It’s all very well you know, this new way of spending my food budget but I’ve got to be honest, the days where there are no weekly points on offer are a bit bleak. I went to bed last night feeling like I hadn’t eaten for a week. Seriously, I could’ve gnawed my own arm off.
And it’s a bit of a double whammy, right? The way weight watchers allocates your points budget largely depends on what you weigh, so as you work your way down the scale, they knock the odd point off here or there. I get thirty three points to spend every day now I’ve lost a bunch of weight, but when I started it was well into the forties. And I’m here to tell you, thirty three points goes nowhere. And yet, I guarantee that there’ll be folk in the posse who are much nearer Skinny Town than I am whose eyes are out on stalks at the prospect of thirty three, because they’ll be on like twelve.
It’s weird isn’t it, it’s the only system I’ve ever know that rewards success by taking shit away. I suppose they have to, but given that I’m only halfway to Skinny Town I reckon by the time I get there I’m going to living on dust.
Having lived life as a grown-up without food boundaries for the last thirty odd years, getting my head around what a normal portion of food looks like continues to be a struggle for me every single day. Take yesterday for example. I bought a boxed salad for lunch, with ham, but I had to push it and buy a cooked chicken breast off the deli too, just to bulk it out a bit. Because, you know, a ham salad wouldn’t have been enough on it’s own. Of course it would, for a normal person. But to me it seemed stingy.
And when I cook dinner, I eat a mountain of vegetables. Which happen to be free of points, so that’s all well and good however I don’t suppose that whoever wrote the algorithm for deciding how many points are in stuff imagined for a second that anyone would ever sit down and eat a double head of broccoli and a full bag of sprouts alongside the main event when they decided to make all vegetables points-free. I can do that. Easily.
I’d probably do well to remember that although there are foods which are free of points, they’re not free of calories. And no matter how effective the points system is, if you take in more calories than you burn off, you’re knackered. Scoffing a full punnet of strawberries or a whole melon isn’t necessarily working to the spirit of what the points-free element of my food plan is all about, right? It’s taking the piss a bit, if I look myself in the eye and have a come to Jesus conversation.
I’m chasing a two pound loss this week, off the back of a sedentary week which nudged me a cock-hair in the wrong direction. So I can’t afford to take the piss.
Best stop then, dammit 🙂
I get 30 dailies and 28 weeklies. I have listened hard to conversations for fear of getting only 12! But I think that’s as low as they go. You are dead right though, if I eat all my dailies weeklies and fit points and also lots of “free” fruit, I won’t lose any weight.
They take your weeklies down to 28? Holy Moly!
I’m 5’3″. Maybe taller people get more.
It makes perfect sense, though, to fill up on the bulk of veggies, especially the ones that are mostly water, before having the main event. Even so, i get what you mean about having to watch even that.
It’s not easy to get the hang of good portion sizes in our world today.
Honestly Mimi, some of my friends fix a plate that wouldn’t have fed the five year old me, never mind now!
I think of my daily calorie allotment as money with no credit cards! Except exercise gives you a little more wiggle room. On my days where I walk I get to eat 1512 to maintain the 147.5 range of course I am going to be 53 this year. The two days a week I lift weights plus walk I get a extra 100 calories 1612 total such is life this seems to work for me. You will find your way and how many calories you can eat to maintain your weight loss once you get there I have faith.
Thank you Susan, I am longing to get into maintenance mode and find a groove that works for me!