by Leann Zotis

Created on: November 04, 2009   Last Updated: February 14, 2010

One of the cornerstones of the Weight Watchers program is the Points Tracker. Through the use of the Weight Watchers online Points Tracker, the Weight Watchers supplied booklet for tracking your points or even through the use of your own personal notebook, you are able to keep track of your daily intake of food along with the Weight Watchers point value associated with each item on a day to day basis.

If you are conscientious in your use of the Points Tracker you will achieve two important keys to your successful weight loss goals - Awareness and Accountability.

Through your diligent efforts to record everything you eat over the course of a day, you will become aware of just what you put in your mouth. You may be surprised at first as you record every meal, snack or miscellaneous morsel of food you eat throughout the day. If you remember that everything has calories, and an associated Weight Watchers point value, you will soon become much more selective, and restrictive, about what you eat.  This is the first major milestone in overcoming mindless eating.

It's easy to overlook the little tastes and samples and bites of food we might eat over the course of any given day. By using the Points Tracker, you are expected to record everything you eat. At the end of the day that Points Tracker could be filled with two pieces of candy from a co-worker's candy dish, a food sample from the grocery store and several test tastes of your dinner that evening in addition to all the regularly scheduled meals and snacks you consume. These are food items you might easily have overlooked if you didn't bother to write them down. The Points Tracker will make you aware of what you eat and that awareness should lead you putting an end to the mindless picking that is probably adding several hundred calories to your diet each day.

When you keep an accurate record of your food intake you are making yourself accountable for your actions. Many times your Weight Watchers counselor will offer to look at your Points Tracker and make some recommendations about ways to improve your eating habits. Turning your Tracker over to her is entirely optional, of course, but if you are willing to do so you will be accountable in her eyes for the choices you have made. Just the mere idea that someone else may see exactly what sort of food choices you are making when you are supposedly trying to lose weight is often more than enough to cause you to modify your eating behavior.

Some people in the Weight Watchers program consider the Points Tracker to be a nuisance and they are haphazard about their use of it. This can be a fatal mistake. The people who are really successful on the program understand the importance of using the Points Tracker and are faithful in recording their food intake and points values.

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