Weight Watchers is a pain in the ass. But until/unless I hit a creepy gypsy man's son with my car and he curses me, it's the plan I'm sticking with.

You have the option to be an online member or a regular member who attends meetings. For now I'm online only and I'll probably stay that way; it's hard to imagine that anyone who's read Infinite Jest and Choke could approach the whole meeting thing without a big dose of ironic detachment. If you're not a "meetings" member and you're online only like I am, you don't have a public weigh-in. Instead, you have weigh-in day on your own. The idea is that you pick a set of circumstances and you weigh yourself in the same way once a week--the same scale, the same time, the same general deal with food and drink, same clothes, etc. I've chosen Wednesday morning, at home, in birthday suit, after peeing and brushing teeth and taking pills, but before eating or drinking anything else.

Weigh-in day has several consequences:

• Your week resets, so your extra "flex" points for the week start again.
• You input your new weight, with the possibility that your points allowance will drop if you go past an arbitrary round-number threshold; it was disheartening to start knowing that as soon as I lost .2 pounds I would lose a daily point, as I then did at my second weigh-in last week.
• You will have to get up at your normal Wednesday time even when your first morning class is cancelled. Grrr.
• You will start thinking about next Wednesday, 7:30 a.m., at approximately 7:37 on Wednesday morning, and at least once every hour thereafter.
• You will do things like walk toward home from the coffee shop Tuesday night with every intention of getting a burrito, but then decide at the last minute that you want a good number the next morning, so you won't polish off your activity points and weekly flex points, but will instead have pasta and let those extra points, to which you are perfectly entitled, go by the wayside.
• You will be content, but certainly not satisfied, when you find that you have lost another 1.4 pounds this week, for a total of 4.8 in two weeks, and about 15 since the end of your summer job.
• You will thus be reminded why you continue not to eat pizza, even though you're pretty sure that you would devour an entire one in 8.3 seconds flat given the slightest provocation.