A couple of you have pointed out that This Thing I’m Doing sounds a little like the Weight Watchers Core Program, where you eat only heartbreakingly sensible whole foods and don’t have to count any POINTSâ„¢ because your metabolism is just too bored to even bother turning it into fat. Or something like that. So I can sort of understand if This Thing sounds awful because it sounds like Core, because who the hell wants to be on Core? It’s like the Weight Watchers short bus. It’s the orthopedic shoes of WW, really, and you stomp around sadly mumbling “me no allowed to eat bread” while everyone else at the WW party is on the other plan, wearing their sexy Flexy high heels and telling stories about their fabulous lives where they get to eat daring little portions of cheese and flirty slivers of cake every day, woohoo! And you wonder how everyone else can stand to wear those POINTy little shoes, because you never got used to how they felt no matter how hard you tried.

Okay, so that’s another weird analogy for how I felt the last time I did WW a bit over a year ago.

I also never really took to Core because the recipes were pretty awful. To be honest, a lot of the dishes in that Eat to Live book are kind of brutal, too, with things like Raisin Coleslaw and Anti-Cancer Soup (oh, let me pound my spoon with anticipation), and if making those had been my first experience with This Thing, I don’t know how it would have turned out. Chris had the book to begin with, and he’d found a couple of recipes that didn’t make you want to pound your fingers flat with a twenty-eight-ounce can of beans. But like I said, I like how it’s going so far. More later.

…is why I lost the seven pounds last month. I guess some of it is due to the swimming and the walking and this class I’m taking at the gym, all of which are technically part of This Thing in the broader sense of its thingness. But that’s all stuff I’ve done before, whereas This Thing I’m Doing is different, for me, at least. This Thing I’m Doing is a vegan diet.

Well, it’s vegan in the sense that there’s no meat and no dairy. I really should call it something else, though, since I’m not concerned with avoiding various animal-product ingredients like gelatin and honey (because I guess I don’t care enough about the poor horsies and the bumbly bees). I’ll also allow myself something with meat or dairy once in a while. So it’s a cheatin’ kind of vegan. It’s cheagan.

Mostly, though, it’s eating a ton of vegetables and limiting everything else, like bread and starchy stuff and nuts. It’s based on this book and this plan. And yes, I know exactly how dour and dull and totally unlubricated it seems. But somehow, it’s not really like that. Somehow, I like it.

And I like better than Weight Watchers. I know for an awful lot of you who read this site, WW works for you; it just wasn’t working for me anymore. The reasons probably have more to do with me than with the plan. For me, doing WW was like having a crazy mother; a well-intentioned but obsessive and inconsistent and maybe even drunk mother. (Yes, I know that watching Mommie Dearest the other night probably made me think up this analogy.) But really, some days I’d be all, “WW Mommy, may I have some cake?” And she’d be half-passed out on the couch and she’d go, “Sure, shweetie.” But then other days she’d freak out and make me do all these bizarre chores, and I’d be like, “But WW Mommy, I don’t want to count out and line up all the Cheerios in the box,” and she’d scream that if I didn’t do it I wouldn’t be a good little girl, and it was all my fault for eating that cake. You know? Well, maybe you don’t, and that’s okay. But with me and This Thing I’m Doing, every day is pretty much the same. And I know the kind of inner mom that comes with This Thing is sort of boring and you probably wouldn’t want to come over to my house after school, so to speak, but I’m a lot less nuts now. Right now This Thing feels better than pretending I can have it all, which is what I did in the past.

That said, it’s a LOT of work, like a shitload of cooking and planning and shopping. It would be even harder if there weren’t several really good produce stores nearby and on my way home from work. Chris and I are doing it together, which helps a lot, and our fridge and freezer and pantry are vast expanses of nutritional no-fun-at-all. And we love it, perversely.

The only thing I’ve been counting is days. Today is Day 24 of doing This Thing, which puts it in perspective a little, because after the first week it’s easy to delude myself into thinking that I’ve been doing it long enough to have completely rearranged my DNA. Uh, no. And I weigh myself again next week. I’ll tell you how it goes.