Here's the headline - I lost more than 60 pounds with weight watchers. Now, I can see you thinking, "Yes... but how long will it stay off?" Well, it has been over 9 years now, and while I cannot deny there have been variations up and down (most notably when I was pregnant and soon after my son was born), the weight has stayed away.
Therefore, I guess I can call myself a Weight Watchers success story. I feel pretty qualified to write this testimonial.
There are lots and lots of reasons why Weight Watchers works, and I could write pages on how wonderfully healthy the program is, how it is nutritional, easy to follow and not too hard on a food addict like me who simply has to have a chocolate fix every now and then. But the reason why it worked for me is simple, I can sum it up in just one word. Control.
I admit it - I am a control freak. I like to have everything my way, and if you tell me not to do something, I will instinctively want to do it even more. I accept this part of my personality (not sure if my husband is quite so comfortable with it mind you!) and I deal with it. Diets have never been great for me because if you tell me I can't eat any more chocolate, cakes, or sticky toffee pudding between now and next Christmas, the craving will be so strong I will literally knock you over on my flee to the nearest supermarket. It just does not work. But here's the thing. As well as being a freaky control-obsessed woman, I am also quite intelligent, with a slight leaning towards the scientific and a preference for understanding why things work. Weight Watchers was literally written for me!
Being, as mentioned, not entirely without brain cells or education, I did understand in my pre-weight watchers years that more food = more weight, and more calories = more weight. However, dieting conflicted so violently with my own personality (and still does to be frank) that this knowledge just led me down the crash diet path. I would wake up one day and find my clothes didn't fit, and resolve not to eat for days, until I was so hungry I would eat the entire contents of the fridge in the middle of the night because if no one else sees then the calories don't count right? Sadly, this did not work (if it did I would be writing my own diet program and making millions my now!), and I soon found myself 5 foot 6, and heading speedily for 200 pounds. Only 22 years old, when I found that my favorite shop did not sell clothes to fit my post-Christmas self, I decided there had to be some drastic action taken. I joined Weight Watchers filled with apprehension and shame.
In the meetings, I found a place where I was not the fat girl; actually, I was one of the smaller members. No one looked at me in sympathy, or came out with fantastic anti-compliments like "you have a really pretty face". I felt like I was at home. As I got the hand of the program, it all made blinding sense to me. Nothing about it was brain surgery, that is true, but food addiction and the self-reproach that haunted me had taken away my ability to see the obvious. Suddenly I had a way of taking control over this thing that was my weight. The program basically taught me to budget. Sure, you can go out Saturday night and hit the desserts, but Monday through Friday, you are going to have to save up a few points for the splurge. If you want to eat more, no problem, just go for a walk or hit the gym to earn yourself a treat. And best of all, if you have a bad day, lose it for an hour and find yourself on the outside of three jam doughnuts, then all is not lost. Just recalculate and rework your points for the rest of the week and all will be well. You will probably still even lose some weight. I think that last was the key for me, because before the program if I had one slip up, I would declare the whole diet ruined and eat everything in sight for the rest of the week. Now I knew that a slip up was redeemable.
Weight Watchers saved my sanity. Seven years later, if my jeans get a bit tight I know what to do. Count points for a week or two and things will improve. Even when I don't actually count points, the principles that I learned are ingrained in my subconscious, and I know that if I am really hungry I can pile my plate high with vegetables and do no damage. It is all about budgeting. If you spend all your points on Monday, you might get a bit short by Friday. If you go gentle on the fats and sugar all week, filling up instead on the good stuff, you can really enjoy a takeaway on Friday night, guilt free.
I could go on for pages about this, but I think that my nine years of maintaining a healthy weight after being so very overweight speaks for itself. It is all about being in charge of what you eat, and knowing what to do to recover if you fall off the wagon for a little while - even letting yourself fall once in a while, because life is not about dieting after all. For a control freak like me, it is the perfect answer.