Not this time Jenny Craig
I got an email from Jenny Craig today.
That’s a name that hasn’t crossed my mind in a very long time.
Jenny Craig is a weight-loss corporation, kind of like Weight Watchers and Slimming World. I was a member when I lived in Australia in my 30s. I think I joined up on two different occasions. Maybe three.
Jenny wants me back in the fold. I hadn’t heard a word from her in more than 10 years and suddenly there she is in my email inbox; offering me a $60 discount if I join up again. I guess she’s figured out my age and reckons I’m probably fatter than ever by now.
Being a Jenny Craig member is not cheap. You buy all your food for the week off them. Every last bite. The idea being that you hardly need to step foot inside a supermarket thereby avoiding all that food-sin temptation.
CHEWING THE FAT
So once a week, you go and see your weight-loss relationship manager at HQ and, after the two of you have gone through your food and exercise diaries and talked about any challenges the week brought (that accursed chocolate bar snatched in a weak moment when you were paying for petrol, for example), you take home a big bag of frozen food wrapped in blue Jenny Craig plastic packaging. There was a lot of pasta, small nut bars, packets of soup, and wraps. That was a few years ago, maybe it’s all different now but I’d bet my last low-calorie chocolate brownie that it’s basically the same.
All the food is calorie counted of course. I was on about 1200 calories a day. If you get hungry, you could eat unlimited amounts of diet jelly. And oh yes, I did. I ate diet jelly like it was my job! The containers I made it in got quickly bigger and bigger until I was eating about a bucket of diet jelly every evening. And I was still hungry.
If, for some reason, I’d forgotten to make the crucial diet jelly the night before, leaving myself diet jelly-less for the day, I would fly into a panic.
‘How on earth am I ever going to get through the day without my diet jelly?? OMG how could I have been so stupid to not prepare it last night? I’ll never be able to stick to this without my diet jelly. How will I stop myself from doing a late-night snack run to the 7/11? Maybe I should lock myself in the house and throw the key through the window to my neighbour so she can let me out in the morning… oh jeezus, I’ll have to buy in five litres of diet Coke, or maybe I’ll just eat the diet jelly as unset liquid, yeah, that’s what I’ll do…’
My first time as a Jenny Craig member was the most successful (if you can call starving yourself for five months to crowbar off a few kilos and then gain them all back ‘successful’). I stuck to that bloody diet like glue.
In the evenings, the growling of my stomach could be heard by the neighbours. But through sheer bloody-minded willpower and determination, I fought the cravings and drowned out the stomach growls with artificially sweetened diet products every night. I betrayed my environmental principles and turned a blind eye to the criminal amounts of plastic waste I was generating. I gritted my teeth and forced myself to soldier on, clawing my way through each long, hungry day on my journey to find the holy grail of thinness. Which was measured by a certain magical number on the weighing scales.
It was miserable, soul crushing and difficult. But I did get down to a weight I was happy with. ‘Hallelujah!’ I thought. ‘I’ve finally done it! My battle is over. I am thin! Well, thin-ish – not fat, anyway. It’s taken me years but finally, at last, here I am! Let the angels sing!’
I know you know what happened after that.
That’s right, I came off the Jenny Craig plan and all the weight crept back. And I’m sure I blamed myself. I must have done because I re-joined Jenny Craig a few months later to see if I could do it again and ‘get it right this time’.
RIDING THE MISERABLE-GO-ROUND
The subsequent memberships were failures from the word go though. By then, I was bored rigid with the food and my body was completely fed up with the deprivation. Just thinking about more months of that spiralled me into depression.
It was all just another ride on the not-so-merry-go-round of dieting.
Back then, I was still tinkering about with what was going in my mouth and not exploring what was going on in my subconscious mind. All that those months of dieting misery accomplished was training my famine response to be even stronger than ever and teaching my brain how to run as efficiently as possible on low calories – the way it did this of course was slowing down or halting systems like digestion, immunity, bone building and repair.
So thanks for the memories Jenny, it was nice to reminisce and remember those crazy diet jelly nights, but I’m going to pass on your generous discount offer this time around.
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