Hazy Shade of Winter

“So what else are you finding with the new program that’s better?”

On the first Saturday in January, Jennifer looks around packed Weight Watchers meeting, hoping for some feedback. She is met with blank stares and a few feeble comments. (Although I tend to be an over-enthusiastic group participant, I hold back a little at Weight Watchers since November when she asked what our strategies for dealing with Thanksgiving Dinner stresses are and I blurted out “I drink!”...I sensed some disapproval. Although the little Italian lady in front of me turned around and winked.)

On the way out, I try to tell her, “it’s like little kids...when you go away, (that particular meeting had not been held for two weeks because of the holidays) they will punish you by ignoring you when you come back home.” She doesn’t have children, so she didn’t think that was funny.

Or, I could tell her, it could be because it’s winter and we are blanketed by snow skies and slush, nine hours of daylight if we’re lucky...sure, fruit is now zero points but is fruit what we crave in the dead of winter?

Well, I will try to only speak for myself and I can confidently say “NO”, I love fruit, but that’s not what I CRAVE.

No, what I want when I’ve been slogging through the icy winter wonderland I call home is to put my face into a Panera bread bowl soup.

The Weight Watchers Points for a bread bowl of Black Bean soup (which I love and I believe is also the best WW choice) is 16.

To put that in perspective for you non-WW people, I get to eat 29 points a day.

Which makes the bread bowl soup do-able, but you have to plan carefully and use some of your 49 weekly points...yes, it’s do-able, but certainly not for every day!

And some days I’m just so exhausted from taking my boots on and off that it makes my head spin to contemplate that it’s only Tuesday and I don’t have those extra points to use on bread because I polished off the Godiva truffles that Santa brought me for Christmas. (You don’t even want to know the points for one of those...OK, they are 6 points a scrumptious mouthful...see what I mean? A grape is just so not going to cut it.)

As I was half asleep in bed this morning, sorting through the Fellini-esque territory of my dreams (where does this stuff come from?—oh, from my mind!—that’s pretty scary) and feeling like the proverbial addict—“I’ll have a nice big salad for lunch today, won’t that be great!”—I so realized how much I just wanted to hibernate. For me, that feels like wanting to turn inward, an unusual impulse for the “raging extrovert” I think of myself as.

And doesn’t that make sense, physically? And mentally? If you accept that everything is cyclical, that winter prepares for the spring, for the summer, for the fall, again for the winter...that you can’t have growth and blossoming without rest and reflection. Our world is so hooked in and turned on, I feel very distanced from natural rhythms and truths.

Being in the present, being still, and allowing myself to rest and rejuvenate are not natural talents for me. Maybe that’s why I reach for my comfort foods. Maybe winter can teach me to be still, just a little bit more. Small steps!

Oh, and if you see me at Weight Watchers, let’s not mention the Godiva truffle thing, OK?