There are few things in this world that make me want to burn it all down to dust and start over again more than Weight Watchers. In 2018, the weight loss corporation rebranded as “WW” in an attempt to swap the retro associations of the diet industry for the more au courant ethos of “wellness.” In 2019, they launched a spinoff, “Kurbo by WW” a dieting app which caters exclusively to kids age 8-17, much of it by free initial 6-week subscription.
When I learned of this most recent move via my number one fave podcast on having a body, Maintenance Phase, something very deep in me was shaken. What was shaken was a memory in the way that a great deal of time, so many days, can be compressed into a single memory. I started going to Weight Watchers when I was nine or ten or eleven. The year is hazy. The feelings are hazy. Did I want to go? I was a child. Who can say. I remember feeling proud of having my own little book, my own system, my own secrets of control and castigation.
It was on the second floor of a commercial building on the wideness of 14th street west of seventh avenue. I believe we went on Sundays, in a swath of afternoon post lunch but before Sunday night anxiety kicked in, though we may have gone on Saturdays instead, or too. The stairwell up from the street level was dotted with posters of people who had succeeded in reducing the size of their bodies, each step we climbed brought a new face and a new number indicating the magnitude of their reduction. A semi-circle of black folding chairs was arranged around an oversized white pad of paper propped up on a stand. Some women—they were all women—were already sitting in their chairs, waiting for the meeting to begin. They had already been weighed.
I was weighed. I held my breath. I waited to see if they would give me that little plus or that little minus, a flick of the wrist in pencil. It could go either way and it often did; I got the little minus about as much as I got the little plus, but the increments were so slim. +.3 or -.2. I wondered about those decimals and what they meant. I wish I had known then that they meant nothing.
WW’s bid to survive by targeting children as weight loss customers initially worked, though the company is still showing rapid decline in profits. As with adults, children who diet end up at a higher weight than when they started, says our best scientific research, and end up with eating disorders at rates dramatically higher than kids who don’t diet.
What is lost to me forever are the meetings, what was said and who said it, though I know I was there. I know I was there because I can feel them, these women of lower New York City, laboring to lose five or twenty-five or seventy-five pounds. They wanted to talk and they wanted to be listened to and they wanted to know what the leader, a woman who had successfully “done it” herself, had to say. I can feel these women still, in their oversized asymmetrical blouses with the tails hanging down, their long vests and scrunchies and loafers. What I am wondering now, is if they remember me.
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Theresa’s Guide to Casting Spells
(This is part 6 of a story called The Purple Cow, told serially, with a new installment every two weeks. You can read previous installments about this house of weird animal queers who live together in West Philly here).
1: Theresa the Owl. Lie in bed, seeing other people in your mind, other places you wish to travel. Listen to Kate, Otto, Ace, and Tom moving about on the other side of the walls.
2: Hear Tom calling your name, know that he is in love with you and you do not love him back. He lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. He works for Comcast.
3: Reach into your pocket and find an old peppermint, partially crushed. Crush it for real between the bottom of your amythest crystal and the cover of a book, your old copy of The Heart is A Lonely Hunter.
4: Open your fanciest bottle of perfume, the one your Aunt Rita gave you when you graduated high school, and pour the ground peppermint dust in there.
5: Shake.
6: While you are shaking, imagine yourself a different person, your life a different life. Instead of wings, you have claws. Instead of this ruffle of neck feathers, you have nothing, a smooth lean neck like that of a cat or an otter. Even Kate’s neck, wide and lightly furred, would do. For a moment, touch your neck and feel yourself changed.
7: With your potion in progress in one hand, climb the stairs to the third floor where Otto and Tom live and knock lightly on their doors. When you’re sure you’re alone, slip into Otto’s room and out his window onto the roof garden where he grows tomatoes. Several tomatoes will already be growing there in tall white buckets, the fruit round and ripe and hot.
8: Pour the perfume with the ground up peppermint dust into the dirt of one of the buckets.
9: Wait twenty minutes.
10: While you are waiting, consider your job at the nonprofit where you work. It is a good job with a good mission. Oh how you yearn to leave it.
11: Pluck one of the tomatoes from the stalk whose bucket you watered and eat it. Feel its plumposity, what good juices come from something so taut and overstuffed.
12: Watch as your body changes. Transforms. You are the most beautiful girl in Philadelphia, in the whole world, and no one, except you, is there to see it.
Yours,
Emma
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Theresa's guide to casting spells