I got home from work at 6pm and inhaled an apple and now I am sipping on an espresso. I’m transitioning to counting points for awhile. It’s been a rough few days.
I toyed with whether or not I’d share this here, I think because in the world of diet blogging, WW isn’t something the hardcore cool kids do. After pondering it for awhile, I realized I don’t give a shit what them bitches think about me anymore.
In 2002 I lost a lot of weight and learned a hellofa alot about healthy eating on Weight Watchers. In fact I will credit WW for (initially) teaching me how to eat right. As time wore on, my WW meetings evolved into discussions about which processed food products would calculate out to less points. Back in 2002, WW did not have its name on brownies and cupcakes and muffins and breads and such — not like they do now (these processed pieces of crap irritate the shit out of me too, but that’s a completely different gripe). At some point it occured to me that losing weight was not about which English muffin is 3.5 points instead of 5. It’s safe to say I slowly grew disenchanted with the program. Or perhaps, I just burnt out on it. I will tell you that towards the end of that run, I felt like WW simply wasn’t enough food. Period. I was a hardcore exerciser then (it’s an easy habit for me to overdue) and I wasn’t eating any of my exercise points. The past few years have taught me how fucking stupid that was. If you are working out like a madwoman, burning 1000 calories a day at the gym, you need to eat more food, comprende?
For numerous reasons, I’ve been toying with the idea of re-trying WW for awhile now. First and foremost is that it worked for me in the past, and I want to experiment with the program as it is now (something significantly different than my last go around — more on that later). Secondly, I am inspiried by a few people I know who have recently been very successful on WW. Third, I’m bored and ready to change it up.
The program has certainly evolved since 2002. You can no longer bank points. Plus, they’ve introduced the core eating plan. Kudos to them for that. Right now, I am counting points as a bit of an experiement and the numbers game is interesting — especially when you compare it to the plan Sparkpeople recommended for me. On WW, if I eat my daily alloted points, plus the 35 flex points a week, I am consuming approximately 1400 calories a day. Note that does not count 0 point vegetables. So hey, I can eat 1400 calories and a huge ass salad at lunch plus some broccoli with dinner. I am also allowed to swap out exercise points for additional food (and frankly I no idea how to count “bootcamp” in the WW activity tracker). These numbers (if I calorie count the veggies) put me at the high range of my suggested Spark people daily intake. Interesting, no?
I picked a challenging month for this experiment, as I am traveling 3 times in May. In fact we leave on Saturday for Florida. My mother is turning 60 on mother’s day and I wanted to be there for it. My plan is combat the festivities by journaling my food and upping my exercise.
Truth be told, I’m curious to see if I will be a Weight Watchers convert in a few months time. Right now I am a bit wary, but cautiously optimistic.
