I must have signed up to Weight Watchers ooh, about half a dozen times in my youth. One time I even managed to hit my target weight.
It’s not like WW doesn’t work you see, it does – if your goal is losing weight. If your goal is more grand, say, you want to lose weight and be able to eat like a normal person and not have to carry a points calculator around with you for the rest of your life, then it really doesn’t.
Weight Watchers might be able to help get you thin, but only in a way that requires constant vigilance which, you must admit, is not exactly solving the problem. Who wants to be constantly stressing about what they can or can’t eat, or panicking that they might have gained a couple of pounds this week thanks to Veronica’s 50th and all that free-flowing champagne and dreamy ice-cream cake.
Weight Watchers, like all diets, ahem, I mean healthy eating lifestyles, misses the point. You see, fixing our behaviour, like, fiddling with our diets or faffing about with fitbits, is kind of like shutting the door once the horse has already bolted. It’s fixing the effect of the problem whilst ignoring the cause. The effect of the problem is we eat too much. The cause of the problem is the thought to eat pops into our head and it lands so strongly that it feels like a pining, a physical longing, and it makes not eating too much of a struggle.
That’s why I had to keep re-joining weight watchers, because gold member or no gold member I would still yearn, pine, long and crave to eat more food than an effortlessly thin person should. Isn’t that what our true goal is with dieting and weight-loss? To be effortlessly thin? To be someone who eats only when they’re hungry and stops the second they’re full. I mean, who cares if you have enough points left for some late-night toast – you’re stll eating late-night toast.
It wasn’t until a couple of decades later that I was finally able to become that effortlessly thin person I’d always wanted. It happened because I stumbled into the missing piece of the puzzle. It’s this:
Becoming effortlessy thin does not requre physical labour – like following a squeaky clean diet, taking up krav maga, drinking gallons of water or joining Weight Watchers – it requires mental labour.
Meaning, when you feel that longing to eat, you have to be able to flip the switch in your mind that takes you from being the victim of it to the observer of it. How you do that specifically is you notice the unpleasant feeling and immediately reach instead for feelings of power, freedom, relief and gratitude, knowing the thought to eat can’t actually make you do it.
That is the cure in black and white. There’s no other way through. You do this once, you’ll realise how easy it is, you do it twice, you’re cured.