Unique just like everyone else...

Exactly how many people are on weight watchers?  I've decided to be open about my weight watchers journey.  Because yes, its much like being a recovering alcoholic.  "Hi, my name is Zulay and I'm a lazy, over eater." Or like coming out of the closet  "Mom, Dad, I'm fat."  I figure the more people who know the more who will help me make better decisions about it. But it seems that every other person I tell has either been on weight watchers themselves or knows someone close to them who has been on it. And its not that I have a problem with that, it's that i wonder why no one asked me to come along.  It's like the world's best kept secret.

Yesterday I mentioned it to another teacher who is in a professional development with me. It was completely random. She decided to go with me and my colleague to lunch. Now it turned out that this colleague had also been on weight watchers once upon a time and still thinks of meals in terms of points. Apparently, once you become a part of this particular cult you find yourself a member for life.  I wanted a salad and since this girl wanted to come with us I felt a need to share the reason why we couldn't just go to the first place we came across. Turns out she was perfectly ok with our decision because she too had been on weight watchers. It became the topic of our lunchtime conversation.   Every time this happens, finding out one more person has a personal connection to weight watchers,  it feels like what happens when you buy a new car. You pick something because it feels unique and all yours, and after you bring it home it feels like every other car on the street is the same as yours.

She was very encouraging and we discussed all the reasons she decided to join, because looking at her you would have no clue that she would ever have a need for something like weight watchers.  It was encouraging and interesting.

I wonder what would happen if I suddenly asked everyone I knew the question "Have you, or anyone you know, ever been on weight watchers?"  I wonder how many I'd get to before I reached Kevin Bacon...

Breakfast Anyone?

My brothers and I seemed perfectly spaced for our high school years.  When one was entering their freshman year another was graduating.  So about the time that my brother went off to high school and I found myself the last sibling in grade school, my mother decided I was old enough to go to school by myself or with friends.  At roughly that same time, I got another option as well; I could wake up early and make sure I had breakfast, or I could sleep a little longer and skip breakfast before going to school.  Like any self-respecting, cool and "not knowing what's good for me" preteen would do, I decided sleep was much more important then breakfast and thus began my moratorium on breakfast.  In this fashion I made it through grade school, high school, college, grad school, and becoming a teacher.

Its not that I never ever had breakfast, just rarely on a weekday, or weekend that I wasn't in Jersey if we're talking about the last five years for that matter, fast forward 20+ years and over 100 pounds, and I found myself sitting in my first ever weight watchers meeting getting reprimanded by the lady next to me about the importance of breakfast.  By the end of the meeting I was making both a promise and a pledge that from that day on (or the next day since breakfast was long over by then) I would start having breakfast.  Sure you're a strange woman I met 5 minutes ago, sure you have a death grip on my hand like a woman in her 10th hour of labor, but you are also a woman who quite obviously cares about breakfast and her fellow man's lack there-of, and isn't this what I joined for, to have support and help, no matter how off-putting and forceful the source?  So I promised, that no matter how small or insignificant the portion, no matter how pressed for time I may be, I would have breakfast, and I did.  I kept the promise for exactly 14 days, and then today happened...

Running late, frantic to get out of the house so I wouldn't be in trouble, I skipped breakfast and you know what I found?  Your body gets used to eating things quickly!  For years I have managed to go for upwards of 6 and sometimes more hours on not a single bite, 2 weeks of breakfast and I can't make it past 10am.  By 10 o'clock I was STARVING, cranky, pissed, starving, restless, starving, I had a headache and did I mention that I was starving?  It was the craziest thing.  Who the hell am I?  Great, so already my personality is changing along with my eating habits!  Have I become one of those horrible people who eat your head off when they haven't had their coffee or something?  Am I an addict?  A Breakfast maniac?  Or, (gasp) have I turned into the woman at the meeting, soon to find myself holding hands with perfect strangers eliciting promises about their eating habits from them?  Has my lack of breakfast made me slightly insane?  Maybe, maybe not, but I'll tell you this much, I think tomorrow I'll be sure not to oversleep.

So today's post is a warning, if I ever get pissy with you from this moment on, just ask me if I've had any breakfast.

First One. Recipes.

My cousin said I should start blogging my experience with weight watchers.  At 4:30 this morning I thought "why the hell not?".

Just to put my self image into perspective, I'm the biggest person (female) I know.  And, here's the gist of how I feel...like a loafer is a world full of pumps. (that's both a shoe and an activity analogy, go me!).

Hardest thing so far? I'm running out of things to eat.

Yesterday I made up a meal by literarily smelling a bunch of stuff in the fridge.  I started with ginger; anything that smelled like a match I threw in.  By the time I was finished I had ginger, an orange bell pepper, red onion, and a green apple ready to throw in my skillet, its like a I was building a rainbow in a pan.  How much of each thing did I put in do you ask? Damned if I know, I didn't think to measure...I'm not a cook.

I know how to make what my mother taught me and not much beyond that.  Unfortunately, it turns out that Dominican food is like 18,000 points on the Weight Watchers scale and since I am currently limited to 41, I need to learn how to make something new.  I'm not good with recipes either.  I find myself completely lost and in need of looking up half the things on any recipe that sparks my interest.  So, suddenly one simple recipe has turned into a research project that would require charts, graphs and other visual aids to accomplish.  In the end I'm both hungry and frustrated, which only makes me even more hungry and doesn't help with what my "team leader" (that's what I'm calling the guy who runs my meetings) said we should do, which is to plan and prepare (my words not his).  I somehow don't think that to plan and prepare one recipe was supposed to require me to do enough research to then write a dissertation.