{"id":5284,"date":"2016-02-18T22:36:21","date_gmt":"2016-02-19T03:36:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/?p=5284"},"modified":"2024-10-31T16:14:13","modified_gmt":"2024-10-31T20:14:13","slug":"ophrah-weight-watchers-and-impossible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/2016\/02\/18\/ophrah-weight-watchers-and-impossible\/","title":{"rendered":"Oprah, Weight Watchers, and &#8220;Impossible&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-5290\" src=\"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Ready-to-head-back.jpg\" alt=\"Ready to head back? Cartoon by Robert Leighton (2003)\" width=\"473\" height=\"355\" srcset=\"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Ready-to-head-back.jpg 473w, https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Ready-to-head-back-450x338.jpg 450w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 473px) 100vw, 473px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>So Oprah is on Weight Watchers. She recently bought WW stock, which then appreciated like gangbusters, so she has that going for her, which is nice.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m seeing a lot of posts chewing over this news, many with disappointment and general comments about the &#8220;impossibility&#8221; of losing weight. Even if you are Oprah, and rich, and capable, and surrounded by opportunities for help and support.<\/p>\n<p><b>It&#8217;s not impossible to lose weight, but it&#8217;s difficult, frustrating, and draining to do things you dislike for reasons that are tied to sadness.<\/b> If you are mired in a belief that &#8220;inside every overweight woman is the woman she knows she can be,&#8221; then your framing is your prison. Because if that woman is &#8220;inside&#8221; you, she IS you.<\/p>\n<p><b>You can&#8217;t take good care of something you hate.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Acceptance in its various forms is often denigrated as passivity, as giving up, as the sweatpants and pint of ice cream of the soul. But sweatpants and ice cream are a perfectly enjoyable part of anyone&#8217;s life, and then you put them away, have a good night&#8217;s sleep, and get dressed for work and have an apple or whatever and life goes on. You can choose to make a habit of healthful living, and you can choose to make a habit of self-care and enjoyment, too.<\/p>\n<p>Ultimately we are what we repeatedly do. <b>If you keep punishing yourself for some notional failure, trying every 30-day fix out there in hopes something will stick, what will stick is restless program-hopping and the sense of failure.<\/b> Give yourself the gift of walking away from that. Don&#8217;t try to change everything at once, but instead choose one small thing and practice it until you don&#8217;t have to think about it anymore. Then build on that track record of success.<\/p>\n<p><!--I blogged about these issues for a year at Starter Steps. Here is a little more about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.startersteps.caitlinburke.com\/2015\/03\/31\/what-makes-habits-stick\/\" target=\"blank\" rel=\"noopener\">how to make changes with more confidence<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.startersteps.caitlinburke.com\/2015\/04\/17\/life-hacks-and-to-do-lists\/\" target=\"blank\" rel=\"noopener\">how to think about which changes to focus on<\/a>. <b>Give yourself time, treat yourself the way you would like to be treated, and you can make changes that make your life better.<\/b>\n\n--><i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.condenaststore.com\/-sp\/Ready-to-head-back-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8543759_.htm?AID=1241889486\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">&#8220;Ready to Head Back?&#8221; by Robert Leighton (2003)<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So Oprah is on Weight Watchers. She recently bought WW stock, which then appreciated like gangbusters, so she has that going for her, which is nice. I&#8217;m seeing a lot of posts chewing over this news, many with disappointment and general comments about the &#8220;impossibility&#8221; of losing weight. Even if you are Oprah, and rich, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,8],"tags":[1347,558,1345,1348,1301,1346],"class_list":["post-5284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fitness","category-media","tag-goals","tag-habits","tag-oprah","tag-possible","tag-weight-loss","tag-weight-watchers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4OKzG-1ne","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5284"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5453,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5284\/revisions\/5453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}