March 16, 2022
Hello WW Philadelphia Members!
What is needed to make a healthier life possible? Sometimes it’s your SUPERPOWER.
Superpower #1: The Prepper - Every Sunday evening or after Saturday’s shopping trip... out come the containers, jars, and plastic to prep veggies for salads, fruit for snacks, ingredients for this week’s meals, lunches for work.
Superpower #2: The Planner – This Member pre-plans; some pre-plan the day, some two or three days, and some a full week of meals. Then the planner surveys the groceries on hand, makes a list for the needed items, and a trip to the grocery, all done.
Superpower #3: Another kind of Planner – This Member doesn’t plan the food but plans out the use of POINTS instead. One version of this is to divide your daily point budget into three and filling out meals with foods from your ZeroPoint food list. Then unused POINTS from each day’s meal are pushed into the next snack or meal. This kind of planner might look like they are flying by the seat of their pants but is truly in control by keeping each meal’s POINT budget in mind when making food decisions.
Superpower #4: This Member has a certain type of mastery of Discipline – This mastery mimics a skill born in people who seemingly keep their healthy weight without effort. (You all know one or many of them, those who are not calorically challenged.) This superpower involves the ability to not eat a food when it doesn’t taste as good or doesn’t seem as satisfying as you thought it was going to be before the first bite. This skill takes a whole lot of that mindful awareness allowing for a moment of total sensory eating before scarfing the whole item down. Members mastering this skill don’t finish the food because “it wasn’t worth the POINTS.”
Superpower #5: Members with this skill should wear CAPES – This skill is even more elusive than the prior 4, it is the ability to discard, give away or in some other way get a perfectly good, desirable item out of the way and out of your mind. An example would be to discard a perfectly good piece of dessert sent home with you by a “friend.”
My lack of superpower #5 rears its head in drive-up windows. First of all, before WW, drive-up windows were my cover. By cover I mean, I could order pretending to be a family of four.
I know you think I said that in jest and while I laugh now, it was true. “Yes, I need four small drinks with that.” Because of the anonymity of the drive-up window, I have avoided them for years and instead inconvenience myself on purpose by parking the car and going inside to order.
Twice in the last couple of months, I have for one reason or another, needed to grab lunch and used the drive-up lane of a burger place and twice I did not get what I ordered. Instead, I got MORE! What kind of devilish intervention is this? One of my biggest lessons to self during my many years as a WW Member is free food is not FREE! So this meant I had to alter the MORE order into something close to what I had ordered.
One action I have found to be cathartic in regards to my relationship with food is volunteering in places and for people where having enough nutrition is a challenge. I can sort canned food at the food bank, assist with the making of the emergency food boxes, deliver meals to the elderly, and even pay for a young mother’s extra but still necessary items that were not covered by her SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).
Placing food in the right perspective in our lives is a huge step to living a healthier, longer life. Yes, we celebrate every special moment with food but realizing an abundance of food, let alone healthy food, is not accessible to all. This is an important lesson, and remembering there might have been a time in our own lives when it wasn’t available, can lead us to make better use of our own food resources. It could be as simple as cutting a meal in half because it really is enough food and POINTS for two meals. One for later or one to share.
And, if you think you’ve handled food challenges especially well lately, share it in your workshop. Your Superpower might help someone else and it’s a GREAT NSV (Non-Scale Victory).
Share kindness this week and have a great day,
