At least there's no Kool-Aid. Too many points.

Well, I've joined Weight Watchers again.

ROC's wedding looms distant on the horizon, but it's close enough to fill me with a kind of dread. Oh, I'm not terribly worried about the Bridezilla factor, much. ROC is going to plan this thing down to the minute with a sort of ruthless organization that will make D-Day look like a game of pick-up basketball. Her will will be imposed on all and sundry, I will be given an explicit set of detailed instructions and armed with the knowledge that failure to complete said instructions will result in no less than the destruction of my very soul. Think I'm exaggerating? Sparty tried to point out to her that a fall date was impractical, because autumn is union negotiation time, and he didn't want to risk getting stuck in a strike situation on the day of his wedding. ROC informed him that if a union strike was threatening to interfere, she'd steal the negotiators' children. She never mentioned what she'd do with them, but I imagine "baking into a pie" is not an unfair assumption. If everyone does what they are supposed to do, I have no doubt that this affair will be fabulous, elegant, and fun for all involved. If they don't, well, she'll eat the sun. So its not the wedding itself that's sent me into the arms of an organization I have repeatedly referred to as a "cult."

No, it's the pictures.

Let me be clear: there has never been, in my life, a picture of myself that I have liked. I look at myself in the mirror and think, "hey, not bad" and then ten minutes later someone takes a picture and I swear to God I don't know what happens in that interval between me looking pretty okay in the mirror and me looking like the unfortunate meeting of a zeppelin and a terrier, but it's almost amazing. I've looked at pictures that people I love and trust have insisted were "good pictures" and thought to myself dear God, I'm looking at photographic evidence of Snaggle-haired Trolls and you are telling me this is a good picture? As for the inevitable "bad" pictures, well, let's just say I understand the appeal of a burqa.

Now, I know I'm being irrational. I have not, to my knowledge, broken a camera yet. No one has ever run screaming from me (well, not due to my looks, at least). And, like I said, I rather like how I look in a mirror. I am fully aware that my copious body-image issues are a product of unrealistic societal standards of beauty. I read The Beauty Myth a long time ago, folks, and I can quote from Backlash. This is all aside from the fact that I have spent a great deal of time in the company of This Guy, who seems to like telling me how great he thinks I look.

But these are wedding photos. My sister's wedding photos. These things are going to hang on walls in family homes. They are going to be shown to approximately half a million people (two big Catholic families, you know). They are going to haunt me for years to come. Nay, verily, decades into the future! And if I have this much advanced warning, you better believe I'm going to take drastic action.

And so I present myself, each Wednesday evening, at the cult, to be weighed in and to listen to the motivational speaker. It's not a bad system, really. You get a number of points based on your current weight, and the food you eat uses up certain numbers of points based on fat vs. fiber content. You have to eat a certain number of servings of fruits and veggies, a certain amount of milk or dairy products, and water. Oh boy do you drink water. You've got six little ticky boxes of water down there at the bottom of your daily tracking journal, and that comes out to about a liter of water a day. I think the hidden key to weight loss under weight watchers is the water drinking, honestly. First of all, you've got this torrent of water flooding your system, overwhelming everything in it's path. I think it works against fat much the same way the rainy season works against overdeveloped California hillsides. Then there's all the exercise you get running to and from the bathroom every ten minutes. . .

But here's the part that I am loving: if you stay within your daily limit of points, you can eat like a trash compactor. I'm serious. This past Saturday, I had a leftover pizza for both breakfast and lunch(8 pts. each). Around dinner time, I had a Diet Coke and a handful of caramels (4 pts.) During the intermission of the late game, I sat down and added it all up. Total points consumed: 20 out of 24. Total nutritional value: 0. This is my kind of diet. It works, too. In a week that included a Quizno's Italian sub, a trip to Buddy's Pizza, a stack of buttermilk pancakes, and a chicken McNuggets Happy Meal, I lost two pounds.

Size 8, here I come.