Friday, January 14, 2011

I was rejected by weight watchers.

So in my effort to shape up this year, I've joined Weight Watchers at work with a friend.  My first experience with WW was 4 years ago.  I wasn't thrilled with it, mostly because I started under a lot of pressure from my mother, but when 4 months later I'd lost 20 pounds, I was willing to concede that the program worked.  I definitely learned a lot about portion size and what actually counts toward making food healthy (turns out low fat alone does not health food make).  Over the years I've had occasional weeks and months where I've tried to track my points, but nothing consistent.
But, the new points plus thing (0 point fruit!) and the convenience of having a meeting at work convinced me to join as an actual member for the first time ever.  I was a bit nervous going into the first meeting - I don't exactly look like a person who needs to be on WW, and I guess I was worried people would be judgmental.  It turned out not to be a problem; a lot of the people in the meeting were lifetime members who had already reached their goal weight.  I, on the other hand, have not.  My goal isn't so much a weight as a pair of pants I'd like to fit into, but if I had to pick a number, I guess I'd say 135.  According to my first weigh in, I'm at 147.8.
And that's where things got tricky.  That afternoon, I went online to sign up for E-tools, and was initially informed that because of my height and weight, WW didn't have any tools that would work for me at this time; the program was designed for people who had more than 5 pounds to lose, and for my height, 143 was the bottom of the healthy weight range.  I went  back, changed my weight to 150, and carried on.  I thought that was that.
And then the next day, I got a call from the meeting leader, also expressing concern about how much weight I had to lose.  I allowed her to change my reported height to be an inch shorter, so for now I'm good to go.
The problem is that the low 'healthy weight' for my new lie of a height is 139, which is 4lbs above my goal weight.  I know it's not really a big deal, but I don't want to be prevented from reaching a goal.  It seems kind of ridiculous to me that WW was ready to not take me as a member at my actual height and weight.  If I'm paying you money for a service, are you really going to tell me no?  I understand that a program like this has some sort of obligation to make sure members aren't using it to fuel an eating disorder, but the program requires you eat a certain amount every day.  Are the health risks of being 4lbs underweight so severe that they're not going to let me do this?
Anyway, there's about 9lbs and at least a month between me and this actually becoming an issue, so we'll see how it goes.

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