Phat-uousness
At Weight Watchers the leader sets up a stand with this observation: Control your emotions or they will control you. Before she begins, I raise my hand and ask if I may modify that statement (I have real trouble with it). The therapist kicks in. I suggest that a better statement might be “Understand your emotions or they will control you.” She is slightly set off balance. A woman down the row adds that I have a point. And later after the meeting another woman stops by my seat and offers that she is in agreement.with me. I try to say that control does not lead to clarity, that the aims of losing weight can be attained by another route. I am not successful, and when I say that control is a “bitch,” quoting a line from Ordinary People, one woman titters behind my back, that Midwestern prudery displaying itself. I guess when she orgasms, if she ever does, she screams, “John . . .Deere. . .John Deere.”
I try to modulate myself, but to no end. I later puckishly tell Sue, the leader, that I hope she still loves me. And she merrily tells me yes, what else is she going to say, “Get lost, fatso.”
When she puts up the word “boredom,” she inquires from the group what causes that, and the replies are fatigue, pressure, annoyances and all the rest. However, to my mind she does not explore what boredom is. She has it backwards; she would be better off exploring what boredom is and from that work her way into how to deal with it in terms of not reaching for comfort food to assuage it. I keep quiet, I have said too much already. Poor Sue has Peck’s bad boy in class. (I also feel experientially that to say you are bored is a misplaced projection upon the world; it is you who is boring.)
I can almost smell in the weekly booklets we get on how to exercise or how to deal with eating out that the clammy hands of behavioral psychologists have been at it. I imagine there is no mass movement to spiritually help us to lose weight. Not probable. Not feasible. Not in this culture. Albert Ellis’ Rational-Emotive therapy might work very well, but given these booklets and what was being presented to us in this meeting, I sense we are given the cart before the horse and since so many of us work this way, it may very well serve the population it is working with. However, losing weight does not mean I have to lose who I am or how I think and any therapist worth his or her salt knows that treatment does not focus on control but on understanding or on feeling — and the ongoing relationship.
When Jehovah made me he gave me a dash of grandiosity. I was beginning to think how I would run this group — an interesting temptation. I have been observing myself with food, the restraints necessary, the portions I should be eating and the lack of “control” that causes an increase in basic, good old fat. In my fantasy I am asked to speak to the group from a perspective of a therapist who does not buy into the approach that is given, helpful that it is. I will leave Sue to her conditioned responses and I will abide in my conditioned responses, for the time being.
The structure of Weight Watchers is clear-cut, organized and fairly administered well; it is not group therapy nor should it be. However, I would give out a copy of my Ten Canons which can be read in the Pages section. And if i was asked to speak, I’d stress these points.
– Why you eat beyond normal intake ultimately will explain and “control” your eating habits much more effectively than if if you inordinately stress controlling them. Indeed, I posit that a thorough personal investigation of why this or that does lead to modulation and moderation — in all things.
– We are all conditioned to eat more than we should and an evening with TV commercials amply demonstrates that. We are “fed” the wrong diet for all kinds of cultural and capitalistic purposes. An essential goal is to grasp what is being done with our heads, to question these assumptions. To lose weight is not to control anything. It is to question everything. Why soda as a beverage? Why Twixt as a candy bar? Why soda and why candy? Part of your attempt to lose weight is to understand the cultural controls sent out into the media. It may be intended or not, that is an issue for cultural critics.
– Indeed, the healthy loser of weight would question some of the basic assumptions about Weight Watcher’s view of people. Here I wonder if anyone has examined the pamphlets and literature which reveals this group’s psychological approach to people. If we are conditioned slaves, so be it.
– Finally, and this is self-serving, the leader of this kind of group should not be necessarily svelte, but someone who has struggled to lose weight and to keep it off. Often these people become leaders. I would suggest they also struggle with and challenge the very group that employs them so that they can be more effective.
A dreadful Aramiac pun on my part – Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin.
