It’s Thanksgiving this week on Ruby. And you know what that means? Serious temptations. So, Ruby’s plan was to have two Thanksgivings, one for her and one for the others.
But, even this sensible idea runs into a stumbling block, as her friends want the traditional pumpkin pie, which Ruby cannot have around, because it was a trigger food when she was at her heaviest.
After Ruby invites her trainers over for the Thanksgiving dinner, the show moves on to her in a therapy session discussing ideas for how to handle dinner. Her therapist emphasizes avoiding “minimizing” eating, which is when Ruby would say “I’ll just have a little of this.”
So, Dr. Jane asked if it would be okay if she came by the house to see if she can get some insight into her environment and how it may affect her eating. Besides examining the cabinets and refrigerator, she interviewed Ruby’s friends to see how they may be enabling her. Ruby and her friends Georgia and Jeff were specifically sensitive to the enabling tag.
This week’s “Ladies Fat Night” involved an exercise called “gentle eating” where the instructor wanted to get the group to slow down and think about what they were eating. Mindless eating is a major problem for people who are overweight. Needless to say, the exercise was met with some resistance, particularly from Georgia, who seems to have an attitude about a lot of things.
Ruby and her friends went off to the grocery store to shop for Thanksgiving dinner. And, even though Jeff says that he was forced to face the idea of enabling, he still goes and gets all the unhealthy foods anyway. Then it’s time to start cooking, which involves a lot of tasting this and that, and then this and that again. Not to mention the spectacle that is deep frying a turkey.
It wouldn’t be Ruby unless there was some drama. The dinner guests all participate in giving thanks in their own way, and it gets Denny chocked up since he lost his brother recently.
Ruby had her healthy foods, but also tried some of the fattening foods. And, even though she tried the “gentle eating” technique, it didn’t appear to last very long.
Inexplicably, Ruby decided to do a weigh-in after Thanksgiving, which set her up to be disappointed. And for some reason, she seemed surprised that she gained weight. It reveals the fragility of her psyche when she is down in the dumps, when she should have been prepared for it after such a food-centric holiday.
The show wraps up with Ruby meeting women at a woman’s shelter discussing their various addictions. Part of her motivation was to face the idea of having a relapse during Thanksgiving. And in the process, she connected with her fellow addicts.