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Thursday, October 13, 2005
Motivation
I am a Weight Watcher, paid up and even attending meetings occasionally. There, the lecturer does what she can to promote weight loss in the ensuing week. She's not particularly eloquent. To encourage herself, ordinarily she holds up a visual aid of some description; a chart or a book of recipes, a paper of "BRAVO" stickers, a sack of snacks approved by the head honchos of Weight Watchers. She invites audience participation, asks questions to get people talking, finishes up right on time and scampers out the door to her next location. Lecturers are like priests apparently...nobody wants to be one. Not enough to go around. Meanwhile her side-kick weighs everyone, records the current tonnage, handles sales of this and that book or snack item. Fifteen individuals show up for the average meeting, sometimes a few more, sometimes less. Meetings. If you desperately needed a shot of motivation, a Weight Watcher meeting would be your last destination.
So how do I keep myself earnestly trying? I don't. No one would claim that I do a good job of this. For example, right now I'm drinking coffee into which I poured a good big blop of heavy cream. And I just ate peanut butter toast. So far though, at weigh-in, I've been down a pound and a half each time. I lose a tiny fragment of weight each week...knock on wood...today is weigh-in day. Nearly all of my fellow meeting attendees are in the same boat...a pound to a pound and a half/week. Lots of grousing and grumbling at weigh-in time. "For this I didn't eat a piece of my own birthday cake?"
Last week the lecturer's theme was that we should cherish our diminished expectations. No, we aren't losing weight fast enough to make us happy. We're all fed up. However, think about it folks...if you lose a pound and a half per week, by this time next year, you will have lost seventy-eight pounds!!!! And since the loss has occured so slowly it will be more easily sustained because you retrain yourself during that year, you get new food habits, you teach yourself how to say NO and how to accept the NO you've said. That was the gist. Not motivational at all in my case. Woohoo. A year from now. I could be dead. I'm old. What would be the point of living my remaining months in deprivation if the only result were a slightly less corpulent corpse? No point at all.
Clearly, when it comes to motivation, I'm on my own. So I am in the process of arranging prizes for myself. The first is quite glorious. When I have lost twenty pounds, officially lost those pounds at meeting weigh-in, I can wear my fabulous new shoes. Oh, yes, they are too glorious to believe. The leather was treated to make it look like rusty copper. OY!!! I have those shoes up on the mantel. Lydia, seeing them declared, "Oh, that is YOU. Wear them this Sunday." No can do. The magic number is twenty. Twenty pounds. I'll be lucky to have lost anything this week let alone twenty pounds. I can see those shoes, however, and I want them.
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