IF YOU WANT TO DROP POUNDS, YOU COULD GO PALEO. YOU COULD FOLLOW THE BLUEPRINT CLEANSE, AVOID GLUTEN, AND EAT LIKE YOU LIVE ON THE MEDITERRANEAN. OR YOU COULD JOIN WEIGHT WATCHERS (SHH!) AND ACTUALLY GET SKINNY.
 |
| <; |
As a former Ace certified personal trainer, I have to say Weight Watchers is the only true program that I have seen that actually works for everyone who actually works the program.
When wealthy, plugged-in urbanites want to lose weight, they don’t go on a diet. They get spiritual. A diet is something you pay attention to at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which leaves about 21 hours to further prove a commitment to the cause. Regardless of whether you’re a juice cleanser, a raw foodist, or a 22-day vegan (Ã la Bey and Jay), you follow the commandments and proselytize the beliefs. You are what you eat.
Or what you don’t. Flaunting self-denial is one of the bougiest ways to show off, a means of proving that you’re experiencing a level of transcendence that mere mortals can’t fathom because they don’t possess your monklike restraint (or chia budget). It also signals that you’re in the know, privy to the most of-the-moment way to stay lithe, sharp, and ahead of everyone else.
Lost in these vision quests is the not-insignificant matter of whether the diets, you know, work. So when these anatomically obsessed apostles actually have to shed pounds, they want that old-time religion. In body-conscious urban circles, the secret weapon for executives, tastemakers, and scenesters—fashion-magazine editors and photographers (who’d staple me to my SoulCycle if I let their names slip), beauty magnates like Laura Mercier, branded personalities like Isaac Mizrahi, and rock stars like Stevie Nicks—is Weight Watchers.
That’s right, the diet that for decades has been the go-to for midwestern soccer moms and dads in pleated khakis—for residents of Manhattan, Kansas, not Manhattan the island.
For this particular, leather-pants-coveting cohort, the first rule of Weight Watchers is that you don’t talk about Weight Watchers. And why would you? The brand speaks largely through the mouth of Jessica Simpson, has boasted a photo of a giant cupcake on its website’s homepage (frosting level: cumulus), and passes out stickers as rewards during its 40,000 weekly support gatherings held in rooms that would make your urologist’s office look like a B&B Italia showroom.
Weight Watchers works, though. It’s not cool—not even ironically cool, like Rihanna using a flip phone—but counting points leads to shedding pounds, whether you’re the type to down 16 grams of beluga caviar (one point) or a Taco Bell Quesarito (17 points). Mainly, the tallying happens online—meetings are optional—and in private, like watching porn.
“For me, Weight Watchers is an executive decision, a way to approach eating like a business project,”
The CIA runs operations less clandestine than this one, which is carried out by millions of iPad Air owners, many of whose household incomes climb well into the six figures. Acolytes don’t blather on like Paleo dieters who won’t shut up about bone marrow, but neither does the guy sleeping with his homely but sexually gifted coworker.
Yet in both cases, the body is quietly getting a healthy dose of what it needs regularly.
For some, like Mickey Boardman, the 48-year-old editorial director of Paper magazine (that glass of champagne balanced on Kim Kardashian’s backside: four points), the habit becomes very regular. “I might work at a hip magazine, I might be a jet-set glamour-puss,” Boardman says, “but my people are really the ones who sneak into the bathroom and eat an entire bag of Oreos.”
Unlike other image-aware magazine types asked to comment for this story (who declined), Boardman’s not ashamed to speak up; subscribing to a down-market diet plan doesn’t bother him in the least. “After being around hipsters all day, I want housewives,” he says. “I want real people.” Sometimes he sees Oscar winners at his meetings instead. “I don’t know if I can say her name,” Boardman says. Jennifer Lawrence? “Jennifer Lawrence? No! Olympia Dukakis.
But it’s New York—you never know who you’re going to see.”
Chris Ying, the 32-year-old editor-in-chief of the food magazine Lucky Peach, doesn’t flaunt his membership. He enrolled in the online version of the program with a certain degree of testosterone-curdling hesitation.
“It took a friend signing up for me to get over the emasculating stigma,” he says. But the program paid dividends.
Ying set out to lose 20 pounds before his wedding, and by following the simple, 52-year-old advice formulated by a Brooklyn housewife named Jean, he did. “As someone who has always aimlessly ‘dieted’—generally eating less food—to keep myself from going from sort of fat to too fat, joining presented a direct path,” says Ying, who balanced the occupational challenge of meals out with chicken breasts and vegetables at home.
“All you have to do is follow their rules.”
To put it in C-suite terms, point counting means becoming the CFO of your mass—and ass. Handle the numbers correctly, and you’re in the black: black skinny jeans, little black dress, see leather-pants reference above. “For me, Weight Watchers is an executive decision, a way to approach eating like a business project,” says Mitchell Nadel, the chief financial officer of an energy-management company that serves the New York City area.
He, too, found solace in the structure, citing a congenital tendency to put on pounds fast and using Weight Watchers as a countermeasure. “It’s not a diet,” he says, 30 pounds lighter than he was last year and with six marathons under his belt. “It’s like keeping a budget. They really should market more toward finance guys.”
[SOURCE]
0 Comments