Category Archives: Weight Watchers

Eat 4 Today – The Commitment. Plan your meal, eat it and forget about it.


Posted by katiebird

I’m not going to eat between meals and I’m not going to take seconds. Just Today. And I’ll try it for a year to see what happens.

When I look back on my Weight Watcher’s experience, I tend to remember what I learned about portion control, and using a food journal as a tool — it’s so easy to eat thoughtlessly (at least if you allow yourself to snack) and writing everything down forces a confrontation with reality. However, as I wrote yesterday’s article – My Love/Hate Relationship with Weight Watchers, I remembered a little more.

I remembered enough to know that thinking about food all the time is counter productive. I needed something, a weight management system that runs on autopilot. A system that manages my weight, but doesn’t need anything in particular from me. I just don’t have the ability to multitask and I have too many other things I want to do. Left to my own devices, I’ll just stop doing it (whatever ‘it’ is).

The beauty of The Commitment is that it builds on what I learned from Weight Watchers. I use tools I bought from them (the measuring gourds & spoons, the digital food scale and even some of their booklets) to help me manage my portion sizes (because yes, portion size matters). But it totally frees me from any food obsession.

I don’t have to stew about how much I like any food. I don’t have to sulk because I’ll never have it again. I’d better not sit down and eat a whole cheesecake by myself — but that would probably be a pretty stupid thing to do anyway — weight managment issues aside.

At Weight Watchers we might spend 10 minutes talking about a low-point cheesecake made with a Triscuit crust. But, if you ask me here, I’d say, “If you want dessert with your meal, why not just eat half a slice of regular cheesecake (or half of that) very slowly”. Get all the flavor and even fewer points or calories.”

Hm. Maybe it was a mistake to bring cheesecake into it at all.


My Love/Hate Relationship with Weight Watchers. Pt. 4 On the edge


Posted by katiebird

Before I go too far off the deep end, I have to stop and give Weight Watchers full credit for developing a system that makes it relatively easy for millions of people to lose weight in a safe way. My most recent (and most successful) experience with them was with The Points Program. And that’s what I’ll be talking about tonight.

Here’s the Weight Watchers Points formula according to Wikipedia:

The POINTS formula

The formula for calculating the POINTS content of a specific food serving uses a formula described in US Patent 6,040,531:

p = \frac{c}{50} + \frac{f}{12} - \frac{\min\{r,4\}}{5}

Where p is the number of points, c is the number of calories, f is the grams of fat, and r is the grams of dietary fibre (if the dietary fibre is greater than four, use four).

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My Love/Hate Relationship with Weight Watchers. Pt. 3 – A Falling Out


Posted by katiebird

I haven’t mentioned the Weight Watcher snacks.

Did you know that H. J. Heinz Company actually owned Weight Watchers from From 1978 until 1999? I’ve always thought that was an interesting relationship considering Weight Watcher’s early history as anti-catsup warriors. While Heinz hasn’t owned the company for many years, they still have an active relationship. The Weight Watcher’s brand of food from frozen meals and snacks to chocolate and other candy treats are still made by Heinz.

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My Love/Hate Relationship with Weight Watchers. Pt. 2 – Still Lovin’


Posted by katiebird

I originally joined weight watchers in 1969 at my mother’s urging. I was 15, already at the height I am now — and while you wouldn’t have called me thin, I was right in the middle of the recommended weight range for my height (at any given time of my life, I can tell you exactly what I weighed).

In those days Weight Watcher’s was a hellish experience. You could eat green beens. I remember that. And you had to boil tomato juice to make your own catsup. They already had the 8 glasses of water requirement. It cost a dollar a week to attend a meeting. I’m sure I lost a few pounds, but I’d say it wasn’t a successful experiment. You couldn’t live on the program for long.

The next time I joined Weight Watcher’s was in the early 80s. I don’t remember much about it. My life was about to take a dramatic turn and when it did, I didn’t have room to think about a complicated diet program. I did lose weight and (again) learned something about nutrition. But it wasn’t a life changing experience. It was interesting to talk to other members who remembered making their own catsup a million years before.

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Male Secrets Revealed! – Why Fat Men Fear Weight Watchers, contributed by DuctapeFatwa


Posted by katiebird

Do you know why women usually live longer than men? I know, that is changing in the US, especially, as the plight of women worsens, but generally speaking, it is still true.

It is certainly not because women have easier lives. On the contrary, the lives of women are, for many reasons, some biological, most cultural, much more difficult than the lives of men. Women are, in any given moment, more likely to be in physical danger, be physically abused, be food and/or housing insecure, be the sole support of minor children, lack the resources to care for minor children for whom they are the sole support, I could go on.

Yet women are generally healthier, both mentally and physically than their brothers, and live longer.

One reason is, women are more likely than men, when they have problems, or something is worrying them, to talk to someone. Maybe a relative, maybe a friend, a professional counsellor, whoever is sitting next to them on the train, depending on their situation and the resources available to them. But they will usually talk to someone.

Ideally, the person they talk to can offer some advice, maybe concrete help that solves the problem. But even if not, the very act of talking, of “unburdening” themselves, in essence, sounding the problem out loud gives her a benefit. Maybe just articulating is gives some relief. Maybe in talking about it, she sees it in a different way, and thinks of things that might help that she didn’t think of just worrying about it with her mouth shut.

But it is a fact that whether you are male or female, talking about a problem helps. The problem is, for a variety of cultural reasons, men tend not to learn this, or if we do, we learn it later in life. Depending on culture, we are taught that we should not have problems, or that we should not admit to having any problems, or that if we have problems we should solve them all by ourselves, or some variation or combination of those. Almost every culture does this.

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