Soooo……when last we left, I was getting revved up to write about Weight Watchers. I’d joined the online version of the group for a few weeks but I had trouble sticking to the plan via the website. Instead, I tried a meeting in town, and I ended up really enjoying it. I decided to start attending these. I intended to write all about that here.

I haven’t been updating for a couple weeks, mostly because of school, and finals (which I’m thankfully done with, and I’ll be taking the next quarter off, so hopefully more time to write!). During that time, however, I was also going to WW meetings and trying to stick to the program, and I was failing. Pretty miserably. I couldn’t seem to stay within my Points range. Weight Watchers works by assigning all foods a certain number of points, and then allowing you to eat a number of points based on your current weight, your activity level, and how much you weigh. It’s a very nutritionally solid way to do it, I think, and I know a surprising number of people who have lost weight and kept it off using the plan.

So what was my problem? I wasn’t writing about it here, mostly because I felt confused and like I wanted to “get things under control” before I did. I didn’t like the idea of reporting back, “Hey, I love this plan, but wow, I really suck at it!” I just couldn’t seem to get anything to work right. I was keeping track of my points, but I’d just go over, every day. I kept thinking that I just needed to get some better recipes down, I needed to not eat on the fly, I needed to make meals, I needed to do a hundred other small things…..

……and then I started to realize (realize? like I didn’t know this about myself before?) that I was sort of compulsive about eating sugar, and this compulsiveness was what was sabotaging my efforts.

I don’t binge. I sort of graze compulsively, which I wrote about in a post entitled, “My particular sort of eating disorder“. At the end of that post I decided I’d try to keep sugar-laden foods out of the house. That didn’t work out so well. I might have found more success trying to suck all the oxygen out of the air. I also wrote about that time I decided to go off sugar, and I’m pretty that lasted less than 48 hours.

So here I am trying so diligently to stick to Weight Watchers, and failing miserably, and it’s all basically because I can’t stop eating sugar. The big GET A CLUE moment came about a week ago. I was so excited that I’d managed to stick to my points for the day, and now it was the end of the night and I had 8 points left, and I could splurge! Woo freaking hoo! Jason was visiting, and we went to the store, where I got a box of peanut butter wafer bars. One serving was 7.5 points. I planned to eat one serving (a “pack”), and then I’d save the rest like a good little dieter-wait-this-is-a-lifestyle-change-er, until the next time I had an extra few points to splurge.

Yeah. You can guess what happened.

I ate one pack that night. Then the next day, I ate four more. Just knowing they were in the house drove me nuts. I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I didn’t binge – I’ve never really done that – but I did eat one after breakfast, then another before lunch, then another after dinner, and then another before bed. I probably would have had a fifth pack except that I gave it to my daughter to save myself.

This big moment I was talking about came when Greg said something like, “Maybe you shouldn’t have another one.” He wasn’t being controlling, he was just noticing I was doing something I’d said I didn’t want to do. And my emotional response to this was intense. I actually HELD THE LAST PACK TO MY CHEST, and I said something like, “But I have to eat this, I have to,” and the thoughts running through my head were like a pack of crazy wild dogs. If Greg had continued to comment on this peanut butter bar I was holding in my hand, I might have had to HAVE SOME WORDS. I was seriously ready to divorce the man just to keep that damn peanut butter bar within my sights.

It was after that, which I like to call That Peanut Butter Bar Incident, I began to strongly suspect that Weight Watchers might not be the way to go here, that instead I might want to look at this sugar addiction as an actual eating disorder, and treat it as such.

That’s when I remembered the few Overeaters Anonymous meetings I went to back in 1996 or so. I only went for a few weeks, because I didn’t feel like I fit in at all. I was overweight by maybe 40-50 pounds, but I was healthy and very active, and my weight was stable. I didn’t really have any severe eating issues that I could point to – I mostly just ate too much, and that’s how I got heavy. I went to the meetings because I didn’t really feel in control of my eating, and I had a large history of alcoholism in my family and was familiar with the 12 Steps. I thought OA would really help me.

At the meetings, I met women and men who were 100-200 pounds or more overweight, who had lost relationships and jobs due to their issues with food, who were coping with diabetes or recent heart attacks, who had severely disordered behavior around food that I hadn’t even imagined. They were all so sweet to me, but I felt like someone who’d broken their leg in a fender bender going to a support group for people who had lost limbs in a fiery plane crash. I felt like a fraud. I couldn’t relate to most of what they talked about, and I frequently left a meeting feeling guilty for not being heavier or having more problems. I eventually stopped going altogether.

I hadn’t thought about OA at all, until The Peanut Butter Bar Incident. I remembered the first step: “We admitted we were powerless over food — that our lives had become unmanageable.” This really seemed to apply to me, right at that peanut-buttery moment, and even right now. I don’t feel like I can stop eating sugar. I don’t feel like this is something about myself I can control, and I do think that it does a lot of damage.

I looked up our local OA meeting (our town is so small, we only have one, heh), and decided to attend one. First, I got in contact with someone from the group, and here I have to make it clear that anonymity is a HUGE responsibility of members of Twelve Step groups, so I won’t be describing people in my town, or their stories in any way. I will frame my experience as what I learn for and about myself. I sat down for some coffee with this member, and I talked a lot about my fears about fitting in with another OA group, and I learned that I likely wouldn’t feel the same way here. I also learned that my issues around sugar did “count”, that my problems around food didn’t have to be wildly dramatic to benefit from OA.

That brings me up to date. The next meeting is on Tuesday evening. Assuming this cold I have gets better and not worse, I’ll be attending. I’m not sure what I’ll do after that first meeting; I might decide it’s something I want to pursue, or I might decide it’s still not applicable to me, or I might decide that it is applicable but there are a few dozen reasons why I probably shouldn’t pursue it. I suspect the last one is the most likely. As usual, I’ll keep you updated.

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