat, binge-text, really binge anything. Sometimes people do these things anyway. I know I do.

I’m hoping I’ll figure a dietary balance out one day and replace my cheesecake snacking with some celery or something.

All in all, I’m really banking on one of my super smart classmates from grade school to invent a magical science top hat that makes me have the cardiovascular system of an Olympian and/or look like Heidi Klum. Hopefully by 2027, as I won’t be young forever. Weight Watchers could even rule the world by then.

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