Weight Watchers Zealots

For over an hour this morning, I listened to co-workers behind me preaching the gospel of weight watchers to another co-worker. I don’t believe that I will ever understand the fanaticism that some people feel about a life style that works for them, be it religious or otherwise.

I’ve been on an exercise kick myself, lately. But I’ve never been the sort of person who responds well to outside pressure. I have to want to do something for it to stick for any period of time. And I am trying. But listening to the tirade was genuinely disturbing.

To me, there has to be some sort of balance in life. Is life worth living if you deny yourself pleasure all the time. Why don’t we just chew cud all day? It’s probably healthy, but how enjoyable is it? So, what’s the point to ever going out for a meal if you can’t let loose and enjoy that meal? Surely, it cannot be every meal – not unless you have the metabolism from hell, which some in my family, but not me, have.

My great Aunt Josephine once told my maternal grandmother, her sister, that “Some of us eat to live. Others of us live to eat.” She was placing my Ma-Ma squarely in that second camp. I’m there with her somewhere. While I’m working to find that balanced place in the middle, a life of deprivation doesn’t sound like one worth living.

This is what I wanted to tell the zealots this morning, but I would have been shouted down. I’ve been there before.