| Product: |
Weight Watchers |
| Date: |
24.03.08 (87 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: A good selection of articles and recipes, cheaper at meetings and inspirational stories
Disadvantages: There are a lot of adverts and the excercise pages do not make any sense
Ever since I started going to Weight Watchers I have brought every issue of their magazine because it is a good read and I think it is helpful to my motivation to stick to my Weight Watchers plan.
It is a glossy magazine that is published monthly and it costs £2. 55 to buy in the shops but I buy mine for £1. 79 from my meeting.
I like the way they section the magazine so that every few pages there is a success story where Weight Watchers members tell their story of how they lost their weight. These members are always very inspiring and they give readers their tips and tricks for helping them on their road to weight loss. Sometimes they do come across as a little bit gushing though and the magazine makes a lot of it read like an advert for Weight Watchers but I do like to read how losing weight affects their lives and relationships. Some of these people have lost over 6 stones and others have lost just 1 stone but all of them are inspirational and sometimes very moving.
Weight Watchers magazine is full of nutritional advice as you would expect for a magazine like this. I like the way they will give me advice about unusual items I wouldn't usually consider eating as part of my diet and the magazine also tells me how many points are in these foods. I find this helpful because even though I use my Weight Watchers Shopping Guide I can get meal and snack ideas and have the points value at hand.
There are also lots of recipes in the magazine and I usually try 2 or 3 out of each issue. It is very good the way they do a selection of meals for 2 or 4 servings because most magazine recipes are always for 4 people and as I live on my own this is too much. I am quite good at cutting a recipe for 4 down to something to just serve me but it does involve a lot of maths so it is perfect for me that Weight Watchers have recognised that not everyone cooks for a house full. Weight Watchers recipes are always very good and I usually am successful in recreating them because they are easy to follow and use ingredients that most of us dieters will have already in the cupboard. The recipes all have the points value and also information about whether they can be frozen and ideas for accompaniments for your meal. Most recipes can be frozen I've noticed and the odd one I have popped in the freezer have been alright once defrosted.
One section of the magazine I have never been impressed with are the exercise pages. I cannot exercise very much because of health problems so one day I thought I would try the gentle looking exercises I had seen in my Weight Watchers magazine. Unfortunately what I had thought were gentle exercises were made much harder for 2 reasons, the first being that the exercises were explained very badly with no thought for real womens bodies and the second reason being that I felt very silly and exposed standing in my living room trying to exercise while holding a magazine. I am not dense and I still have all my marbles so I know if the exercises had been explained properly I would have been able to follow the instructions. The magazine had provided photographs to try to visually explain where my hands and legs needed to be but I think I must have been the wrong shape because I could not bend over properly once I was in the position I think Weight Watchers were suggesting. The exercises are nicely coded with the level of fitness and/or skill you need to complete them but I don't think these would be very accurate and you are better off to buy a fitness DVD if you want to exercise at home.
There is more in the magazine but nothing that jumps out at me to tell you about. The magazine focuses on giving people who are following the Weight Watchers plan advice and information about how to make the most of our daily points allowance. I don't think many people who don't go to Weight Watchers will get very much out of this magazine. On a long car journey from Cornwall to Nottingham recently my daughter forgot her book so she flicked through my magazine. In fairness to the magazine she did try a recipe she found on that journey but because she doesn't need to watch her weight she found most of the magazine to be bland and boring.
She made a comment about how many adverts are in the magazine and since then I have noticed that there are a lot. Nearly every other page is an advert for something but then again they are adverts I personally think are interesting so I don't care about this. They are mainly food or fitness product adverts, a lot of them are for Weight Watchers products and I think this is a good way of finding new products they have at the moment because I shop in Sainsburys and their Weight Watchers selection of food isn't very good. Now I find out in the magazine what new things they have out and I can order them next time I use Asda or Tesco to shop on-line. The only thing about the adverts is I wish the magazine would give me a points value for the items being advertised, they used to give details in a little list at the back of the magazine with the page of the item but it would be much easier if they would print how many points in the food advertised on the actual advert page.
I think the Weight Watchers magazine is definitely good value for money and I would happily pay the full price if I didn't get a discount at my meeting. It keeps me on the straight and narrow in a way because I will keep each issue until the next one arrives so if I feel myself craving a fish shop supper I will flick through the magazine and sometimes that is enough to stop me reaching for the car keys and my purse. There is a little half page section in most issues that take certain food items and tell me a good alternative, this is a handy little section and I have recently swapped taramasalata for salsa on their advice and also cream crackers for rice cakes. I did not however exchange my chicken korma for chicken tikka because that would be taking dieting too far!
Summary: I read Weight Watchers because it inspires me to be good on my diet.
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