Weight Watchers vs. Caloric Intake - help!

Weight watchers is mostly for people who do little to no exercise. Also WW takes into account fat content especially saturated fats. Once you combine caloric intake and saturated fats, that's where the points get racked up.

I have tried the old WW "core" diet, which worked for me about 7 years ago, I lost an amazing amount fast (60 Lbs. in 6 months). Problem is I stopped, and gained it all back within a year. Last year I found out I had type 2 diabetes. I incorporated the Core diet with a lower carb diet (don't eliminate altogether). I eat about 240-300 grams of carbs a day maximum, foods and meals with no added fat, no added sugar. The only fat I add is low fat cooking sprays or extra virgin olive oil. I have lost 102 Lbs. so far and I have managed to keep it off. Incorporate with 6-8 hours of exercise a week, and consume about 1500-2000 calories a day to lose and about 2500 calories a day to maintain.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the help here. I'm probably going to go to My Fitness Pal. I'm just always hungry with WW. I expect a little craving, but I'm extremely hungry most of the day - especially when I wind up eating one of those 500 calories/20 point jobs.

Any other input is appreciated.

Thanks,

Rob

I did WW back in 2010 and lost about 30 pounds between September and right before the new year.

The plan back then was pretty easy. There was an equation for what a point equaled. I don't remember what it was exactly, but in a pinch you could just estimate that every 50 cal was a point and maybe bump it up 2-3 if it was an item with a lot of fat.

Jan 2011 they completely changed up the plan and they obfuscated the equation of how they were determining the points. You HAD to use their counters to know what anything really equaled. They also changed the number of points you were "allowed" to eat in a day. It went from a pretty standard formula of divide your weight by 10 and then there were some modifiers for if you were male or female and age...

Cut to my first meeting with the new plan. Talking to people after, it appeared that any woman that was anywhere from like 140-250+ pounds had been assigned 19(?) points. So I did LOL when I saw you say that the 500 cal item was so many points. That would be my entire days food.

I quit at that point and haven't ever regretted quitting the program.

I think the WW company is more interested in getting you dependent on them, than making you healthy.

I'm not going to advocate any other plan in particular, but there are A LOT of good free (or the cost of a book) options out there.

Edited by kskonkol 2014-01-16 11:38 AM

I lost over 40 pounds on WW, but once I got into tris and tried to drop the last 5 lbs, it just didn't seem to work. I've gained 7 back but am losing again with My Fitness Pal.

It seems as long as I eat enough during the day so that I have a small-ish dinner, the weight drops off fairly easily.

twomarks

I thought you could earn more points by exercising?

Matt

in the circa 2010 plan, you could earn 1 point for approx every 100 cal you burned. So basically you were allowed to eat back 1/2 what you burned.

And there was always people who would say you should never eat back the exercise points. They would claim that it would stall their loses.

It was a HUGE disagreement between people.

There was also a bank of points that you could spend at your discretion throughout the week. Some people would just divide them evenly across the 7 days of the week... and then there was some people that would save them all to go eat a whole pizza on saturday (or some other silly thing).

This is totally bring back memories.

I've lost 33 pounds since Nov.4th, 2013 and people have been asking what I've been doing. I've been going by the old saying "if it looks like a bad idea, then it probably is" or in this case "if it looks like it's a bad thing to eat, it probably is".

Thanks Lisa,

My RMR is ~2100 so 682 didn't bother me too much. It was from Smoothie King and it had some kind of protein added to it. I've been to SK about 3 times in my life and just had to grab something quick so I wasn't very familiar with what was on offer.

With my RMR being that amount, when I ramp up training next week, it's going to be hard not to drop weight as long as I don't eat one sleeve of Girl Scout Thin Mints per day - which is entirely possible when I get my grubby hands on them.

The points - calories discrepancy is is what got me asking questions.

twomarks