I was embarrassed at my first Weight Watchers meeting. Its a god-damned cult. Its a cult that you pay to go to and get lectured about your weight. I went because I was depressed. My family dragged me along in a vulnerable moment and paid for me to be there. It was like an intervention, but with strangers instead of all the people who love me.
OMG how embarrassing. Some well-mannered stranger recorded how much I weigh, how overweight I was, and then I had to sit with a bunch of (urgh) fat people who didn’t want to be fat anymore.
My mum and Sis have been going to WW for about a year now. They are weight-loss gurus. Ask them the points value of any food, or meal. They know it. Especially Queen D. She is amazing. But it was one of those talents I thought she was putting to a frivolous use. Even when the fat started to melt off both of them, I had the arrogance to minimise that achievement by thinking “well who wants to just loose weight? Isn’t it playing into corporate stereotyping and all that shit?”.
Luckily, I had the sense to shut the fuck up and learn what was actually going on. What I found was interesting. Moreover, I think there is more to the politics apart from women being further victimised by a food / fashion /image industry that fattens them up, tells them they’re too fat, and offers to slim them down chemically or surgically. There is a story of community and empowerment here. I want to tell you some of how I feel about being an anarchist in WW.
Corporate food - no more
First off, my family were losing weight. And they were losing bad habits. We’d never been a maccas and KFC family, but occasionally the corporate food monsters would slip through. But not now. Border security is locked down tighter than a frogs ass on maccas.
Corporate food is BAD for you. There is no doubt that if you want to lose weight, you can’t support it. You can’t even walk past a maccas without the oil in the air weighing you down and causing grease spots.
Lifestyle changes
Not just maccas, but that entire alienated eating out, fast food, “I’ll just grab something on the way home and eat in front of the telly without tasting that my food is full of sugar, fat and salt” is pretty much gone too.
There is much more emphasis for them on cooking at home. This means slowly evolving a lifestyle that isn’t tied to work, to consuming. In other words, overcoming that produce-consume pathology that pervades everything these days. It means evolving a life where the individual is the indivisible unit. A life where the individual is in control and responsible for themselves.
I find that a very anarchist quality.
Activist lifestyles
This gets me thinking about all the things I was involved with…mostly activism. I can deal with work. With relationships. But activism? How can I have time to be selfish,to cook, to arrange my diet and exercise if I am busy giving all my time to some project or other? The short answer was that Jura was an abusive environment for me, and I had to leave the collective. The longer answer is more complicated.
Vegan foods aren’t exactly low energy. Lots of vegan cooking replaces meat or dairy fats with oil, hearty grains and SUGAR. Gah!
But more importantly, it meant not having the time and focus to look after myself properly. It meant eating pizza at the meeting. It meant eating lots of high-energy foods to keep me going to accomplish all the things I did. That just doesn’t mesh with the idea of taking care of yourself.
Empowerment, consuming
My sis used to be quite tied to her work. It made me really sad how she was mistreated (in my eyes). Now if work threatens to interfere with her exercise program, work can get stuffed.
She (and I) used to go shopping heaps. We’d eat out and have lots of fun too. I’m not sure about D, but I was in a space where I’d been so critical, so cynical, that I was numb and disabled from making choices.
WW has enabled D (and me) to be much more critical of advertising, labelling, claims that foods make, that cosmetics make. It is about making yourself the reference point. The cheese might satisfy something in me, but I ask all these other questions now. Like “will it satisfy me tomorrow, or just now?”, “will it sabotage my entire day of eating”, “will it mean I’d eaten a meal’s worth of energy in a 50g package and not even felt full?”.
I’ve noticed that we don’t go shopping as much now either. For one thing, D has her weekends full with the gym (and new friends, even). And we are also not looking to shopping to fill something inside us. We make our own worlds. Consuming can’t satisfy.
I knew that long ago. Then I forgot it. Now I know it again.
Empowerment, body
So we make our own worlds. We control our own bodies. And not in a authoritarian controlling sense. In the sense of “get that corporate magnum ice cream outta here, and don’t try to convince me to put it inside of me”.
Actually, that reminds me. I read somewhere in reference to sexual health “don’t put anything in your vagina that you would not put in your mouth”. Hmm. At the time, it made me think of maccas. It still does. Would you put a Big Mac in your mouth when you wouldn’t trust one in your fanny? Why? It doesn’t make sense. Oh gross, now I have visuals.
There are all these young women (and they are women) blogging about their dieting and weight loss journeys and various successes. What unites all of them is a desire to control their own bodies. I don’t want to undermine those storied by casting victimhood status on them. Sure, they want to be thin, and if you just want to be thin so you can buy clothes at Supre you’re a fucking moron who probably is a victim. But if you want to be thin because you are tired of being fat, tired of being blamed for it, tired of being controlled and tired of not being an equal, and tired of being criticised at both ends, then that is something I support. Go on, sistas. Shed kilos. Take control. Say “fuck off” to all the little cakes that say “Eat me” and all the little bottles that say “drink me” and all the little shiny things that say “buy me” and all the assholes who say “you are not enough because you are fat”.
Vegans
When I started this post, I wanted to talk a bit about the parallels between dieting and other alternative or extreme diets. I suppose that on the one hand, dieting is “trying to make yourself look thin” whereas on the other hand, veganism is “maintaining a strict diet which may have looking thin as a side effect”. Both can be unhealthy and both can be practised in a silly way.
So I suppose what I am saying is that I’m proud to be an anarchist WW’er because I find it empowering and challenging. Being uncritically vegan is just as silly as the Aitkens diet (but less harmful to cows. Moo.
Bad habits
The best thing about WW is challenging stupid habits. Apparently the founder of WW would eat chockie bikkies IN THE TOILET. When I heard that I laughed for about 20 minutes. That’s pretty awful and addicted behaviour. But I’ve known people who’d go to bed with a large bag of chippies. I’ve gone through periods where I had a pint of milk for breaky each morning in my teens. It goes beyond eating sensibly, it goes beyond eating what you want to eat, or how you feel you should eat, and becomes irrational and addictive.
Something I don’t do anymore is drink alcohol regularly. Its a bad habit I picked up from Souv. And I just kept doing it because I thought it was what I wanted. But its not. Its bad for me, my body, my mind, and for everyone around me. Ultimately though, I’m not doing it because I am shocked at how many points are in every glass of beer 
Mental health and food
Our fledgling Sydney Icarus group has talked a lot about food recently. Gluten free diets are meant to help. I know that sugar and caffeine aren’t really my friends. I know that having a stronger body will put me in a better place to have a stronger mind. (ok, its not that my mind is weak, its just different). Having a stronger body will put me in place where I can deal with my different mind in a Good Way(tm).
There’s a contradiction here that I can’t tolerate. Why would anyone refuse psych meds, but not take care of the other things they put inside themselves. Its like abdicating responsibility in one area and then refusing the consequences (i.e. that you go mad and end up in hospital).
Which is not to say that the lovely icaristas have that attitude. Its more that I think I have had that attitude. I got by on packet pasta (yum, alfredo) for so long and managed to lose weight on that diet that I thought I was indestructible, and unfattenable. When I got fat (and unhealthier and unhappier), I just thought “fuck it, the alfredo weight loss time will come again” and continued to put garbage into my mouth with gay abandon.
Instead, I should have taken control. I realise that if I take control of what I eat, what medicines I take e.g. Sodium Valproate, Sertraline, Alcohol, Coffee, Teas, Sugars, fats, salts; (much like Queen D has done) I can actually manage much much better. I can be in much more control.
(Yes, Beaver. You are always right.)
I’m in the flat making 
