SOUTH PORTLAND – Maybe it was that number on the scales? Or maybe that I couldn’t button my slacks, fearing the zipper would go halfmast, causing the great unveiling in my classroom?

Or that sometimes I had to go up a size from the one I had been in high school? Or was it the newly Skinny Minnies I work with at the South Portland Community Center?

So when I got an email about a Weight Watchers group starting up at the Italian Heritage Center, I decided to join. How ironic! The place where we love to go to eat now is the place where we go to learn not to eat, at least as much.

“Too much ‘oni, oni,’” I said when I told my Aunt Theresa my news. My Aunt Eva used to say that when she produced a huge plate of pasta.

Stepping through the doors of the IHC to attend the first meeting, I’m assailed by the smell of what seems to be, but isn’t, my grandmother’s spaghetti sauce. “Mangia, mangia,” I hear her say.

“That’s what got me here,” I say to myself.

Our group is about 15, mostly chatty Italian women, but also two men, who look a little shell-shocked to be surrounded by all this chatter.

“Eat the foods you love; love the foods you eat,” says our leader Karen, who at times is a comedian.

How can I? I love bread and cheese and pasta and chocolate and ice cream. A Dairy Queen Peanut Buster Parfait is 20 points.

But as the weeks go on, I have learned to cut down my portions and have the occasional indulgences. And I walk, walk, walk, even on vacation. My fridge now has groceries in it, and my snacks are fruit and almond butter. I measure out my pasta. I could never imagine a cup could be so small — and that’s cooked.

The local eateries miss me. Chris Bolling, owner of Red’s and a former student, has wondered where I’ve been. “I thought you didn’t like us,” he said.

Not like us? I’d wrestle someone to the ground for a Boston shake. Instead, a dish of Wow Cow soft-serve, but add some rainbow sprinkles.

Tom, the owner of the Cookie Jar, comments that he doesn’t see me as often. Don at Terra Cotta Pasta tells me not to “shrivel up” (he needn’t worry). Also missing me are the Buttered Biscuit and every ice cream stand in Greater Portland.

I am counting my points and counting down the weeks until I’ve reached my goal weight. I hope to “mangia, mangia” again, but this time with caution. I might become a lifetime member.

When I had reached a certain decade, I bought a bikini as a last call to youth. Who was I kidding? I never fit into one, not even in my salad days.

But now I have a different dream. I see myself in a magazine, replacing Jennifer Hudson as the new face (or body) of Weight Watchers.

Vicki Sullivan of South Portland teaches English at Southern Maine Community College.

 

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