First some good news to share: I lost FIVE pounds this week. As nearly all of you know, I have more than 100 pounds to lose so while this is just a drop in the proverbial bucket of lard, it's weight that I hope will be gone forever and ever. Amen.
Losing weight this week certainly helped the cause, but really something else happened this week that has given me more hope than I've had in a long time that this can be done and that I can do it. It's all because of a Weight Watchers cookbook.
For those who don't know -- when I was a senior in high school I was significantly overweight. I had been fat my entire life to that point. I believe I was almost 9 lbs when I was born! When I was nine years old and starting a new school I remember the school nurse yelling out my weight to her assistant: 100.5 pounds. I was mortified because the weights of my classmates were something like 75 or 80 pounds. And my brand new classmates didn't waste anytime reminding me that my weight was a lot higher than theirs.
I'd tried Weight Watchers a few times in my early teens. My mother had much success with it, and she'd take me along, and I'd lose a few pounds here and there. The Weight Watchers leader was our dentist so he knew me and my mom. And he didn't seem to care that my first three or four attempts at weight loss were completely unsuccessful. Until that day -- November 13, 1975 -- that I decided to give it one more try. My plan was to lose enough weight so that I could have the lead in the high school musical, but really I was just tired of being fat. So, my mom drove me to the church where meetings were held and dropped me off. I ate a Cadbury Carmello bar in the car. It was the last candy I would eat for the next 9 months. Because, for the next nine months I did not veer from the Weight Watchers plan. Not once. I followed it religiously, as if my life depended on it.
I remember when I had lost 50 pounds my chemistry teacher called me into his office and wanted to know if I was on a diet because he noticed that I had gotten thinner. When I told him I had lost 50 and a half pounds, he was dumbfounded. Then he announced it to the whole AP chemistry class. I was a little mortified and a lot proud of myself. I graduated high school thin. So thin, in fact, that my parents had my senior pictures redone for me because the original picture (and the one that appears in my yearbook) is me weighing well over 200 pounds. Every yearbook picture that was taken was taken in October, so every single picture in that yearbook shows me fat. But I didn't care because I knew what I had accomplished. And my dentist knew what I had accomplished too. He cried when I left the meeting for college, after making a speech about my success and my tenacity and my general wonderfulness in ways beyond dieting. Dr. Forbes and I were often the last two people at the meeting, waiting for my mom to come pick me up, so we had time to talk about things like college and life and weight loss.
Eventually I lost a total of 73.5 pounds before leaving for college in the fall of 1976, weight that I kept off for the better part of 20 years (I'd gain 20 pounds and then go back on Weight Watchers - or have a major anxiety episode and lose it again) until I got married and somehow thought that marriage meant that I could eat everything my husband-with-the-metabolism-of-a-hummingbird could eat.
So, fast forward to this past weekend. I hate being on a diet. I really do. I like food and food likes me so much that it wants to stick with me FOREVER. But, you know, I'm facing this surgery and I have two six year olds who would probably be kind of bummed if I succumbed to any of the myriad diseases that afflict fat people and run in my family even amongst those who are not fat. So I decided that I just had to gut through it, even if I thought I couldn't. And even in that first week I had moments of hopelessness, where it just seems like so much weight and so much sacrifice and really, why couldn't it just be easy the way it was when I was a senior in high school?
And then I found my weight watchers cookbook. The one I used when I was 17 years old. When I remember those days, I remember losing weight as being relatively easy. I remember that my mom was enormously helpful because she made me a soft-boiled egg with a piece of toast every single morning and even made me a lunch to bring to school every day. It was usually 2/3 a cup of cottage cheese, a slice of bread and a piece of fruit. I'd buy milk at the school or else I'd bring a diet soda. (No one drank water back in the 1970s!) Since high school seniors were allowed to skip study hall and hang out in the cafeteria, I sat with my friends while they ate soft pretzels and I'd have a coffee with a sucaryl tablet or two in it.
Every time I went on a diet after that, it was NOT easy. And I always thought that meant I couldn't do it, or that my metabolism had changed or that the program had changed (which it has -- drastically -- over the years.) But this weekend, as I looked through that cookbook and saw the meals and recipes that I checked off I started to remember how hard it really was back then. Sure, my mom made me my lunch, but my friends were more than willing to share their sweets with me. As treasurer of the student council I ran a lot of bake sales and carwashes and there was always food. Always. But I never touched it. I had a steady babysitting gig for a little girl for whom I had to prepare dinner and more often than not her mom would leave cold pizza to be heated up. I heated it up for Dana, but never touched it. Once, when I had lost nearly all the weight I took a bite, but then spit it out.
My family regularly had pizza on Saturday nights and I never had any. My father would watch television at night with a bag of doritos. I didn't eat them. There were always at least three flavors of ice cream in my family's freezer. There was also a steady stash of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, cadbury bars and frozen hostess twinkies and cupcakes. I was tempted every single one of those 73 and a half pounds.
And somehow remembering how I'd make my special tuna sandwich with almost no mayo (light mayo didn't exist in 1976) but a mix of mustard, onions and a tiny tiny tiny bit of mayo made me feel better. So did remembering how I'd take a slice of bread and slice it horizontally to make two slices because light bread hadn't been invented. Being reunited with my recipe for Vanilla Cream and fake pizza and baked fruit made me remember how while my family ate their pizza I'd have a glass of skim milked mixed with orange or raspberry soda. It made me see that even back then I didn't want to do it and it was hard, but I did it anyway.
And remembering that made me feel in a way that I can't remember ever feeling in all my past attempts at dieting, that I really can do this. And that I can do it, just by doing it. By not accepting anything less than success. That I am stronger than a Big Mac; that I don't have to succumb to cakes and cookies and ice cream (oh my!)
So it is with a zealous hope that I haven't felt in more than 30 years that I go into my second week on Weight Watchers. (If you've made it this far, thanks ... I promise I won't spend too much time talking about weight loss!!)
And now for the promised cute kid pictures!!
The girls' kindergarten assigns family projects where the whole family can pitch in and help. This assignment was to make snow people or animals. Rob helped the girls cut out their snowballs and then I helped with dressing them. The girls designed them. Hannah's is a snowdaddy holding a lunchpail, and Lizzie's is a snowmommy with a necklace on. They were very proud of them!
Pretending to be cats has STILL not gone out of fashion in our house. Hannah and Liz spent the better part of Saturday in their cat outfits. They got these outfits when they were three years old and they were very big. Now they are very very small. But luckily for these kitties, they stretch!!
Here are all the grandchildren. The funniest part of this photo was all the adults behind my camera, trying to make Brenna smile.
Here a nice picture of my brother TA and sister-in-law Ann. Hannah thinks Aunt Ann looks like Brooke Shields:
My sister Terry was the chef for the day:
Oh and here's another tradition, started by my sister Aunt Anonymous (you'll see a picture of her in a minute). We always open Christmas crackers, which is why you'll see some of these subsequent photos of us wearing silly paper hats. Here, Hannah and Liz try to figure out what the prizes in the crackers were:
Here are the silly hats inside the Christmas Crackers (Lizzie's prize was a toy dinosaur):
It's always lovely to have a toddler around for a Christmas party. Here's Brenna contemplating the candy canes offered by Mrs. Claus:
And pointing out a couple of the zillions of penguins Terry has all over her house:
Tommy telling Grandma something very important (or speaking Latin ... I can't remember which!):
Then Tommy moved on to tell his story to Aunt Anonymous: 
And this would be Uncle Anonymous:
Lizzie has this thing lately about scaring people. I don't know why, but she loves to hide and jump out and yell BOO ... which is hazardous to my health most days since she's very good at here. Here I caught her getting into position to scare someone:
Here's Aunt Anonymous in conversation with Hannah and Lizzie (who by the way insisted on wearing these sweaters even though it was not cold in Terry's house, nor did they match their Christmas outfits -- six year olds have very strong opinions!):
Grandma and T.A. I just like this picture:
I love the expressions in this photo. Tommy is attempting to become a member of the Bentley family and (horrors!) an Eagles fan:
Ray and Rob. I'm going out on a limb and guessing they were talking about computers or cars. Probably cars:
Snickerdoodles are a family favorite, as you can tell from Hannah's face:
We also celebrate my dad's birthday. Terry couldn't fit all 78 candles on the cake due to fire restrictions, but here he is blowing out the seven she did put on the cake: