Lately I have noticed that a good-sized chunk of Weight Watcher meeting time is spent in confessing what foods, "good" or "bad", have been consumed by my fellow members. Sometimes the confession is helpful. For example, the other day a lady told us about a flat bread that she had tried that was only 3 Smart Points and it was really tasty and she made a wrap with it and filled it with veggies and turkey slices and Laughing Cow cheese. She even brought the wrapper of the bread which we passed around so we would know what to look for if we wanted to try it too. Helpful.
Then there are the folks who feel like they need to come clean about how many pieces of Halloween candy they ate or how they just couldn't say no to the donuts that someone brought into the office. Sometimes we hear about how a person went out to Chuck-a-Rama and ate a roll: "But I only had one, and then I had this and that and a tiny bowl of ice cream."
Here's the thing: if you are in Weight Watchers, you're there because over the course of your life, you have made poor eating decisions. If you're me, you have eaten large portions of food that is high in fats and calories and sugar and all the other things that make food yummy and not the best for your body. Here's what else...old habits die hard. If you love donuts, it's probably always going to be hard to not have a donut when they are in the office.
The beauty of Weight Watchers is that you get to choose. Have the donut, write it down in your tracker and move on. If you choose to pass on the donut, give yourself a high five, congratulate yourself on your will power and move on. There is no food in WW that is forbidden. The program is not about perfection, it's about taking care of yourself and learning.
My new leader, Lana (who I really like!) put a good spin on the food confession situation in the last meeting. After someone talked about how they ate a couple of pieces of candy before they caught themselves mindlessly eating, Lana asked the person how many pieces of the candy the person had eaten last year. The lady said, "I think I ate the whole bag." Lana said, "Look at you! This year you only had two pieces and you were mindful enough to stop and even track it. Good job!" I loved how she found the positive in the situation.
When people talk about the french fries they had for lunch or the bowl of ice cream they had after dinner, Lana says, "If you stumble down a couple of stairs, do you catch yourself and stop the fall or do you just let yourself tumble down the rest of the stairs? Just because you eat french fries for lunch doesn't mean you have to throw your whole plan away for the day. Track it and make a better choice at your next meal."
I think that's good advice. Now if only my tummy would stop rumbling when people make their food confessions. Those confessions are almost never about how much broccoli a person had!
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