Kathy joined Weight Watchers. Shut up. Because it apparently breaks some weight loss commandment to display even a scintilla of cynicism at meetings, Waisted is where she bitches about eating, not eating, oversharing weight watchers, and probably you.

By Kathy Cacace [Archives]

The other night, I had this dream that I was on the subway. Why I can’t dream a limo, or a private jet, or even a station wagon stuck in traffic instead of the F train is beyond me. I was trying to get off the train at West 4th Street when this big guy in a trench coat and a fedora (less like a detective and more like someone Frank Costanza would have a vague business association with) got in my way. Instead of moving away from the door so I could get out, he slapped me on the backside and said, “Move your fat ass!”

So I killed him.

Literally, I strangled this man until he was on the floor dead, and then I calmly got off the train, and, because this was a dream, emerged into my elementary school.

With subtle hints like this one, I’m realizing there’s a rage associated with people knowing I’m trying to lose weight that I probably need to deal with lest I end up wearing an XL orange jumpsuit and estimating the number of points in a tray of institutional franks and beans.

At my meeting this week, the conversation veered from how to eat at restaurants (hint: don’t eat so much) to how people’s “support systems” (husbands) “help” them (embarrass them while eating) to “stay on program” (get hot). Whenever one woman went out to dinner or to a party or anywhere that wasn’t a lettuce field, her husband would ask, “How many points are in that?” before she ate or ordered anything. My meeting leader, the fabulous Ricardo, countered with a story of another woman he knew whose husband would ask her if she wanted a Diet Coke every time he thought she was going overboard. These women, supposedly, were appreciative of this.

Isn’t this kind of chicken or egg? Which came first, the dickhead or the big ass?

If any of you ever ONCE said something to me along the lines of, “Are you sure you want to eat that?” I would murder you with such ninja speed they’d give me my own line of plus size action figures, but I would make them put me in something cuter than a bodysuit. Maybe a dress with an empire waist, because what’s more flattering than that? But my point is: a comment like that is not support. That’s looking down from the top of a pedestal you must weigh only so much to climb and saying, hey, fatty, you’re not just fat, you’re dumb. You don’t know what you’re doing. I’m thin. Therefore I know what I’m talking about.

Now put down that single Dipsy Doodle and polish my pedestal with your generous behind.

Last night I went out to a vegan fast food place, one of my favorite restaurants in Brooklyn, to celebrate a birthday dinner. I ate a shit ton of phony mac and cheese and two southern fried “chicken” wings with dowel rod bones. Now. If you were a dickhead and you knew that I was on Weight Watchers and you saw that I was eating a pile of fried crap with a side of radioactive yellow delicious, this would probably be a time when you might say, “Hey, Baby Beluga, back away from the drumstick.”

To which I might respond, “Hey dickhead, I ate single bowl of cereal this morning and a Popsicle for lunch so I could have this for dinner and still be well within my points range. So, since you don’t know a fucking thing about my life, how about you go fuck yourself?”

Food is personal. Eating is personal. For some people it’s emotional. For me, it’s mathematical. Since no one else knows the total value of what I’ve consumed during the day, there’s no one else that has a right to question what I’m eating. It’s my business if I want to lose weight, and it’s my business how I do it, and I sincerely worry for anyone (any Weight Watchers lady) who cedes that right to anyone else (her dickhead dude) who will decide how and when they want to police you.

(So watch out, because a vegan drumstick dowel rod “chicken” bone is really nothing more than a concealed weapon).