And then I didn’t. Or I did, but really half-heartedly. (Quarter-heartedly?) So this time, the diet wasn’t failing because of a shame cycle, or lack of information. It was failing because my life was way more interesting than the diet. It was failing because it bored me and I would way rather gaze at my baby than get on a bike.
And the game changed all of that. The game was fun. The game was fierce. The game gave me permission to diet openly, aggressively, in-your-face-ively, which is my new favorite word that I just made up. Whereas before I had been mortified by the number on the scale, I was now shouting at anyone who’d listen. “Hey! Guess what?? I weighed 199 last week and now I’m only 195!! I’m only 195 and next week I’M GONNA WEIGH LESS!” The whole thing was fun. And I lost a whole lot of weight and that was really fun.
Reason #7: I find dieting boring.
The game is fun!
I play because left to my own devices I am a lazy, cookie-eating, chip-craving madman with a bicycle tire around my midsection.
—M.P., 39
So these are my stories. (Okay, fine, I have more stories, but I gotta save some for the rest of the book.) But these are my reasons for playing.
What are yours?
Food, weight, weight loss…these are not simple subjects in our culture.
I have met very few people who don’t have painful weight stories or crazy diet stories or screwed up parents and mean ex-boyfriends that led to painful weight stories and crazy diet stories.
So tell your stories.
Tell your secrets.
Tell them to your spouses and tell them to your friends.
And if you’re not ready to do that, then start by telling them to yourself.
The game you are about to play is pulling dieting out of the closet. It’s making it a group sport. It is acknowledging that we are all a little fucked in the head—so why not just talk about it?
Tell your story. Because it’s the answer to why you should play this game.
GET A PEN!
Right now, write down some of your own reasons for wanting to play this game. Be brutally honest. This is only for you.
Chapter 3
TEAMING UP
(Or, Why Should I Give a Crap What Anyone Else Does?)
The strength of the team is each individual member…the strength of each member is the team.
—Phil Jackson
* * *
The Rule: Form a team of two players or more and challenge a team of two players or more. Your weekly score will be averaged with the scores of your teammates, so choose your team carefully and support each other daily!
You must be in communication with at least one member of your team and at least one opponent at least once a day to earn 5 daily communication points.
Note: You do not need an equal number of players on each team. A team of two or three can play a team of four or five or six because each team’s scores are added and averaged each week.
* * *
In grade school and in middle school and in high school, I was the kid chosen last whenever there was any kind of team game. I know we all like to joke about how we were the kid chosen last—but really, most of you weren’t dead last. You were maybe fifth to last, or third to last, and it just felt like you were last because you wanted to be first. I was actually last. I was chosen after the kids with various physical and mental disabilities. Every time.
It’s not just that I was horribly unpopular; it’s that I was teeeeeerrible at sports. I had an uncommon combination of a total lack of skill and a total lack of interest. I was generally living inside my head, writing stories, planning my Oscar acceptance speech, or imagining what I might say to the cute boy on second base if he ever noticed I was alive. If, God forbid, the ball came my way, I was lucky if I noticed in time to duck.
One of my most vivid childhood memories is from the first grade when I was, as usual, chosen last for the softball game. I went up to bat with my usual combination of disinterest and terror—and I actually hit the ball and ran to first base. It was my own private miracle. It was like the bat moved all by itself and then a swift wind came and pushed me to the base. Then, in an even more stunning turn of events, I actually made it, one hitter at a time, one base at a time, all the way back to home plate and scored! I was actually cheered on by my team! I went home and told my mom I had hit a home run, because that is what I believed I had done. (I actually didn’t understand the difference between making it home and hitting a home run till, like, last year.) I was very, very proud. If you’re expecting that where this story goes is that I became strung out on the feeling and got better at team sports, you are wrong. I just figured a “home run” was all anyone could ever expect of me, and that was the last effort I put into any kind of team sport, ever.
I loved the game because there aren’t a lot of competitions that I stand a good chance of actually winning. With the game, it was just mind over matter. Plus wanting to kick some serious ass.
—Emily, 27
But games? Games are another thing entirely. I am a highly competitive game-player. Like, during friendly games of Celebrity and Taboo I’ve been known to become so intense and scream so loudly, I’ve made people cry. I was reading about game theory when I started writing this book and I read that there are fundamentally two different types of game-players: there are social players, who really don’t care if they win or lose and are just happy to have fun playing, and then there’s me.
I do not like to lose.
Whether this comes from a childhood of being chosen last or from the fact that I am a Scorpio with Sagittarius rising, I don’t know. I just know that if you play on my team, you’d better not play lightly. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have fun. Have all the fun you want, just don’t fuck me up while you do. Because—did I mention? I LIKE TO WIN.
Az noticed this. Which is why he invented this game for me. I may have mentioned this already, but I think it bears repeating that Az gave me the food and exercise plan in July, and from July to October, I lost five pounds. And then we started playing the game. And from October to December, I lost fifteen pounds. Same food plan. Same exercise plan. The only difference was that I was doing it for points. And I was doing it for my team. And I was doing it against someone else’s team. Which prompted me to actually DO IT. The team aspect made a huge difference to me. I was motivated by winning, sure, but I was also motivated by the desire to support/please/not piss off my team. And as it turns out, there are actual studies to back this up…
A weight-loss study published in 2001 indicates that groups can achieve better results than one-on-one interventions. Even when the study participants preferred individual treatment, they saw better results in group settings, losing 11 percent of their weight compared with 9 percent for individuals.
In another study, dieters who attended weekly support-group sessions had lower cortisol levels than dieters who dieted alone. How crazy is that? That by meeting with other dieters once a week, people were literally, physically, biologically less stressed out??
My team won! We beat six other teams in an all-out brawl. I didn’t really know these women when I started—one was the niece of my best friend, one was a casual acquaintance—but by the end, they felt like sisters. Every time we talked I was amazed by how much we had in common despite a twenty-year age spread between us. We shared recipes, we shared frustrations, and occasionally we shared a meal off. We supported each other and as a result, we not only won the game, but for the first time in all of our lives, we felt like we were in charge of our diets and our bodies and our health. And beating all those guys was AWESOME.
—Jesse, 37
One more thing about playing with and against teams: It’s FUN. If you’re playing all out, your e-mail box will be loaded every morning with messages like, “EAT A CUPCAKE! EAT ONE! YOU KNOW YOU WANT ONE!” And you’ll be all, “Screw him. I’m not eating a cupcake! I will instead spend my morning composing pithy poems about my opponents!”
S
ome actual e-mails during our months of gaming…
Note: During this particular game, we had color-coded our teams, as you will see…
knock, knock,
who’s there?
banana.
banana who?
knock, knock,
who’s there?
banana.
banana who?
knock, knock,
who’s there?
orange.
orange who?
ORANGE IS GONNA KICK YOUR ASS, THAT’S WHO
Love, Anselm
Dear Anselm,
Orange is the color of baby poo after they eat carrots. Red is the color of victory.
Krista
What color am I? Is “winning team” a color? ’Cause it looks great on me.
Doug
I think this Anselm dude has been drinking…I would say “White will Win” but it sounds horribly racist.
Michael
I must admit, I was drunk last night.
Drunk with the power that comes from a perfect points day. And already meeting my weight goal for the week.
Orange don’t take no mess.
Anselm
So what have we learned from the above? Well, for one thing, we’ve learned that everyone is more clever in their trash talk than I. “The color of baby poo after they eat carrots?” Seriously? That’s the best I could do?? That’s just lying down on the job, is what that is.
Also, we have learned that taunting is encouraged. Taunting is encouraged because the game is meant to be fun and taunting is fun and funny and, strangely, motivating.
BUT the game is also meant to create a support system for your health goals. So ONLY play with people you know will have your best interests at heart. ONLY play with people you like and respect and trust to be supportive. Funny is one thing. Unkind is wholly another. You want everyone in your game, teammates and opponents, to be willing to drop all sense of competition if you are needing a few kind words of support. It’s like in sports, when a player goes down on the field, the players on both teams stop playing and help him up. It’s good sportsmanship, and it must be applied to this game as well. So, here’s another series of actual e-mails from that very same game:
Hey everyone! I just wanted to tell you that I’ve lost 4 pounds this week, and the biggest joy about that was going running yesterday 4 pounds lighter! HOLY CRAP!!! It’s so much easier to run with that weight gone!! It’s motivation for sure to keep going.
Thank you all for your support (even though it looks somewhat nastier than any kind of support I’ve ever had).
Ok. Gotta go run 10 MILES and kick all your asses!!!
Kate
Kate—proud of you!
Michael
Kate—rock on. You will still lose, of course, but please lose knowing you have all my respect.
Outstanding
Results
Are
Never
Gained
Easily
ORANGE ORANGE ORANGE!!!!
Anselm
So let’s talk now about how you find people to play with you. If your plan is to go get the three fattest people you can find and challenge them to a game, heh, I like your thinking. It’s never fun to acknowledge your back fat to people who are skinnier than you. But here’s what I know: My skinny friends have their share of issues just like the rest of us. They look at their gorgeous bodies and they don’t feel good, just like the rest of us. They feel defeated by what to me is an invisible layer of flab around their belly, just like the rest of us feel defeated by our larger rolls of flab. Our bodies may look different but the way we feel about our bodies is remarkably similar no matter what our size.
How do I know this? For starters, I know it because I’ve been a lot of different weights in my life. When I look at pictures of myself in high school, I am amazed and saddened to remember how much I hated my body and how fat I thought I was. I would kill for that body now. I had a great rack and fantastic legs—and yeah, I had a curvy belly because I inherited my curvy belly from both sides of my family and there is no weight at which I don’t have it. I wish so much that I had understood that in my teens and twenties. My beautiful assistant, Star, is twenty-two and just gorgeous and I plead with her daily to appreciate what she has, and, of course, she can’t, because we are all so fucked in the head.
Contemporary society has fucked us. The starlets on the magazine covers have fucked us. Kate Moss almost singlehandedly fucked my entire generation. “Heroine chic?” Jesus Christ, we are fucked in the heads. And I am ranting…And I can’t remember what I was talking about…Hang on…Oh, right. Teaming up. Okay, I will now make an attempt to gracefully bring this topic full circle…
Being built like me, it’s easy to want to dismiss the body woes of my skinnier friends and assume that they don’t need and shouldn’t want to play this game. But when I do that, I’m missing the point, which is that almost all of us struggle with our bodies, no matter what our size. And it’s important to remember that the game is not only about getting fit, it’s also about getting healthy. And one of the many things I love about it is that it evens the playing field. Someone built like me can play against someone built like Az and sometimes I win, and sometimes he wins, and we always both win because we are always healthier and feel better when the game is over than when it started.
So, now that we are agreed that almost everyone you know could benefit from playing, I will say that I think the best place to start looking for players is at home, because if you can get a household game going, you’re more likely to eliminate the unhealthy foods from your fridge. So maybe start by challenging your husband or wife or girlfriend or boyfriend or sister or brother or parent to a game. (Depending on the dynamics in your relationship, you can either play on the same team or play against each other. You decide.) Once you’ve got one person on board, you can both ask other family members, as well as your neighbors, your friends, your friends’ spouses, your coworkers, the moms and dads in your carpool, your gym buddy, your children’s friends’ parents, or just about anyone else you can think of.
* * *
Step Up Your Game!
Get an office game going!
Even those of us who’ve committed to a healthier lifestyle and filled our fridge with fruits and veggies tend to slack off at the office. Someone brings a box of donuts, someone has a birthday cake, someone makes a coffee run and the next thing you know you’re ordering Fudgeaccinos and licking frosting off your fingers. So challenge your office mates to a game. Whether you get everyone playing and form two huge teams, or just get three or four coworkers on board, you’ll be amazed how much easier it becomes to resist temptation!
Bonus idea: Make the prize at the end a month of freedom from the most loathed job in the office. For example, the winners don’t have to refill the paper in the copier, or run for the boss’ coffee, or drive the carpool for a month. Bought prizes are great, but the kind you can’t buy tend to be even more motivating!
* * *
I recently interviewed for a new financial advisor for my company. The last guy that came in was perfect and I offered him the position starting Wednesday. He graciously accepted with one condition. He wanted to start on Monday. He said “One of your coworkers told me about “Game On” while I was waiting for the interview and I didn’t want to miss out on the next round.” I guess he’s one more person whose butt I’m going to have to kick! I’m 15 pounds down and counting!
—Moj, 30
Word to the wise: Be very careful when you invite people to play that they don’t think you’re calling them fat. Many of the people I’ve played this game with do not qualify as fat under anyone’s definition. Az, for example, has no freaking body fat, but we’re two weeks into a new game as I write this. Why? Because he’s training for the Boston Marathon. He uses the game as added motivation to run all those miles every day. Believe it or not, we’re also using the game to write this book! Az’s healthy habit (see Ch
apter 12) is to work on this book for a minimum of three hours every day. He loses points if he doesn’t do it, so he does it. This is not just a diet game, it’s a better-life game, a goal-meeting game, a health-improving game—it’s whatever kind of game you need it to be. So don’t be shy, ask your friends and family to play. (But when you do, show them Az’s picture and say, “this guy’s playing,” just for good measure.)
Okay, so now that you know how to build a team, how the hell are you supposed to work with them? Well, lucky for you I’ve been playing this game for…um…ever. And I have gleaned some experience in how best to make this whole thing work. So without further ado, here are my top ten tips for making the most out of working with your team!
Teamwork Tips
Meet with all your players (teammates and opponents) every weekend for a weigh-in/discourse/day off meal. The meetings keep everyone involved, and the weigh-in keeps everyone honest! Even if you don’t want a group weigh-in, have the meeting. It gives everyone a chance to ask questions and to share strategies, recipes, successes, and challenges. It’s invaluable.
You can earn your communication points by e-mail or text message, but try actually getting on the phone with a teammate once a day. It’s great to actually talk it out—to celebrate your successes and vent your frustrations in a more personal way than typing allows.
Have a night out or a meal off with your team. Again, the more cohesive you are as a team, the more responsible you will feel for your scores (and the more driven to kick the opposing team’s collective ass!).
The Game On! Diet Page 3