Weight Watchers Diet Examined

Weight Watchers is one of the powerhouses of the dieting world, a true marketing success. The plan has been used successfully by thousands of people, and at first glance, appears to be very sound. Weight Watchers takes advantage of the fact that in order to lose weight, one must consume less calories than one burns on a daily basis. Many diets have attempted to do this by cutting out food groups, replacing high calorie foods that people nonetheless love to eat, and generally making people’s lives miserable. Not so with Weight Watchers. On this diet, you can eat whatever you want. Seriously. Fried chicken, chocolate brownies, beef fajitas, and the list goes on.

Weight Watchers works by assigning a point value to each of over twenty-five thousand foods. When the dieter consumes a food, they are then consuming the associated point value. Depending on your current weight, you are expected to consume a certain number of points in a day. By adding up the point values of the foods you have consumed, you know whether or not you have hit your target for the day. By restricting the number of points consumed, rather than the foods, Weight Watchers allows people to eat their favorite foods, so long as they complement them with low point foods to stay below the target cumulative value. Therefore your fried chicken should be paired with some broccoli. Your brownies should be eaten with fruit.

There are a number of health-related issues with this approach. To begin with, dieters simply cannot be trusted. Or rather, they should not be trusted to trust themselves. To wriggle around the cumulative point system, people have been known to eat huge meals of whatever they like, then not eat again for the rest of the day. Or, they may pair their meals with diet drinks and other unhealthy options. Finally, while it may be easy to stick to a diet that allows fried chicken and brownies, one must consider what these foods are doing to one’s overall health. Many of our favorite foods are high in saturated fat and other unhealthy ingredients. When losing weight, one of our primary focuses should be on keeping the body healthy throughout and beyond the diet. When weight loss becomes the only goal, people tend to be unfettered in their attempts to do so, with disastrous outcomes for the body as a whole.

Another feature that has made the Weight Watchers approach so popular is the weekly meetings that are held to encourage members. In a group setting, led by trained facilitators, the dieters are praised for their progress and instructed on how to maximize the diets. In today’s hustle and bustle worlds, however, the meetings have turned into online meetings, reducing the amount of social contact and the encouragement of actually seeing with your own eyes the success of your peers. Furthermore, there is a cost attached to the meetings, one that could easily be avoided by simply forming your own group of friends who would like to lose weight together.

And finally, there is the wrinkle that Weight Watchers members most often complain about, even those who are faithful to the points system. Counting points and deciding how to complement meals can be time-consuming and annoying. The Weight Watchers website offers tools to do so, but the fact remains that many people are too busy to sit down and determine the point value of the foods they are eating. Some lose track as the day goes by and do not properly calculate their daily totals. In short, there are a number of ways in which human error can derail this diet completely.