Thoughts on WeightWatchers

Since my insurance through my employers pays for WeightWatchers, I joined the program 10 weeks ago to start to keep track of my eating and weightloss. I started out a new round of 13 meetings today. I have mixed feelings about WeightWatchers.

The positives are that they provide a supportive environment and lots of motivation through their meetings and online forums. They also encourage tailoring your diet to your lifestyle, restrictions, and work schedule. On the negative side, which in my opinion slightly outweighs the positive, they are overly reliant on numbers and everyone who is a certain age, height, weight and gender gets treated equally on the program without regard for other factors such as health history, genetics, metabolic rates and so on. Everything is reduced to a number - weights, percentages, points values and so on. I have been to too many meetings where people talk about how they follow the diet to what I consider to be extremes - depriving themselves of all that they enjoy in order to stay within their points. WW is a "lifestyle" that encourages and often rewards obsessiveness and perfectionism. A further gripe I have with WW is that although they so strongly encourage eating unprocessed and healthy foods, all the WW products themselves are highly synthetic, tasteless substances.

So, my approach to WW has been to try and eat what I like in moderation, and to use the meetings as a place to track progress, give and receive support, get some tips and recipes, and maintain accountability. My progress has not been as spectacular as it might have been if I was spending about an hour each day trying to figure out PointsPlus values, but I am much more satisfied in my diet.

Here is what I ate and was fully satisfied in:

Breakfast
Oats w. Banana, Apricot Preserves and Honey
Tea w. LF Milk

Unsweetened Green Tea at work. I drink several cups of this each day.

Lunch
Noodles w. Tofu, Asparagus and Purple Cabbage (leftover from NYE Party)
Apple, Orange

Snacks
Homemade Hummus in a recycled store-bought hummus container, Carrot

100 Cal Trail Mix

Dinner
Chapatti (Indian Flatbread)
Mutter Paneer (Someone at work brought in a box they did not want. Yum!)

Impressively sparse ingredient list for a processed product

Odds and ends: Spinach Pakoras, Pear, Cheese