The on / off switch - am I fooling myself?

Somebody posted a message on WW Connect the other day and I wrote a response which I suspect sounded horribly preachy. The scenario was this: someone said that she kept joining WW, losing a couple of stone and then going “off-plan”, gaining the weight back and then having to start again. What could she do to break the cycle? To which my response was: you have to stop thinking of it as being on and off plan. The way you eat when you’re following Weight Watchers is the way you eat, full stop. The longer you think of WW as something that you will do for a while, to get to goal, and then stop, the longer you will be stuck in a cycle of losing and regaining the same weight over and over again.

Wouldn’t you want to punch me? I did try and add lots of smiley faces and said several times that this was only taken from my experience. But still.

The thing about Weight Watchers that breaks you in the end is the fact that you have to be so switched on all the time. Everything needs to be weighed and measured (well, nearly everything). If you want it to work you have to assiduously monitor every drop of oil or sprinkle of cheese. It’s a lot more difficult to eat on the hoof, especially from non-chains. It is, sometimes, pretty exhausting. I can see why people burn out. I can see why I burned out. But I don’t object to the food and I think that is probably why I am much better nowadays at maintaining my weight then I was when I was younger. Something, somewhere is sticking.

I was thinking about this particularly because I had a day “off” on Saturday – planned and deliberate. We went for a nice walk, stopping off at a few pubs along the way. In the last one, we ate chips with lots of salt and a good slather of mayonnaise. We made chicken wings for tea that had been slowly confited in fat and then dunked them in a rich blue cheese dip. Happy days. It made my comments to the woman on the message board seem rather hypocritical. But then, on Sunday morning I knew that I was back to it and despite the fact that I was hungry yesterday, and my treacherous body wanted to eat toast all day, I stuck to pointing and weighing and measuring and tracking. Monday morning, I was showing a small (0.6 lbs) gain for the week. But there’s a big difference between half a pound gain’s worth of planned indulgence and a two stone slide back down the scale. I think.