4-Watching Weight, Part I

I am four-time loser at Weight Watchers. It has become vastly clear that I am not cut out for this program. While some people seem to do well on it, I, sadly, do not.

I joined Weight Watchers four times between 1999 and 2005—two of those times I remained in the program for a year, while the other two times I lasted a few weeks or months. I lost between 20 and 25lbs on the two occasions that I really stuck with it and almost nothing on the other two. I have gained back every pound several times over and presently have zero intention of ever trying the program again. For some bizarre reason though, I have kept some of my old Weight Watchers materials. It’s interesting because pulling them out evokes both longing and aversion: longing for a time when I was thinner and ostensibly in control; aversion, because I had to spend so much time thinking about food in order to feel in control.

I first decided to try out Weight Watchers in 1999 at the age of 23. I had crested to 203lbs, was wearing a size 14 or 16, and generally feeling pretty uncomfortable in my own skin. I remember going to the warehouse at work to make the call to the 1-800 number because I didn’t want any of my co-workers to know that I was looking into it, despite the fact that I was quite good friends with most of them.

It was probably not a coincidence that I had been working my first desk job for a little over a year at that point. Until then I’d always been in retail environments that had required me to be on my feet all day. I had a roommate, which meant I was probably eating less than I would have had there been nobody at home to make me feel some level of shame about overeating. However, I had a hectic schedule, and the money to eat out more, so I could hide some part of my food consumption. Between being suddenly sedentary for eight hours a day and having more money to eat out, I started packing on the pounds.

My schedule was difficult to work around so I chose to go to a Saturday morning meeting even if I had to commute nearly 90 minutes to attend. In time having a Saturday morning meeting became a method by which I could cheat the system. I’d go to the weigh in on Saturday morning and then spend the remainder of the weekend eating whatever I wanted in whatever quantities I desired. Then on Monday I’d go back to “being good” and usually the goodness would show up on the scale the next Saturday morning, though I more than likely slowed down my progress with this methodology.

My ultimate goal, in 1999, was to lose about 30 or 40lbs and get down to my late high school weight of 165, but the first goal that most members try to meet is to lose 10% of their body weight. It took nearly six months but I finally lost my 10% and got down to 183lbs; I never lost anymore weight. I spent the rest of the year bouncing around that number—gaining and losing the same five or six pounds. I remember a friend admitting to me that she’d been jealous of my weight loss. She needn’t have been. After a year of taking my (somewhat smaller) arse across town to meetings I was fed up and frustrated and stopped attending at all; and the weight slowly crept back on.

It was between 2000 and 2003 that I made my two quite short-lived attempts at Weight Watchers. Both times it was my own lack of real motivation coupled with some un-enjoyable meetings that did me in. One of the meetings was simply too impersonal for me. It was held at a regional head office and I felt a bit like one of many cattle—no pun in intended--being herded through the process. The other meeting was in my very Italian neighbourhood and I was the only non-Italian in the room—which became disconcerting after a while. Besides that, the Italian meetings were held on Monday nights and since I usually spent my weekends cheating Monday was the worst possible day for a weigh in, in my books.

My second major attempt at the program took place years later in 2005. This time I went into the program at 222lbs. I’d now been working the same desk job for seven years, I was living on my own (and thus eating constantly without shame), and I wanted to get serious about dating but wasn’t feeling particularly confident about it at my weight. In addition shopping had become such a trial that I felt something had to be done. This time it only took me four and a half months to lose the 10%; but I had help. I had my wisdom teeth out in December of 2005 and didn’t eat solid food for two weeks. It’s amazing how you’ll lose weight when you’re essentially eating baby food. Overall I ended up losing about 25lbs and then, just as before, as the one year mark came up, I got tired of going to meetings every Saturday morning. This time it wasn’t even a long commute getting under my skin. I was only 15 or 20 minutes away from the meeting by subway and I had a friend going with me, so sometimes I even got a ride; but I guess I just got tired one day. And so by August of 2006, I had finished with Weight Watchers for the last time.

The Weight Watchers Method
For those of you blessedly unfamiliar with Weight Watchers, let me explain how it works. I’m going to base my explanation on my most recent attempt to stick with the program, but I can’t guarantee that it reflects the program in its present form whenever you happen to be reading this—Weight Watchers has changed dramatically since its inception and will probably continue to be tweaked as more information about weight loss becomes available.

There are two methods available in the program: The Flex Plan or The Core Plan. On the Flex Plan, foods are allotted point values based on calorie count, fat and fibre content. Members are then allowed to eat a certain number of points daily. This number is mostly based on the member’s weight but factors like age (i.e. if the participant is a teen or child) and pregnancy are taken into consideration. More recently, gender has also become a factor though for a long time it was not. So for me, at 222lbs, I was permitted 26 points of food a day. And for the sake of context, here are the point values of some common food choices that I would have made:

• 3oz of boneless, skinless chicken cooked = 4 points

• a medium sized apple = 1 point

• 1/8 of a 9” (diameter) fruit pie = 10 points

• a Big Mac =14 points.

Ultimately The Flex Plan is a simplified method of counting calories but some foods get more ‘bang for buck’ because of lower fat and higher fibre content. You can eat whatever you please but you must stick within your point allotment. If you enjoy freedom and have the ability to reign yourself in when you know you’re out of points, then this is the plan for you. On The Flex Plan you can also gain points by exercising—but it is sort of a zero sum issue. You’re only getting more points because you’re burning them off—you’re not actually gaining anything extra or cheating the plan in any way. Also, the makers of the plan recommend that you eat no more than four extra points a day even if your exercise has earned you more (four points amounts to about 25 to 30 minutes of high intensity cardio for most people). For someone working out heavily this really isn’t feasible—after a certain stage you have to put back in what you’ve taken out. However this doesn’t tend to be a problem for most members. While the overall idea of Weight Watchers is that one should exercise in conjunction with the eating plan, you honestly won’t find many hard bodied people at a Weight Watchers meeting. In my experience, members aren’t generally doing more than four points worth of exercise a day.

On The Core Plan a member can eat as much as they need to feel satisfied but the actual foods permitted in the plan are limited. Foods that are part of The Core Plan are ones you know to be healthy—lean meats, poultry and fish, whole wheat pasta, brown rice, whole grains and potatoes, fat free dairy products and a lot of vegetables and fruit. But even some of the permitted foods are limited in quantity—whole wheat pasta, brown rice and potatoes, for example, are only allowed once a day; ground meats with no more than 7% fat are only allowed once daily as well. The member, however, is allotted 35 points a week for foods that don’t fall into The Core Plan. The key to successfully navigating The Core Plan is understanding the need to stop eating when you are satisfied--not full or overflowing.

A member can switch between Core and Flex as often as they like—in fact, switching is sometimes recommended as a good way to kick-start more weight loss when one has reached a plateau—as long as the switch doesn’t occur in the middle of a week.

I don’t like being told what to do so I was always an adherent of The Flex Plan. And frankly The Core Plan didn’t exist the first three times that I tried Weight Watchers. The Core Plan was more of a response to proponents of The Atkins Diet and The South Beach Diet asking why Weight Watchers didn’t seem to really encourage healthy foods choices. Despite my reluctance to ever try The Core Plan though, I actually believe Core to be the more effective of the two in the long term. My feeling is that it helps people learn something they can take with them from the program should they decide to leave—relatively healthy eating habits. Flex, on the other hand, simply left me with an even more bizarre relationship with food than when I started out.

The Meetings
The meetings are an integral and interesting part of Weight Watchers. Missing meetings is usually the death knell for your Weight Watchers journey.

The group leader, a Weight Watchers employee, pretty much makes or breaks a meeting in my opinion. I’ve had some group leaders who I loved and other ones who made me never want to show up again. I’m sure that reason I stuck around for a year in ’99 and ’05 had a lot to do with having really great group leaders. I bumped into one of these women years later at my local Running Room and we still really clicked. When we’d have substitute group leaders I’d sometimes just weigh in and leave.

But the meetings have way of being a double-edged sword because there’s a certain amount of “group think” that occurs. Really heavy members will generally receive unmitigated encouragement. People that tend to fall in the middle, like me, will also receive quite hearty encouragement. People who look "normal” when they join (i.e. not people who’ve lost the weight and are maintaining) but for whatever reason have chosen to try Weight Watchers: not so much. There was a young lady in my 2005 meeting who was around 20 years old and came into Weight Watchers at about a size six. She lost ten or twelve pounds and left looking virtually the same to me. She seemed genuine about her struggle to lose the weight but most of us middle-aged fatties were having a hard time being sincere in our encouragement of her—at least I was. It was difficult to understand why she felt she even needed to lose weight.

Another phenomenon that tended to occur was that when people lost a lot of weight quickly--instead of the promoted healthy 1-2lbs weekly--they really did get the most applause. When my friend Patricia* attended meetings for a short time and proudly met her 1-2lb goal every week, the reaction she got was nothing close to that of those who came in saying they’d dropped six or seven pounds in the same time frame. She found it disturbing that this dramatic and generally unhealthy type of weight loss was held up as admirable without the group leader making much of an effort to temper the excitement.

At every meeting, there are, besides the group leader who runs the discussion, a variety of people taking your money and weighing you. The people sitting at those scales have the power, often, to make or break your day. I recall one old fella at my 2005 meetings who used to call out your weight so loudly that every one else could hear it, much to the chagrin of many. There was another woman who was so discouraging to members who had gained weight that some of the members complained to the group leader. There was also the complaint that she was harder on very heavy people than she was on others who were smaller. Ultimately, the actions and reactions of members cannot be fully controlled, and as such the meetings can be both the greatest strength and weakness of the program.

Weight Watchers, My Friends and I
Off the top of my head I can count seven of my friends who have been Weight Watchers members. I'm almost positive that there are more but it’s hard to keep track. Tonya* has tried the program and always slips up with alcohol. She constantly overshoots her points when she and her husband decide to crack open a bottle of wine. She’s no longer on the program. My friend Emily* has an on again-off again relationship with Weight Watchers. Sometimes she does the meetings and sometimes she doesn’t. She almost always seems to be counting her points but never quite religiously sticking with the plan. She’s never really been overweight, in my opinion, either though. My aforementioned friend Patricia was so perturbed by the unhealthy encouragement of dramatic weight loss that went on in the meetings that she attended, that she stopped going after just a few weeks. My good friend Krista* just seemed to tire of the program eventually. Another friend, Miriam*, one day decided she was finished with paying for weight loss and quit attending meetings after about a year and a half. She’s now on a new diet that’s doctor supervised and it seems to be working well for her—she’s lost more than she did on Weight Watchers thus far. I remember an old friend Norma*; she was one of those rare people who had managed to hit her goal in the program and was in the coveted position of not having to pay for meetings anymore. She called me one night because she didn’t know how to keep herself from eating. This was after her weight had floated back up and she was paying for the privilege of attendance again.

And then there is my amazing friend Val* with whom I started out in 2005, still keeping up with it 2 ½ years later. I asked her what makes her stick with it after all this time and she said the following (I’m paraphrasing here): “I like that I can eat whatever I choose to eat. There’s no one telling me what I can and can’t have; because whenever something is restricted then I’ll cheat. With Weight Watchers I can have what I want and find a way to eat that works for me so there’s never any need to cheat. Secondly I like that I’m not alone in this. On every other plan that I’ve tried I always hit a point when I start feeling like I’m the only person doing it and then I want to quit. The support that I get at the meetings really helps. Lastly the accountability. Knowing that I have to go to that meeting every Saturday keeps me on track. I can slack off for the weekend but I know if I don’t stick to the plan Monday through Friday it’s going to show up on the scale. So the accountability is a real motivating factor.”

Even though she's on The Flex Plan, Val mentioned that for the past 18 months or so she hasn’t actually been recording the point values of what she eats at all, but she has diligently recorded what she’s been eating. She finds that having to be honest about everything she eats keeps her in check (or at least lets her know why the number isn’t going where she wants it to on the scale). And to her credit I will say this—Val looks fabulous. I saw Val a few weeks ago and she looks great. I mean she can wear skinny jeans dammit.

But I have my suspicions (and Val had agrees) that she is the exception, rather than the rule. Val said that almost none of the people with whom she began Weight Watchers back in ’05 are still in attendance (myself included obviously)—or if they are, they have left and come back, thus losing the same weight again. It seems that while the psychology behind Weight Watchers works for Val, it doesn’t, in the long term, work for the vast majority of people, myself included.

In the documentary "The Diet Wars" Stephen Talbot compared Weight Watchers to being in a 12-step program; and I have to admit, the shoe fits. Weight Watchers meetings can sort of feel like being in a group of ever-recovering fatties. "Hi, my name is Isabel, and I'm fat." My therapist has indicated that she feels the point counting is only giving you a false sense of control over your eating habits, and only recommends using the program to kick-start weight loss but not as a long term remedy. And I'd have to agree (and no, I don't always agree with my therapist). If it's going to take attending weekly meetings and counting points for the rest of my life to keep me in check--I can't say I'd call that control. And while The Flex Plan is all about eating what you want when you want, no one talks about how dramatic the food reduction is for most new members. Upon starting the program I was easily eating a third of what I'd normally eat. I'm not saying this isn't a good fraction to shoot for but in my case I was left feeling quite deprived. When I finally got accustomed to eating less, I still had be really careful about my food choices or risk being left hungry...and angry. I could have a 10 point piece of pie but I'd have a hard time remaining satisfied for the rest of the day on just 16 more points. In fact I wasn't able to, so I'd have to overeat or starve. One option would leave me trying not to feel bad about having cheated (and usually eating to numb out the guilt) while the other option would leave me hungry and angry. I realize there are a lot of emotional issues caught up in my eating habits and that complicates what is, at its simplest, an issue of calories consumed and calories burned. But I don' t know many women for whom weight gain and loss isn't an emotional issue. While Weight Watchers does have a component of emotional coaching in the program, obviously it's not tailor made for each member.

My intent here is not to besmirch the name of Weight Watchers. I think it's one of the healthier weight loss programs out there. I just wonder if it's as kind and gentle and all-inclusive as it claims to be. Given the seemingly high member turn over, one might not think so. But I don't intend to have you simply take my word for it. I'm not even going to have you go on the word of my jaded ex-member friends. In the interests of checking this theory out I plan to follow some Weight Watchers members over the next year to see how it works for them. It will not, by any means, be a large enough sample to call the experiment scientifically sound, but simply an interesting look at random people trying to make this program work for them. I will give at least quarterly updates on their progress and in a year we'll see where they all end up. While it may prove nothing either way, it will be interesting to get a glimpse into the journeys of others as they navigate watching their weight.

*Of course those aren't their real names!