8st 2lb lost - and only spent £50! (Weight Watchers)

Member Name: HelenHancox

Product:	Weight Watchers
Date:	05/07/02 (6283 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: safe, you can eat REAL food, you can still eat out and eat chocolate

Disadvantages: bye bye cheese, bye bye pizza, cost of meetings, if you go

I am a WeightWatchers fan. The reason being that two years ago I went from 19 stone 2lbs (121.8kg) to 11st (70.4kg) in 10 months (I'm 5'9"), entirely by following the WW diet, and in consultation with my doctor. I ate the recommended amount every day, and the weight just dropped off.

Since that time 1 stone has crept back on due to excessive holidaying where you really HAVE to eat all the breakfast as you've already paid for it. But I just started a quick WW yesterday to get rid of the 7kg.

But, the most excellent thing about WW to me is that I did it all at home on the computer using their 123 Success 2000 CD-Rom (now PurePoints). It cost me about £35, and it was all I needed. No WW recipe books, I never attended a meeting. Oh, I did buy a Bonus Buddy pedometer which I found very helpful (that was £16), but my investment in losing almost half my bodyweight was £50.

I put my success down to the fact that I was sponsored for a local charity (helps willpower), and that I enjoy walking and have two large dogs. For me, the key was lots of exercise. Each day I usually earn 6 bonus points through walking 8 miles. Yesterday I had 9½ bonus points (4 points for walking, 4 for swimming for half an hour, 1½ for 15 mins aerobic exercise on a mini trampoline at home).

I really did genuinely change my eating habits, and have mostly kept them two years later (except I'm eating too many cakes now). Rather than buying pre-packed food I cooked meals from basic ingredients. Without all that lovely olive oil they don't taste QUITE as nice, but you can have a huge meal for only 5 points, and I have 20 a day (had 28 when 19 stone starting the diet). By the way, if you want to see before and after photos, look at www.hancox.org.uk.

Anyway, I would recommend WW, especially doing it at home if you're computer literate and if yuo have some way of boosting willpower. WW themselves don't encourage sponso
rship (you might rush it) but I did that under a doctor's guidance and for a set period (6 months).

They may rake in the money at the meetings but the "new me" is such a delight, after 2 years I still sometimes forget that I'm not fat anymore. It's worth it. And the fact that it only cost me £50 is even better!

-- UPDATE --

One or two comments asked for some more information on what the diet actually involves and how the CD Rom worked. So here goes!

The diet works on a formula for calculating calories and saturated fat and giving them a "points" value. Each person dieting is allowed a specific number of points each day (depending on height and current weight - usually around 20 points for a woman and 26 for a man) which they can eat in any way they wish. You could potentially just eat four jam doughnuts (at five points each) for a day - but that wouldn't be satisfying at all! The diet trains you to be more aware of what is in food, and that "treats" need to be balanced with other food. If you binge on cakes etc you will just have to eat less for the rest of the day. After a while that jam doughnut just doesn't seem worth it when you could have had a full evening meal instead!

Most vegetables (excluding potatoes, peas and sweetcorn) are zero points. So basically if, like me, you have an ENORMOUS appetite, you fill up on stir-fried onion, courgette, aubergine, tomato etc with every hot meal. I tend to have a main source of protein (i.e skinless chicken breast, venison steak, pork casserole), have potatoes or rice (carbohydrates are sadly quite high in points so I can't have as much bread as I would like!) and then masses of side vegetables. It makes for a very satisfying filling meal which, for me, is usually around 5 points (the jam doughnut figure again!).

Most fruit is around ½ a point per item (i.e. per apple, kiwi, orange, peach) with the excepti
on being bananas which are 1 point for a small and 1½ points for a medium.

You can also "earn" extra points through exercise. For example, 15 minutes swimming is two bonus points; 15 minutes brisk walking, cycling or aerobics is 1½ points. You can add these on to your tally for the day and eat extra as a result - it worked very effectively at encouraging me to do more exercise. I could then have that jam doughnut I desired!

But how do you know how many points something is? This is where the CD-Rom comes in. My one is now two years old so it might all be different now, but it is basically a sort of database which lists masses of foods from different shops and their points value. It has a daily diary where you enter everything you have eaten that day and it counts up the points (because of rounding four items at one point each might only total 3 points in total). If the food you are buying is not listed, you can enter the details and get the points value through the nutritional information section on the food - size of portion, calories per 100g/100ml, saturated fat per 100g/100ml. And that's how the points are worked out. It has a section for exercise and what points various forms of exercise are worth. It has a section of advice (I find that a bit naff) and also a recipe section where you can add your own recipes. It also has graphs and charts of your weight and measurements that you enter on your weekly weigh-in. However, this section is a bit weak and I had my own excel spreadsheet so that I could look back in a more detailed way.

For me the main point of the CD-Rom is to track incredibly accurately what I am eating each day - no cheating! I plan my evening meal before I start preparing it - I know if I can have a medium or large jacket potato, what sort of dessert I can have, and if I have points left over at the end of the day I can treat myself. WW is very firm that you must eat all your points in a day - or y
ou can save four, but no more. I am on 20 points a day at the moment and if I eat less than 16 instead it may work against me and make the diet harder to keep to. In fact, I did find during my diet two years ago that sometimes I had to eat a couple of squares of chocolate at the end of the day to hit my minimum points. A very pleasant requirement!

WeightWatchers isn't anything magical - it's a tool to help you evaluate what you're eating. It steers you toward eating healthier food (although the supermarket low fat brands are often full of dodgy ingredients so I try to make my own stuff more often!) and to exercising more. And if you change your eating habits effectively enough (as I did) you can keep the weight off even when you've finished.

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