Weight Watchers

My sweetie has been giving the Weight Watchers program a try, and I'm stepping up to the plate to help her eat according to the program's guidelines. She really doesn't eat a lot--less than I do, in fact--but she has been consistently gaining weight for years and I'd very much like to see her live longer and in better health, so it's worth trying anything.

My mother has worked with the Weight Watchers program on and off for many years. I rebel against what I see as her obsession with her weight, in the way that so many of us react to our parents. Personally, I've been gaining and losing the same ten pounds for the past fifteen years, and I can live with that as long as I don't graduate to a new pants size.

There are things I really like about this program. It's been around for a long time and, according to my mom, if you stick with it, it works. She also says that it's not austere, and that's a very good thing in a diet program. I like the fact that they take a long term approach, one that treats "diet" as a set of day to day eating habits rather than a short term fix for the excesses of our day to day eating habits.

I'm not comfortable with the extreme emphasis on cutting out fat. I know that, personally, I feel better when I don't skimp on the olive oil. I don't think most of us gain weight from using too much olive oil on our salads. We gain weight from bingeing, snacking, and out-of-control portion sizes. And there are some funky things about the website, especially its recipe feature. The points it calculates when you enter a recipe are way out of proportion to the points for the individual ingredients of the recipe. We even tried entering some of the recommended recipes which supposedly had no points, and it calculated points for them.

But we're slowly learning to navigate these quirks, partly by avoiding the recipe feature. I brought a shopping list to the farmers' market yesterday and came home with some spectacular, compliant foods. We made a salad using greens from Alm Hill, jalapeno-style albacore from St Jude, red pepper from Billy's Farm, and cherry tomatoes from Stony Plains. We dressed it with lovely olive oil, scrupulously measured, and a fine balsamic vinegar. It didn't feel austere at all, and it was so beautiful that I had to take a picture.