STUPID HOWARD: Day one

Okay, have you ever been to Weight Watchers? I have. A lot. I'm not generally a joiner, but I've joined that particular group about seventeen times. And it's worked! About four of the seventeen times I've joined. Apparently, you actually have to do the program to succeed and thirteen of those seventeen times I just couldn't get on board with it. Maybe it was the cheerleader lady explaining the points system to me for the five millionth time. Every time you go they change it even though "the new revolutionary system" is really just the same old thing. Flex points instead of just say, regular points. The biggest difference I ever noticed in all the times I've joined is that one time peanut butter counted as just a protein point and then another time went back to being a fat point -- or something like that.

But once, when I lived in Brooklyn it did work. I was a young struggling -- if not quite starving writer.) I was at one of highest weights and I was sitting in Burger King, no less. And I glanced over and saw someone in the mirror who looked kind of like me but with a really fat face. Surely that couldn't be me. Upon realizing it wasn't one of those mirrors they have in funhouses, and was, in fact, just a regular mirror, I marched myself over to the Weight Watchers, signed up, and lost thirty pounds.

That was MANY years ago and I was a much younger man. I didn't know then I'd join another sixteen times.

CUT TO: (as we say in the movie business) many, many years later and I'm driving up to the Times Square studio to appear on "Good Morning America" to promote our book, "Women Are Crazy, Men Are Stupid -- The Simple Truth To a Complicated Relationship." And I look up at the Jumbotron they have outside the building that broadcasts GMA to all of Times Square. And what am I thinking before my national television debut? OH GOD, MY FAT FACE IS GOING TO BE ON THAT SCREEN?!

So here I am. Again. (I actually lost twelve pounds before the GMA appearance, but they say that television puts ten pounds on a person so I really lost a grand total of 2) But this morning I weighed in. No, if's, ands or buts. (like about how silly it is to start a diet on the weekend.) The official tally of my weight is One hundred and Eighty six pounds. Which would be great if I was, say, six feet four inches. Let's just say I'm five-seven on a good day.

And so it begins...

But I'm back at it. Not at Weight Watchers this time. But watching my weight. I've actually watched it go up and now will hopefully watch it go down.