“Momma, how many Points in this banana?”

So I am sitting in my hotel room, waiting for my sister and a new WW commercial comes on. The voiceover talks about how many women are on diets, and asks some version of the question “what will our children’s relationship with food be like?”

I almost spit out my Vitamin Water.

Seriously??? WW thinks it’s normal for a child to grow up with a woman or man (or both) who are constantly counting points? I knew women who wrote points values on everything. I even knew a woman who figured out how many points were in her daughter’s teething cookies because she liked to snack on them (I’ve tasted them and have to admit, they’re kind of tasty).

How on earth is this healthy for children? A woman in one of my many different WW meetings once talked about how proud she was of her husband, because he’d memorized the Points values of all of her favorite foods. We all ooh’d and ahh’d over how sweet that was. Then another woman said her little girl, who was 10, had also memorized Points of many foods, and then another woman said her eight year-old son asked how many Points were in his banana.

The scary part is how NONE OF THIS SEEMED ALARMING at the time. In fact, we all talked about how “great” it was that the children were developing this consciousness. Now I realize that this is just the beginning for those kids… WW doesn’t even allow members under 12. Eight year olds shouldn’t be thinking about Points.

WW is just getting ridiculous at this point. It’s frightening, really.

xoxo,

Juliet