I have measured out my life with coffeespoons

STIPIMM: “Battle Flag,” by Pigeonhed, remixed by the Lo Fidelity Allstars

Today is the one-year anniversary of my giving up caffeine. From Jan. 2, 2005, to now, I have had only five caffeinated sodas (including a celebratory Dr Pepper I had yesterday), and one was a rum and coke, so it doesn’t quite count (maybe?). Yay for me.

It was only accidentally a New Year’s Resolution: Jan. 2 coincided with two things that made it easier (if only marginally so) to give up the sauce: 1) it was the end of the holiday season, during which it would have been hard to resist delicious caffeine; and 2) it was during a break in school. So, after returning from Texas, I went through two weeks of headache hell, just in time to be pain-free for the first day of the my final semester at AU.

Now, it’s Jan. 2 again, and both Bridget and I find ourselves facing another accidental resolution. Sometime in November, we both decided to hunker down and try the Weight Watchers program again. We had done it once before when we lived in Maryland, with mixed results, and now, tired of our paunches, we were going to go for it again.

We did pretty well, I think. We allowed ourselves 1,000 Flex points (more on those below) for Thanksgiving, so that was okay, and we were able to keep it up, more or less throughout December. But the holidays were too much temptation, and we pretty much knew that going into it. And so, plied with cookies and candies and all kinds of yummy foods, we let our diets fall by the weigh-side during the holidays.

The holidays are now over, and it’s time to go back on the diet. Accidental resolution number two.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with how Weight Watchers works, I’ll give a brief explanation. The entire concept revolves around the idea of points: different foods are assigned a set number of points per serving size. There’s a formula to it (more on that below), but it basically translates to 1 point for every 50 calories you eat. Because of our weights, both Bridget and I are allowed 24 points of food per day. In addition to those 24 daily points, every week you are allowed 25 Flex points, which you can use any time you want, in whatever combination you want. For instance, you can spread your Flex points out over the week, adding three or four points to your daily total; or you can save them up and then go out Saturday for McDonalds and ice cream, using all 25 points at once.

If you’re a good Weight Watchers person, and pay their fees and all that, you get the benefit of weekly support groups and a weekly weigh-in that helps track your progress. Bridget and I have each other and we own our own scale, thank you. Moreover, since Bridget has done Weight Watchers off and on since she was a tween, she’s got a veritable library of books and guides, which allow us to do it all without feeding the WW industrial beast.

I’ve never been a fan of the idea of diets. When I was growing up and watched my parents diet, I could always detect the misery in my father at having to eat a grapefruit every morning or other such wonder diet. It was one of the early promises I made to myself as a teenager that while I would certainly not mind consciously curtailing my food intake, I would never, as an adult, go on an outright organized diet.

But then, I promised myself I’d never get rid of cable either…

My decision to go on WW this time and last comes from two motives: 1) the desire to, yes, weigh less and be slimmer; and 2) to support Bridget in her striving to be good about food. Besides, how could I, in good conscience, slop down on greasy food, while my beloved has to sit across the table from me eating lettuce?

Diets are supposed to make it easy to make good eating choices. But of course, being an intellectual (defined by Bill Cosby as being a person who thinks about and analyzes things that normal people do naturally), it’s not enough for me to just do the program and smile. I have to break it down to brass tacks. And so I did.

The first thing that made me intellectually engage with the Weight Watchers program was mathematics, believe it or not. The tallying of food using numbers just lends itself to mathematical analysis, and me being me, I was happy to oblige. When one is trying to find out the amount of points a particular food has, there are two resources: 1) one of several books showing the point values of common food items, as well as the point values for name brand foods and stuff you’d find at popular restaurants; and 2) a paper sliding scale (that I call “the slide rule”) into which you input calories, fat grams and dietary fiber grams to get a point total.

For all you math-literate people out there, the presence of a slide rule suggests a simple linear relationship between the three variables and the point result. And indeed, there was. It took about, oh, 30 seconds to figure out the points formula once I sat down to figure it out. It’s actually disappointingly easy:

Points per serving* = (Calories / 50) + (Fat grams / 12) – (Dietary fiber grams** / 5)

*rounded to the nearest whole number
**for purposes of the formula fiber grams can be no higher than 4 per serving

So now, with this simple formula in mind, I no longer need the slide rule to figure out a point value. Bridget will often use me by calling out the variables from the kitchen. It gives the program a geeky element which provides me an itty bit of satisfaction while I’m starving away.

Of course, it’s not enough for an intellectual to just break down a simple linear formula. Bah! Now it was time to analyze the whole program and how it works. Here’s what I determined:

1) The Weight Watchers program is really little more than a psychologically cushioned way to literally count calories. Look at that formula again: the big swing element in that formula is the calories. Fat grams rarely get up that high, and even if they did, it would only make one point of difference. The same with fiber. If I ate a low-fat diet with a daily intake of 1200 calories, I would be doing pretty much the same thing as what I’m doing with Weight Watchers. The difference, like I said, is psychology and convenience. Not only is it easier to count points up to 24 and keep track of foods based on small number amounts, but it also makes it not quite as daunting when one thinks about numbers like 7 points or 3 points, instead of such monstrosities as 365 points/4 grams of fat/6 grams of fiber.
2) You might look at the formula (like I did) and wonder “why are the fiber grams limited to four”? Through a little online research, I found out that it actually used to be unlimited. But sometime in the late ‘90s, they changed it. Why? Think about it this way: fiber grams are the only way to bring a point total down in a particular food. What’s to stop an clever dieter from mixing a can of Metamucil into his ground beef to bring that bacon cheeseburger down to a total of –4 points?
3) Having a mathematician in the house to figure out the Weight Watchers program is a mixed blessing for Bridget. Sure, she may like to get instant point values from her human calculator, but that human calculator has taken his mathematical examination of the program a bit too far for her tastes. The WW program works on estimation. The types of foods that can be, say 4 points, range from those with 176 calories to 224 calories (assuming no fat and fiber). Now, let’s say we wanted to triple our serving of whatever that four-point food was. According to the program, that would mean simply tripling the point value to 12 points. Okay, fine, but Mr. Mathematician points out that tripling the calorie value gives you a different result: ranging from 528 to 672 calories, which (by the formula) ranges from 11 to 13 points. So, instead of keeping it simple, having a guy knowing the formula in his head just complicates things and, frankly, frustrates Bridget when I go questioning the basic principles of the program. Indeed, Bridget is right: the program works on estimation because the rounding up of points (on average) will even itself out over the course of a day. You either have to break down everything you intake to point values out to two decimal places, or you have to surrender to the logic of the system. And so we generally do the latter.

So far so good. One thing from the program that we don’t do is weigh ourselves every week, partly from superstition, partly from the desire not to simply measure success in terms of pounds. The real end goal, for both of us, is feeling better about the way we look, and, maybe, fitting into smaller clothes a little better. In the meantime, we will continue to measure out our lives, one point at a time.