So I finally showed up to a Weight Watchers meeting in order to assess the damage. As I sat down glumly and started flipping through the first-week material–usually they give you a refresher if you’ve missed more than two weeks in a row– and realized that everyone was flipping through first week material.
Something’s up. I pay attention. The the leader is laying out the “new program.”
It seems they’ve revamped the entire system and they thought it was so urgent that it couldn’t wait until the new year, the customary time for radical change. It’s as if we, the obese, like Chrysler, are in such danger of sinking that we needed an immediate bailout. It turns out that the points accounting system, like the credit market and the finances at the car companies, was being abused, and too many people were failing. If all you needed to do was count the calories that went into your body, that left it open for people to fill up on Tastee cakes and 400 calorie frappucinos, and gleefully (and legally) writing it down as kosher. And everyone was doing it.
Odd: the “new” program looks an awful lot like the old one, from about twenty years ago and before the discovery of points. Just like then, now you have little boxes for portions of the things you need: protein, carbs (back in the day they were simply “breads”), fruits and vegetables, water. Another thing: their claims are now footnoted, from staid sources like Journal of Human Nutrition and Obesity and Morbidity.
Signs of the times: a return to things that had worked beforehand, but were abandoned to disastrous consequences; underestimating greed; cooking the books. Perhaps not coincidentally, the curvy 50′s pinup Betty Page died this week. She was an example of something that worked well, then fell out of fashion, and was later resurrected as a retro found object. Pax vobiscum, Ms. Page.
Posted by jochoapa 
