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~ponder~
So I wonder: are there programs of the Jenny-Craig-et-al sort for people who feel like they need to gain weight? I don't mean for people who need help with anorexia or bulimia or other disorders, but for people who find that they eat and eat and just can't keep up with their metabolism and believe they would be healthier if they could gain fifteen or twenty pounds and keep it on.
It seems counterintuitive, doesn't it?, but really, there must be a market - albeit a very slight one - for the exact converse of the struggling-to-lose-weight segment of the population. Might help to focus the whole matter on health matters rather than body-image ones. (I will always adore Carrie Fisher, but I loathed every single time I heard her in her JC commercial say "Thank you for letting me be pretty one more time." There is nothing right about that sentence.) I mean to say: Health At Every Size and all that, but there are people at every size who are not healthy there, and sometimes the way to do that is to change the size, and sometimes the change needs to be one way and sometimes it needs to be the other way. And I presume, from logic and just a smidgen of anecdata, that among people who struggle with being underweight there must be those who need guidance to make choices that will help them control their weight better than they've been doing. (Anecdatum: I knew a girl in high school who had passed willowy and gone into rail-thin, who wanted badly to be able to gain some weight for a variety of reasons, and toted snacks with her everywhere she went - but raw celery wasn't going to do it for her, you know what I mean? She needed someone to take her by the hand and slap some peanut butter on there or she was never going to make any progress.)
I just, you know, I wonder what Weight Watchers would do if you told it your starting weight was 105 and your target weight was 130. They'd have to do a different set of calculations when working out the points, I think, where you'd get credit for the carbs and lose some for the fiber, maybe, instead of the other way around. It shouldn't be outside their remit, though.
It seems counterintuitive, doesn't it?, but really, there must be a market - albeit a very slight one - for the exact converse of the struggling-to-lose-weight segment of the population. Might help to focus the whole matter on health matters rather than body-image ones. (I will always adore Carrie Fisher, but I loathed every single time I heard her in her JC commercial say "Thank you for letting me be pretty one more time." There is nothing right about that sentence.) I mean to say: Health At Every Size and all that, but there are people at every size who are not healthy there, and sometimes the way to do that is to change the size, and sometimes the change needs to be one way and sometimes it needs to be the other way. And I presume, from logic and just a smidgen of anecdata, that among people who struggle with being underweight there must be those who need guidance to make choices that will help them control their weight better than they've been doing. (Anecdatum: I knew a girl in high school who had passed willowy and gone into rail-thin, who wanted badly to be able to gain some weight for a variety of reasons, and toted snacks with her everywhere she went - but raw celery wasn't going to do it for her, you know what I mean? She needed someone to take her by the hand and slap some peanut butter on there or she was never going to make any progress.)
I just, you know, I wonder what Weight Watchers would do if you told it your starting weight was 105 and your target weight was 130. They'd have to do a different set of calculations when working out the points, I think, where you'd get credit for the carbs and lose some for the fiber, maybe, instead of the other way around. It shouldn't be outside their remit, though.