Family Daze: What’s the Point(s)?

There are several things I do well in my life and dieting is not one of them. Of course everyone has their own personal strengths. It’s just that mine happen to be eating and drinking. Call me crazy, but I have a hunch this is probably the reason why I’m not as svelte as I used to be.

Oh, like most of you, I’ve tried exercising to celebrity videos and drinking diet chocolate shakes and all that. And let me just say these techniques work great, especially if you don’t like doing things like, say, breathing or chewing. The last time I tried to diet I lasted three days. Which, according to my history, is two and a half days longer than usual. The first day I faithfully weighed and measured everything that went into my mouth, including lipstick. On the second day I jogged around the block twice. By the third day my husband came home and found me passed out on the sofa with an empty diet shake can tossed beside me and a box of thin mints on my breath.

It was clear that I needed professional help.

So I went to a popular weight-loss center where I quickly learned all kinds of important things. For example, I learned that losing weight would give me control of my life, raise self-esteem, and increase confidence. On top of that, I learned it could lower cholesterol, decrease blood pressure and make me feel ten years younger. I also learned that it is very cold standing on the scale in nothing but a scarf and tube socks.

And if that wasn’t amazing enough, they told me all about a revolutionary weight loss system where each serving of food equals a certain number of "points" instead of calories. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I think of points I think of games like racket ball or air hockey. However, instead of being the kind you win, these points are determined by a mysterious formula of fat and fiber combined with height, weight, and the gravitational pull of tidal currents which I suspect, if written out, looks something like: aH sin[at + (Vo+u) – K]. But I could be wrong about this. But I do know that, after a lot of whispering and nodding by the weight loss counselors, it was somehow decided that I was allowed to eat up to twenty-five points a day.

Now, I must admit, that sounded fine to me. After all, in baseball that’s a pretty good score.

I started on my lucky-diet-starting-day, Monday, and easily made it through the whole day within my points budget. I even ended up with a few extras. However, on Tuesday something strange and unexplainable happened and I came up short on points around dinnertime and had to borrow from Wednesday so I could finish off dessert. This wasn’t a problem except, of course, that it threw Thursday off. On Friday I called my neighbor, Julie who was also dieting.

"Do you have any points I can borrow?" I hissed into the phone.

"What?"

"I had to transfer Wednesday’s to pay back Tuesday which left me short on Thursday so now I’m on negative numbers. I need at least seven points to break even."

"I think you’re doing something wrong."

Of course she was right. After all, there must a better strategy. Like transferring a few points from, say, Monday, and tacking them on to Saturday night. Or pooling our extra ones together at the end of the day then dividing them up evenly among us. Or perhaps converting the entire point-finding formula into the metric system. But deep down I know this would be wrong.

"Don’t worry, you can earn extra points by exercising," she said.

"Great!" I hung up and got out my calculator and figured out that all I would have to do to earn seven points back was to bicycle three miles, then jog around the reservoir, and then swim across it a few times.

As I headed out the door, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, a better weight loss strategy would be to eat less and stay within my allotted limit.

But, tell me, where’s the challenge in that?