Another week, another meeting. Down a bit, which surprised me a bit since I had a haphazard weekend and seriously didn't exercise at all, but not complaining.
I had to leave the meeting early today, and WOW was I glad to. See, since I started the Plan, I've been alternating between two meetings -- one at work and one at the local center on the weekends. I'm not a huge fan of the leader of the work one --she's got this self-hating thing going -- but have been going because it's both somewhat convenient and close to not having enough members to be sustained. Now, the work meeting is in a conference room in a building above a cookie shop. So this is occasionally a topic of conversation. And the leader decides to use it to segue into the day's topic (restaurant food and portion sizes).
First, let's go through what I would do if I decided that I couldn't live without the cookie:
1) Pull out my smartphone and pull up the Plan app
2) Search for "X cookie", X being whatever kind I wanted
3) Use my (admittedly embarassingly large) knowledge of the size of various establishments' baked goods to come up with an equivalent. I'd guess between 8 and 10 dots for one of these particular cookies, having eaten many of them, so if that seemed to be accurate based on the comparisons I'd probably list 10 dots if I was feeling like I'd maybe given myself a couple free passes earlier, or 9 if I was feeling virtuous.
Total time expended: maybe a minute?
Apparently not everyone is hep to the ways of the smartphone, though, including this leader, because she pulls out the Restaurant Book and starts trying to figure out the dot value of the cookie. (Spoiler alert: if I had to look everything up in a book everytime I ate, I would be failing horribly at the Plan, too.) Her initial guess is "14 dots." [Cue gasps from the group.] "They're just full of grease and fat and lard." She tries to come up with comparable restaurants, but has trouble. Someone suggests Au Bon Pain, and she initially has trouble finding it: "Oh, if they're really bad then they don't even want to be in the book." She finds it, after two or three minutes, and 8 to 10 seems like a reasonable comparison. She looks vaguely disappointed, and uses the word "lard" again.
And then she moves on to a little pop quiz on other baked goods -- Perkins muffins (14 dots!), Starbucks scones (13 dots!), in a voice that I was probably predisposed at this point to hear as sneering. She then states that these things are her downfall, which is "why I'm a lifer." And then mentions the Plan snacks that are on sale this week. And then makes the joke at least twice during the next 15 minutes that restaurant portion sizes (the topic of the meeting) give her "job security."
I left early to run an errand, but gotta say, none of this is making me want to go back to this particular meeting. On the one hand, the leader's relationship with food is hers alone, and if she weren't putting herself in a position of leadership, I'd be a lot more empathetic to how she got there. But as it is, the implicit message she's sending is "Food is your enemy! Treat baked goods and pizza like they're evil!" And I'm kind of like, "Shit, bitch, treating these things as guilty pleasures is how I freaking got here. Perhaps if I instead treat them as perfectly reasonable sometimes foods (to quote Cookie Monster), I won't feel so shitty about myself when I choose to eat them, and I won't then want to drown my misery about effing up by eating the entire batch or the entire pizza. This is not freaking rocket science."
This whole episode seems indicative of an emerging generation gap among followers of the Plan, which I'll probably post more about in the future. People who are coming to the Plan for the first time now, or who are open to change, like the new Plan. People who are less comfortable with change are resistant to it, and bring a lot of old prejudices and habits of legalistic thinking to it. As I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before, I am seriously allergic to legalistic approaches to food, so I tend to judge it harshly.
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Preview of next week's post: remember how I said I don't spend money on weight-loss industry food? Well, my exception to that is frozen entrees -- because they help me with portion control during the workday. I typically go with HealthyChoice steamer meals (the excess packaging makes me mad, but goddammit, they're actually pretty tasty). This last week, though, there was a good enough combination of a sale on Plan meals and a coupon I'd gotten at a meeting that I bought six of them. So I'll be reviewing them next week, after I've had a chance to give them a try. Sneak preview: so far, it's not looking good.
Some other topics I'd like to touch on soon, mostly for my reference:
--"I'm back again" -- why and how people fall away from the Plan, why they come back, and whether they should
--The different components of the Plan, and how they do and don't work together
--Why the Plan desperately wants you to know it has been scienced from actual science
--A textual analysis of the "weekly"
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