So, here's what I DO like about Weight Watchers.

[xiphias]

And an apology to folks on Facebook: on LJ, these are cut, because a lot of people just don't wanna hear about it, but the LJ cut doesn't propagate over to FB. If y'all had LiveJournals, you could ignore me better!
The thing about Weight Watchers is that it doesn't tell you what to do. If I want spend my daily Weight Watchers points by eating a stick of butter and six shots of tequila, I can do that. I get 46 points a day, and that's what that is.

In order for me to work within a system, I NEED for it to allow me to make terrible choices. The freedom to do only what is best is no freedom at all. Freedom MEANS "being allowed to make terrible choices." Eating a stick of butter and six shots of tequila is the kind of terrible idea that you don't get outside hazing rituals and Japanese game shows -- and Weight Watchers allows you to do that. Heck -- everybody gets 49 "cheat points" a week, too -- no matter who you are. Even if you are much smaller than I am and get fewer daily points, you STILL could choose to use those points to down twelve shots of Jack Daniels in a row. I mean, you'd probably die, but you'd still be following the rules of Weight Watchers.

At the same time, though, while it's allowing you to make horrible life choices with your food, it's still gently nudging you to make better ones. When I'm putting together a recipe, I see that I can get this much pasta for 5 points. But, right under it in the list, the whole wheat version of the pasta is ALSO there, and it's a point cheaper. So, y'know, maybe I'll look at getting the whole wheat, and saving a point? Or maybe not -- but there's that little nudge there.

If we go to the lower-fat yogurt, and all that other stuff, and make a tweak here and a tweak there, hey, look! We've saved enough points to finish the day off with a Snickers ice cream bar! And now there's whole wheat pasta in the house and lower-fat dairy products and stuff. And maybe we just use those points to eat an ice cream bar every day. Or maybe we don't, and we've just gotten USED to using the slightly-healthier choices.

Or maybe we eat an ice cream bar. Or a beer. That's okay, too.

Comments

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Ice cream bar and beer! The perfect diet. Actually seems to make sense to suggest than 'forbid'. I like what you say about the 'freedom'. Must now have wine and a cigarette.

[fatpie42.livejournal.com]

I cannot imagine how this system can possibly work. The food that is best for you doesn't tell you how many calories are in it. There aren't a lot of nutrition labels on loose fruit and veg.

Personally I've been FINALLY losing weight by cutting down on carbohydrates (not cutting OUT mind you). Bread, rice, pasta, potatoes. I've been trying to leave off the starch and been pretty successful.

With stir fry I now have quinoa, which is great. Pizza nights have been replaced with crustless quiche nights and instead of potato wedges and veggies I now have sweet potato wedges and veggies with that. With curries I've stopped having rice and instead have a couple of wholemeal chapatis. Gotta admit, I kinda miss pasta.

Meanwhile I'm regularly boiling eggs and I've got really into avocadoes. Plus I've always been seriously into fruit. To stop the craving for sweet stuff during the day, oddly enough I found that cheese acted as a good substitute. I've finally stopped snacking on cheese now, but it's done the trick. I don't crave chocolate biscuits any more.

Anyway, I'm sure all that was REALLY boring, but the point is, I don't think I'd have managed to make any of those positive changes by trying to count the calories. Though part of me is curious as to how many calories I'm actually consuming, so I'd be interested to hear how it is done. (Hmmm, you keep saying 'points' rather than calories. Are they connected?)

I've got plans tomorrow to try and make korma sauce from scratch. I've come to realise that pre-made sauces are stuffed full of sugar, so I'm expanding my repertoire. (Hopefully in future I can make the curry paste in advance and freeze it, like I do with one of my other curry dishes.) If that's a success, I guess it'll be Rogan Josh next! :)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Weight Watchers is a company. You pay them every month for access to their databases, phone app, website trackers, and so forth, and also for weekly meetings.

Weight Watchers points are based, in large part, on calories, but not completely. Two things with the same number of calories may have very different numbers of WW points: a slice of white bread has 80 calories, and is 2 points, but an apple is 95 calories, and zero points. As a bribe to get you to eat more raw fruits and vegetables. If they actually calculate out the calories and everything in a banana, it would come out to 3 points, and if you build a recipe with it rather than just eating it, the computer will use the real value.

But, because, when you eat a banana, you're usually doing that INSTEAD of eating something else, like a candy bar, they bribe you by counting it as zero.

Calories from fat and from sugar are more points than calories from protein; if a thing has a lot of fiber, it gets a discount on points; if a thing is highly refined, it gets a penalty on points. So the points actually DO come out as a bit more representative of "healthiness" rather than "calories".

When you eat something, you type it into the website or the app, and it looks up the points in its proprietary database, and tracks how many points you've used. Everybody gets a number of points based on their weight, height, and sex: I get 46 points a day, while poor Lis only gets 26.

A Weight Watchers point is usually somewhere around 40 calories, plus or minus, usually plus. On Weight Watchers, I can eat about 1840 calories a day of stuff that's pretty bad for me -- but I can eat closer to 2000 or more calories of food that's good for me.

And either way, I'll tend to lose somewhere between 0.5 and 2 pounds a week. More in the first week or two, but
it levels off fast.

You might want to look into whole wheat pasta. It's significantly better for you than white pasta, and it might work for you.

One thing I like making is what's called "American chop suey," for no reason I can tell. Or "Beefaroni", which makes a little more sense.

For eight servings, it's a pound of ground beef, a pound of dry pasta, cooked, a couple cans of tomato sauce.

This last time I made it, it was a pound of ground beef, a HALF-pound of WHOLE WHEAT pasta, and a couple of cans of the tomato sauce that is nothing except tomatoes in it. And I added onions, garlic, oregano, pepper, and sage myself.

It tasted every bit as good, and was every bit as satisfying. I expected it to be NEARLY as good, but much healthier -- but it was ENTIRELY as good, maybe just a shade better, because I did better with the spices and added more garlic. And having proportionally more meat-to-pasta was actually a lot better.

So, I did find that I can do a lot more by switching to whole wheat pasta, which actually holds up better to heavier sauces, and cutting down the amount of pasta in the recipe.

Just as a thought.