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]

To this day, when I see a dumpy old guy in a hat, I think George! to myself. This is because the game Guess Who? was a formative childhood experience, one that embedded itself into my cognitive schema for categorizing and judging strangers so early that every ginger bald guy is Bill, every nerdy academic type is Tom, and Mrs. Peacock from the movie Clue is Claire.

My brothers and I played this game far longer into our preadolescence than the box recommended, keeping it fresh by consistently updating the kind of questions we would ask. “Does your guy have a round nose?” we might’ve asked each other when we were 6 and 8 years old, but by 12 and 14, it was more along the lines of “Does he look like he might be in that Good Touch, Bad Touch video they showed us in fourth grade?”

So, I present my submissions to Guess Who: Weight Watchers Edition.

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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]

I have this thing for cut-offs. It gets a little warm and, bam, I want to sever the legs of every pair of pants I own. If I could go through the rest of my life bare-legged and futzing with thigh-high frayed hems, I’d be the world’s happiest girl. This spring has been exciting because none of my pants fit, which means I’ve been able to slice and dice my old, big jeans with abandon and wear the belted, slightly droopy results virtually every night I go out. That’s my party uniform: the one lucky gray t-shirt own that I don’t hate and doesn’t fall off, and one pair of shorts selected from the rotating cast of frayed denim guest stars.

For someone with a whole host of body issues, I have very little shame. Or class. I have worn denim cut-offs recently to house parties, people’s places of employment, restaurants, bars, dance parties, and very nearly (until I was able to remove a chocolate icing stain from my one pair of jeans) the Mother’s Day celebration I threw at my house. Whatever. I may have arms that make you crave Jello, and I may exhale fully only in the safety of my bedroom, but my legs (while blindingly, radiantly, ghostly, Polishly white) are pretty much in proportion and, come on, they’re freaking legs. Who cares?

Judging by a subway ride I took recently, EVERYONE.

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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 last vestige of my Catholic childhood that hangs around my adult life (besides the inability to steal anything due to crushing guilt) is the concept of purgatory. A universal waiting room of judgment is an idea that has a certain resonance when you learn about it as a kid, because then, everything is purgatory: K-Mart, the dentist’s office, math class, being stuck in the car with your mom. Being stuck in the Tae Kwon Do lobby waiting for your brothers to break their stupid boards. Being stuck in the vestibule after church while your mom talks to other moms and you jump from floor tile to floor tile on one foot because there is nothing else to do and you are LITERALLY DYING, MOM. GOD. Everything is purgatory when you have no control.

Welcome to the wonderful world of the “plateau.”

Despite following my points regimen, drinking all my water, walking more, and sacrificing thin young kittens at an altar built from old Vogues and Ex-Lax boxes, I have lost approximately two pounds in the last month. I’ve heard countless stories that this will happen from time to time, and that you just have to keep on trucking and eventually your chemistry will adjust and start losing again, but come ON. It’s like my body is my personal purgatory, stuck between sizes due to some unwitting earthly sin of mine.

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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]

Here are a few facts about my butt:

1. It is smaller than it used to be.
2. Despite its shrinking size, it is still the one place where I do not excessively gain weight, which is sad when you consider Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian, and the fact that I will never be a Black Tail cover girl.
3. It is currently residing in a pair of black skinny jeans I purchased at Trash and Vaudeville.

These were my goal pants, and though I haven’t reached my final goal (nor have I decided what that goal actually is) I caved and bought a pair because, well, fuck you, I want good pants now. Prior to purchasing these pants (which I basically live in because they are the only pants I own that fit at all), I was courting a pair of jeans at Uniqlo. Same pair. I’d visit once or twice every couple of weeks and take them on a romantic getaway to the dressing room to see if they would fit. Each time I buttoned them up my waist looked less like two sausage links, but as of last week they still weren’t great. Stuck with the option to either purchase a pair of (quelle horreur!) bootcut jeans at Old Navy or keep on trucking in my current pants (which reveal so much asscrack when I walk that they’re basically a one way ticket to a public indecency charge), I figured it was time to try Trash.

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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 old lady who weighs me in and sometimes offers me free pretzels (which is sort of sadistic, when you think about it) was chirping her “support” so loudly that I put my boot back on the wrong foot. When I stepped down on it I kind of tripped because all my toes were going the wrong way, and, since my lucky weigh-in outfit always includes the one dress I own, I accidentally flashed my underwear to everyone perusing the shelf of one point snacks.

“You made it! You beat it, actually! Amazing! You should be so proud! Ricardo! Come look at this!” Ricardo, meeting leader extraordinaire, catwalked his way over to my scale.

“Ten percenn! Congrass! Ha you thought abow a new goal?”

This was the point at which, if my life were an actual situation comedy instead of just resembling one, they’d do that simultaneous zoom in/zoom out that instantly reads as shock and terror. I got through three and three-quarters years of high school gym class without ever having to kick the ball during kickball. I am the queen of avoidance. But last Wednesday there was no getting around speaking to Ricardo, despite eight consecutive weeks of sitting in the back, muttering things like “Heroin has no points, how about you try that?” and avoiding all human eye contact.

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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]

Tootie, Natalie, Blair or Jo? Jessie Spano, Kellie Kapowski, or Lisa Turtle? Melanie Wilkes or Scarlett O’Hara? Mary-ann or Ginger? Rayanne, Angela, Sharon or Delia? Mary Kate or Ashley? Kristy or Claudia or Mary Ann or Stacy or Dawn or Mallory or Jesse? There are all these archetypes under the umbrella of girldom, and I don’t buy any of them until confronted with a recently engaged Charlotte.

In my regular life, this is a situation in which I have found myself precisely zero times. Thanks to my new weekly get-togethers, however, I’m buying ever more into the fact that there are kinds of girls who cannot ever see eye to eye, despite even the shared bond of elastic waistband ruts in our stomach skin.

When I signed up for Weight Watchers, I did it to be able to walk into a store and purchase a decent pair of pants like the motherfucking gainfully employed American capitalist consumer I am, goddammit.

I was not, despite the shrieking owners of flashy new rings multiplying amongst the ranks of my meeting like termites, signing up for Miss Ovary’s Estrogen Hoedown.

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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]

Happy fucking Valentine’s! Hope fat little cupid spears you all right in your skinny asses and you have lots of bony, pointy, sharp, gangly sex. Fuckers.

In the song I’ve had stuck in my head all motherfucking day, sage old Kool and his Gang advise us to, “Celebrate good times, come on (do do do DO, do DO do doo, YA-HOO!).” I’m doing my best, like Lionel Richie, to get my fat ass dancing on the ceiling, but gravity (and reality) keeps intervening. There’s so much to celebrate: Valentine’s Day, 11 pounds gone in four weeks, Thursday (laudable only for its proximity to Friday), the burrito I brought for lunch, my bangs staying basically in place despite sleeping on them wet, and a Foodswings Valentine’s “date” tonight with my girl boyfriend Jes. But the celebration part (YA-HOO!) keeps getting foiled.

Last night at my WW meeting (P.S., the official gang sign I’ve devised for Weight Watchers is the “whatever” W…but wiggle your index fingers twice, like air quotes), the old weigh-in lady told me I’ve lost 11 pounds in four weeks on the program. “Make sure you celebrate it at the end of the meeting!” she urged.

“Uh, I’m not really…a celebrator,” I said, putting my shoes back on.

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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.

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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]

Though they are probably the least nautical thing on the planet (they don’t float, you can’t surf in them, and they don’t even have a sailor waist), my anchor is a pair of Trash and Vaudeville jeans.

To explain: every Weight Watcher is supposed to have an “anchor” that you think about and dream about and sleep with a picture of under your pillow and wish for on every twinkling star that somehow propels you toward your goal. When you think about it, this is just “thinspiration” more appetizingly named. Everyone on a diet has something that keeps them turning down the Reese’s Pieces (which I have not wanted in something like five years AND which appeared in the work vending machine this week for the first time I can remember, proving once and for all that there is a god and he fucking hates me), and whether that’s a pre-pregnancy pair of jeans or a picture of Kate Moss taped to the underside of your toilet lid it doesn’t much matter to anyone but you.

Except when you have to listen to a pack of hungry retards talk about it on a weekly basis. “My boyfriend bought me a diamond anchor necklace and I wear it all the time to remind me of my goals.” Yeah? Really? And you just walked into a door, right? (more…)

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]

“Cuhhcakesss…” Ricardo said, in that gay Cubanish drawl that will remind me of Hank Azaria in The Birdcage for all time even though I saw that movie once and didn’t even like it. “Cuhhcakesss are all abow feelinksss.”

It is my fate to sit in the back of whatever classroom I find myself in and never speak. This does not prevent teachers, professors, priests, magicians, and Weight Watchers group meeting leaders from looking me in the eyes and speaking directly to me as though they are ghosts and I am the only medium able to channel their desperate unfinished business to the corporeal world.

“No, I’m sssseriousss. Cuhcakesss are nah abow nutrishio! Cuhcakesss are all abow pleaashurrr! Now I gonna tell you how I make frensh toess for two poinsss.” (more…)