How Weight Watchers Taught Me to Be a Disordered Eater

Hi, it's Victoria here from Bam Pow Life and in this video, I'm talking about how Weight Watchers taught me to be a disordered eater. Before we get started, I want to remind you to subscribe to my channel so you can get all the best videos and give me a thumbs up if you like this video. And also check out the links below for some free goodies all up to make your brain really happy.

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So I was about 21 when I very first went to Weight Watchers. I convinced my then boyfriend, poor him, that we should join Weight Watchers together so that we could become very skinny and fabulous. He wasn't even fat. So, ugh. That poor boyfriend but anyway he came along with me. When I went to Weight Watchers, I was so goddamn excited to finally get my eating under control and finally become the skinny person that I knew that I deserved to be.

I started Weight Watchers like we all do with any new diet with glee, with excitement, with, I'm gonna do it not like the rest of the greedy fatties that can't control themselves. I'm gonna eat nothing and become thin within weeks. So the first thing that they do is obviously they weigh you and then they tell you how much you should weigh. I thought that I was fat but Weight Watchers told me that I was really, really, really, really fat and that I was about to die any second. And then they told me what weight I should be and it was a giant difference and now I know that that weight, I would have been so, so thin and they were just saying that's what the normal weight is.

Obviously, they were using the B.M.I. scale, the body mass index scale, which is not based in science. It was created by a mathematician and it's a load of bullshit. Basically, they were saying I should be this size when really I was fabulous just the was I was. Anyway, so the disordered eating that they taught me was, that things had points, right? Most of us know what Weight Watchers is like, this banana has X amount of points, this packet of crisps, chips, has this amount of points. I soon discovered that I could eat certain things that I liked better but weren't necessarily healthier for me, because they have the equivalent points value.

I would store up tons of points to eat Weight Watchers chocolate bars versus eating the things that I would normally eat, which would be variety of food. Another big thing that Weight Watchers teaches is that if you move your body then you gain the permission to eat more food. And so you have a calculator so you can work out, okay, so I've done a X amount of activity therefore I'm allowed to eat more food. And that's fucked up. So that is giving yourself food as a reward. And also if you haven't moved your body, you're not allowed to eat food, that's disordered eating pounds.

Weight Watchers taught me to absolutely ignore my hunger. My hunger was not an indicator of the fact that I was hungry. It was an indicator that I needed to do better, that I needed to get my head down and it was an indicator that I was starving, therefore I was becoming thinner. So hunger wasn't a reason to eat ever. Weight Watchers taught me that I should be eating certain foods at certain times and not eating past a certain time in the evening. And again, that is ignoring what your body wants. Sometimes you need a bigger breakfast, sometimes you want to eat at 11:30 PM at night. But Weight Watchers it was encouraged that you just suppress that.

You've had your dinner, now just that's it. No more eating for you. Weight Watchers also taught me that weight and health are correlated, not true. Weight Watchers so taught me that if I had had a smaller body that I was a more worthy human being. So when I started Weight Watchers, I was kind of a average type of mentally well person. I probably wasn't that mentally well but by the end of it, I was so fucked up around food. Had so much guilt even more than I had before. A gargantuan amount of guilt. Shame, because any type of food eating is shameful. And I had "fallen off the bandwagon" because I had eventually stopped going to Weight Watchers after losing a lot of weight. Realizing that I have to keep this up for the rest of my life. And it wasn't possible.

I left with shame, with guilt, with disordered eating, with a ton of shitty messages that I had to spend years and thousands of dollars with therapy unlearning. So if you're thinking about going to Weight Watchers or Slimming World or Jenny Craig or any of these fucked up diet company group meetings or any type of diet. Don't do it because you won't lose weight, 95 to 97% of people won't lose weight and most people just pick up a shit ton of disordered eating patterns, shame, guilt and they lose a ton of money. So keep your money and spend it something fabulous.

If you like this video, make sure that you like and subscribe and remember check out the links below for some goodness that you can download and make your brain happy. All right until the next video, I will see you then. Bye.