I joined Weight Watchers yesterday to curb my eating. I know it’s called WW now, but

it’s still fucking Weight Watchers, and I’m still 30 pounds heavier than I was in high school, and

I need to answer yes on family medical history questionnaires where I used to answer no, and I

might as well lose the weight. So I signed up, even though they did their pandemic layoffs via

Zoom, and I learned to track my food.

Before daybreak yawns over Philadelphia, I crack the fridge where the cats are sleeping

and thread cold turkey through my teeth. Nuking it feels pointless, and warm turkey reminds me

too much of Thanksgiving anyway, of ribs lipping an antique dining table, of sit-up-straight jabs

to the spine, of relatives I can’t see huddled around slivered carrots and hummus, and Merlot

diffused through nostrils, and questions milled through the pepper grinder. How’s your job? Are

you still writing? Cooked turkey breast, skinless, three ounces. 2 points on Green, the plan with

the least 0-point foods. 

You count SmartPoints, not calories, on Weight Watchers. SmartPoints make healthy

eating simpler.

When I wake to mewling, I pull the tab on the cat food and sniff the contents. The gray

beef smells more surf than turf, so I test a morsel just to see. It tastes like King Kullen, like

standing in line for cold cuts as the deli man asked, “Is this thin enough?” and my dad split the

sample slice between us and I cherished the herb and peppercorn crust of it in my mouth. Dad

can’t eat deli meat anymore, not with his cholesterol, and the stroke that wasn’t a stroke but sure

looked like one to all those people on the train. The cats bump at my ankles and I eat the whole

damn thing. Pot roast with gravy, 7 points.

I read email before my first sip of coffee—vanilla latte with nonfat milk, 9

points—because these days my laptop springs open its jaws just to show me how wide they can

stretch. A client is testing her CC limit over a missing comma on a fourteenth draft. I eat my To

Do list, then the print proof, because I’m not up for promotion anyway. Whole wheat crackers,

one ounce, 4 points. “You sound so professional,” my mother said when she overheard me with a

client on the phone. “So adult.” It was the day before her spine surgery, before she’d cried in the

room that used to be my room, in the bed that used to be my bed. “When did I get so fucking

old.” When she told me to practice the ugly side of kindness if anything went wrong. “I don’t

want to live like that.” My pen splinters between my hands and I drink it like a Pixy Stix. It tastes

like a busted lip.

Weight Watchers doesn’t have a point value for pen ink. So because it’s a liquid and

liquids don’t promote the same feeling of fullness solids do, I track it as a summer berry

smoothie, 8 points. I’ve hit my daily points goal, and fuck me if it’s not even dinner time.

When I snack on the plants I’ve raised from cuttings after work—not just the mint and

basil, but the fichus too (non-starchy vegetables are 0 points), my boyfriend seems concerned,

and not just because we haven’t had sex in weeks—2 FitPoints for every ten minutes, if tracked

as a HIIT workout. FitPoints can be exchanged for SmartPoints if you turn on swapping.

“There’s nothing else to do,” I say, sucking milk sap from my thumb. It tastes like a spent

condom.

The fichus makes me puke for hours, but at least it passes the time. I watch the ink swirl

Fibonacci spirals in the toilet bowl—the only perfect thing my body’s ever made. I think I’ll dip

my old manuscripts in there, to see what sticks.

There are therapists for this, and my boyfriend thinks I should see one. There are pills

too, and I think I’d like that better, 0 points. What I need is discipline. I could stop if I wanted to,

if I really tried. I could eat poached salmon and smoothies and kale chips. I could lose the 30

pounds, get my cholesterol in check. Sit up straight. I could write again. Find the energy to

FaceTime the people I care about, or am supposed to care about but maybe don’t. 

But I’m 24 years old, and the world is sort of ending, and I don’t feel like discipline

today. Today, I feel like eating. So I let the Weight Watchers app tremble and disappear from my

phone, and I slump in front of a blank Word document, and I eat the keys from my keyboard like

kale chips to pass the time.