Weight watchers is still a diet

Readers of my blog know I have no love for WW. When I first decided I needed to lose weight, I tried doing my own diet. I showed little success of 3 years of diet foods and OTC diet pills, I moved to WW I believe when I was 16. I had no idea that diets didn't work and thought that if you were fat, you went on a diet, lost weight and everything would be fine. WW didn't ask for a permission slip from my parents but my parents did pay my joiner's fee and weekly fee (at least I got a discount of a whole $2 for being a student). We met in the basement of a synagogue, shared our weight loss successes and our challenges. Every week I was given a fresh booklet to check off exchanges. The team leader was a woman name Rosalie who I believe was one of the rare WW team leaders who lost weight and kept it off. She wasn't famous so she never made it into the ads. 

The time I last did WW, I was 24, had done it a number of times over past eight years. Each time it ended with me gaining the weight I loss plus more. This would be my final time because the first week I followed the plan and gained weight. I never went back. 

As far as diets being bad for your health WW seems like it's not as bad as the other. They often have ads touting it as a lifestyle change. One January, their slogan was "Diets are mean." And a recent article cover WW's CEO touts that it's not about dieting but behavior modication. 

The original Weight Watchers program centered around calorie counting which often led participants to initially lose weight but then later gain it back.

I'm not sure which original program he was talking about. I first did Weight Watchers 25 years ago and there no calorie counting. First it was exchanges, then it was point system then pointsplus, now they have something new called 360. Maybe he was talking about the original plan from the 1970's. 

To me WW is the most dangerous plan because it flies under the rader and gets labeled as the "sensible weight loss plan" rather than crash dieting of other plans. WW sneaks into your workplace, your wellness discounts, your insurance plans. 

Laura Beck of Jezebel literally has my almost exact same WW story. (And I swear I wrote the part about WW before I read the article.)

I went to my first Weight Watchers meeting when I was 12*. I attended with my mom because she always wanted to lose weight, and I was a fat kid, so it made sense. Of course, I'd been on other diets before, but this one was different, this time I would succeed through six easy meals a day and a healthy new interest in jogging. The weeklyexercise in terror meeting involved sneaking into their offices in a local mall 

In the end Weight Watchers isn't a lifestyle change or even healthy eating. Whether you count points, exchanges or apples, it still limits the amount of calories you can eat making it a diet.  

Comments

[La]

I am so FRUSTRATED by the comments on the Jezebel page. I had exactly the same experience with WW - only the last time I did it, I lost 152 pounds, plateaued for another 2 years and then, after exercising all of the cartilege out of my knees, had double knee replacements at 45. I know you won't believe it - all of that weight came back. Now I'm fat again and disabled. Yay me! People are like sheep being led to the slaughter. The diet industry is destroying the health of this country and I think it's part of a larger conspiracy to hide what they've been doing to our food supply (growth hormones, chemicals, additives, changing things genetically). You can't tell me that there are normal chickens in this country with breasts the size of turkies. Those things are huge. They scare me. Sorry I'm rambling. The Jezebel comments really pissed me off!

[Brenda]

Has Weight Watchers ever really worked long-term for anyone? My WW story is very much like yours---I'm 50 years old and have spent the last thirty years dieting my way up to 230 pounds. The lightbulb started to come on when I read "The End of Overeating" by David Kessler, but I have to admit that those old, deeply ingrained habits die hard, and I haven't been very successful.