29 Points?!

Really? I'm at the new plan minimum?!

I'd been absent from meetings since (predictably) two weeks before Thanksgiving and was just finding my way back for (even more predictably) the New Year. I sat at my first PointsPlus new-plan meeting, post-weigh-in, and I felt like someone had just delivered me the mother of all sucker punches.

29 points. Wasn't that the equivalent of 18 points on the old plan? How am I supposed to LIVE on that? Roz also has 29 points, and I out-weigh her by a good 45 pounds.

Calm down, I told myself, there's got to be a mistake. I pushed this unwelcome bit of news out of my head so I could focus on Jen, my awesome leader for the last three years. She hadn't lost any of her pep or powers of motivation, and I felt myself drawn back into her enthusiastic can-do spirit. I love her meetings; they never fail to pump me up no matter how despondent I'm feeling over my latest lapse.

We celebrated the scale-wins and the milestones, she left us with a final thought to carry us through the temptations of the coming week, and we got up to leave. I wanted to ask her about my new points target, but the crowd in the year-beginning meeting was huge. There were actual new people who needed her attention more than I did, so I quietly departed with the number 29 orbiting my brain, wondering dramatically how I would avoid starving to death.

The plan has always worked for me when I worked the plan. I owe it more than a little faith that these new changes would work just as well as, if not better than, the old plan.

I mean, it's only a week, right?