Happy 2024! Here’s to a new year, for some a sense of new beginnings and starting fresh, for others, just another day, month, year.
I’ve never really been one for new year’s resolutions, mostly because I believe that when we ascribe a resolution to a day like New Years, we end up putting undue pressure on ourselves. If we need to change our goals or adjust them we feel like failures, or worse, like cliches! I know they work for some folks, but not for me.
So how’s the weight loss going you ask? We’ll in the last 2 weeks I’ve lost approximately 1lb. Again, not great, but not nothing – especially considering it was Christmas and holiday time filled with lots of good food and desserts. I also say approximately because I’m weighing myself at home and I have one of those old scales, so I can’t tell I’ve lost 0.2 of a lb or not, it’s basically one or nothing. I’m doing this because I don’t want to get lost in the numbers and the decimal points. Been there, done that, trying something new.
On to the main thesis of this post: To WW or not to WW. If you’re one of the folks who’s read me before or you scoured my site to see what the backstory is, you’ll know that I did weight watchers for a very long time. I think about 10 years or so and a few times at that. The TLDR version is that the first time I lost 50lbs, went to grad school and regained it plus an extra 25. Then I lost 100lbs, but couldn’t maintain it. So here I find myself. I had been maintaining about a 60lb loss until the pandemic.
I quit WW in post-pandemic 2020. For a while they were offering a multitude of weekly Zoom meetings for members and then they just kept cutting them back and cutting them back. At that point I had been steadly gaining weight (even though I was following the current plan and was exercising 5 days a week which included running regularly). Then I had that very stressful contract where I ended up gaining a good 20ish pounds in a short amount of time. And I started to grow tired of WW and didn’t see a return on value for still spending the same amount of money. I didn’t see a path forward with WW where I would be able to lose this new 20ish lbs. I finally quit for good.
I hadn’t been happy with the plan for a long time. I’m just not a person for whom zero-point foods work. At least not for foods that aren’t veggies. Even the zero-point fruit didn’t work for me. Why? Because I’m not a person that doesn’t know how to eat healthfully or a person who hates veggies and only eats fast food. In fact, even before WW I was never a big fast food eater. What is difficult for me are portions. I just eat too much food. My brain doesn’t tell me when its full. Or if it does, it’s too full and way too late. I don’t know if something happened when I was a kid – if I taught myself this, or if I’m missing hormones/chemicals etc. (I’ve never bothered to get tested, I don’t even know if you can get tested for something like this) but my whole life I’ve never felt full after a “normal”-sized meal. I have this memory of making chili one time when I was in university for dinner and I ate a bowlful and I remember being SO excited that I felt full. It had never happened before.
So obviously zero-point foods don’t work for me. It didn’t even work for me when they only made fruit 0 – because honestly, I could eat a whole bag of grapes in one sitting, and I did! I wasn’t eating air. Those are real calories and real sugar I’m ingesting and whether natural or not, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. When other foods like chicken etc. became zero, I struggled even more. Look, I get it, the zero-point foods are there to help encourage folks to eat those foods instead of other nutritionally-deficient foods. But as I mentioned, that wasn’t my main issue. So I’m happy I quit. It wasn’t working for me.
I also really started to feel like they (WW) were getting desperate, just throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if it sticks (i.e. makes $$). Points and point values were changing annually, terminology was changing where (for me) it just became nonsense words. I’ve been through enough school to know when someone is trying to sound smart without saying anything at all.
The only time WW really worked for me was when I first started. I know, I know, you’re going to say it’s because it was the honeymoon phase and my mindset was different, I was younger, and my commitment was differerent, but hear me out. It’s because for me it was pretty straight-forward simplified calorie-counting. There were clear rules and that worked for me. Again, I know this doesn’t work for everyone so I’m just saying what worked for me.
When I was little I had to go to the doctor for stomach pains – why? Because it turns out I was eating 8 bananas a day. WHO DOES THAT?!? Me. I do that. So there was a rule created that I could only eat 1 banana a day. And you know what, to this day, I will never eat more than 1 banana a day. My mom also had to make a rule that at lunch, I couldn’t have more than 2 slices of bread, why? Because, of course, I would eat more than that in one sitting.
These rules work for me. I’m just that type of person and it actually takes a lot of stress off me. I don’t feel guilty when I go outside the rules, because I know how to get back on track. Does that make sense? I’m not sure if it does, but that’s me.
So what does all this mean for my current weight loss efforts? Well I’ve decided to go back to the only thing that really worked for me and that let me feel like I could actually eat anything I wanted in moderation, and that is the WW plan from early 2010. Don’t ask me what it’s called. I don’t know. There have been so many names and so many changes that I just can’t be bothered to keep track and devote that much brain power to it. The only thing I know is that it’s the one before PointsPlus became a thing. So pre-December 2010.
I’m using the original-to-me plan – the one where points were calculated by calories, fat, and fibre and that’s it. Where the only zero-point foods are non-starchy vegetables. Where you get a daily points target and 35 weekly points. Where you could, in a pinch, always estimate that approx. 50cals = 1 point-ish. I downloaded a free excel tracker and put it up on my G-drive with a shortcut on my phone so it’s my version of an app so I can track as I go and I pulled out my old booklets with the food point values and that’s what I’m using. I know this feels restrictive to some and I think the new WW might actually be closer to this than to the latest iterations of the program, but that doesn’t matter to me. So far, this works.
I can’t even tell you what a game-changer it has been for me mentally. It feels like I’m on a food budget (which is a good thing for me), but a manageable one that doesn’t make me feel bad for liking bread, eating potatoes or having a chocolate every now and then.
That’s where I’m at. Weight-watchers-ish. How are you?
Pound per Pound 