ww is for weight watchers

So do you remember that great picture Marty G took of me doing the tire clinic at the Freewheelers Fall Picnic?

Yeah, that one. Click on it and blow it up, and note the several pounds of gut peekin' through the inside of the wheel in my left hand.

I've had that pic as the desktop image on the Ultra Geeky Linux Computer that I do most of my actual writing on (it's got the good keyboard; I can't do much on those laptop computer keyboards). I've been staring at that gut prominence for months.

There's also the fact that the middle digit in my three-digit weight (pounds, not kilograms) recently hit a number that I haven't seen in ten years. There's the fact that I'm hitting the high ends of weight ratings for some of my bike components. There's the fact that ol' Jacob, which is the name I gave to my hip-and-back pain a few years ago, has been more frequently insistent. There's the fact that I have skinny pants that I may never get into again, and that the medium pants I currently wear are starting to complain, and the fat pants that have been hanging in the closet (I mistyped a size on an order a few years ago) are eagerly anticipating their debut.

My sole efforts haven't done anything to bring a change about; I still find myself driving home from work packing away the potato chips I have in a bag on the passenger seat.

So with the blessing of The Excellent Wife (TEW), I got myself out the other night and went to my first meeting of Weight Watchers. It wasn't as awful as I'd thought: nobody pointed and snickered (or, on the other hand, told me I didn't weigh enough to be there); they let me sit in silence for the course of the main meeting; I got set up with my daily points (a daily budget from which you can withdraw the point values, assigned by Weight Watchers, for the food you eat). I've paid the freight and been invited back.

There's an app on my phone now with which I can scan bar codes and get points values for various foods, and track my points. For example, my usual work lunch has been four ounces of a red-cabbage-and-beet-juice salad that TEW gets for me in Polish stores, and four ounces of Swiss cheese. The good news is that the points value is only 2 for that salad. The bad news is that the point value for an ounce of Swiss cheese is 4, so that daily cheese is 40% of my daily budget of points. For yesterday, I cut it down to three ounces.

I don't know enough about the program to know how exercise fits in (and it's different now from what it was when TEW did it, years ago). I get more than a day's worth of extra points per week, and I figure I'll keep those for special occasions and ride days (and I may find that when I put in rides - there's a place to enter exercise in the tracking tools - that the food budget changes).

I suspect I'll learn more about it as the days go by. If my participation does nothing more than eliminate the stopping for the M&M's, or finishing off the donuts at work, that will be pretty good, huh?