Tea and Crumpet

Yesterday I had the privelige of meeting the charming Lady Crumpet for tea at Tea and Sympathy in the Village.

A brief bit of double-taking ensued as Lucy Liu or someone who was masquerading as Lucy Liu by looking exactly the same down to the tininess and the freckles got up and left after I asked after the fat-free celery soup. Some days I can't do anything right.

Anyway. Tea and Sympathy looks like a small British tearoom from somewhere like Bath, only transplanted to New York and so with an enormous air-conditioning unit and epic ventilation box section snaking across the ceiling. But in a nice way.

It was also an odd thing to me, odd as this being odd may seem to those of you used to a higher standard of oddity round these parts, for all of the wait staff to be British. One of the waitress's accents matched my Yorkshire Gold tea, and summoned to mind a hundred teenage evenings while my family looked at the TV above my head watching 'Coronation Street' (I didn't mind being the one at the round kitchen table facing the other way). There were British accents at a lot of the tables, too.

I was fascinated by one guy who came in shortly after we had recieved our 'British Monarchs' themed teapots. This man wore rugged weathered jeans and trainers, and as he nodded to the staff he shrugged off a heavy coat which looked like it had seen several thousand better days. He ordered bangers and mash with beans and pulled out, of all things, a copy of the Daily Mirror.
Everything about him screamed 'Trucker'...apart from his context. It was as though he had been plucked from Knutsford Services on the Northbound M6 and dropped just outside a small theme cafe in the West Village.

The tea, the company, and yes, the fat-free celery soup as well; they were all excellent.

Which brings me, through a celery-soup flavoured segue, to Weight Watchers.

I've never been good at moderation, and I think the transition from the UK to the US and from single to married life has left it's mark on me. I'm more...cuddly than before. I cringe at a higher percentage of photographs of myself. Now it's not a desperation thing; I don't get out of breath climbing stairs, I can do increasingly large numbers of laps of the running track when Krissa and I go out jogging. I am okay. But I'm not good.

This was my rationale before I went along to the first meeting on Tuesday, where they weighed us both, and all of a sudden I was gripped with the surprise of just how un-okay I am.
I've got a big frame, so I take all this BMI (Body Mass Index) business with a pinch of salt, because people of the same height do not all have the same healthy weight. It's just a guideline. Sure. So I have a margin of error. But not that much.

So it was a bit of a surprise to learn that, despite being considerably taller than the man himself, I was only a few pounds off weighing the same as Homer Simpson at the beginning of the episode where he attempts to gain enough weight to be classified as disabled. That's a hell of a lot of Stuart to lose to get to what the WW Krew would call 'a healthy weight'.

I got two silver sticky stars for turning up on Tuesday. And there was a lot of applause. And talk of the inconsiderateness of Disney toward dieters.
But over and above the things that made me question my sanity there is the difficulty I had with decided to go along in the first place.

Dieting seems to be a bit of a passive way of dealing with the problem. I took up the Atkins for a month a couple of years ago and lost who knows how much weight (I certainly don't, I just did the thing, I didn't weigh myself) and I've exercised or whatever, but dieting seems an un-masculine approach to a problem. Overweight? Join a gym! Run around a lot!
Weight Watchers? HAHAHAHAHA. (says the little voice in my head who never learns and sticks to its preconceptions regardless of evidence)

But it's about learning moderation. It's about learning to eat properly, above and beyond what you THINK you should do but never do, it's about having the reference, the information, the regime and, should you need it, the support of little shiny stickers and the applause of other people.
We'll see how it goes.

I'm sure with a little research you could find out how much Homer Simpson weighs, but I don't want to lay out the truth in plain sight, so I'll say this; my starting weight is H-4 (Homer minus 4) and we'll be moving away from that.

Update: Well, okay, I was wrong. Ignore everything to do with Homer Simpson. I weigh more than him.