How Weight Watchers Can Help You

How Weight Watchers Can Help You

The Weight Watchers Organization

Weight Watchers is the largest and also the leading company of weight reduction products in the world. Founded in 1963, this hugely successful company focuses its diet plans around three simple concepts.

First, a successful diet plan must limit the amount of calories consumed, second, exercise is a critical component of any diet program and third, support from a team designed to help you make good choices and guide you towards your ultimate goal is a great help. The company boasts over 1.5 million members following the weight watchers diet and holds over 50,000 meetings globally every week.

How It Works

The Weight Watchers system works on a “points” basis. Points are based on the calories in a product making the plan seem more exotic. While it’s a relatively simple concept, reducing calories is a key ingredient in dropping pounds. Weight Watchers now has two alternative diets, the Flex Plan and the Core Plan.

As you would expect from the name, the Flex Plan gives you more food alternatives. This diet follows the point system, and since every type of food is assigned a “point” value, you can eat all your favorite foods, you just need to control the amount you eat. The points you are allowed to consume on any given day are based on your gender, age, weight and height. This is an easy diet to follow, with just a little math required to add up and manage your daily points.

The Core Diet strays from the basic points system and is good for people who don’t want to count and measure everything as this system is based on eating healthy foods. You can choose foods from all the basic food groups including fruits, vegetables, grains, starches, lean meats, poultry, and dairy products and you can eat all the “acceptable” food you want and even cheat once in a while with a snack (provided that it’s in a controlled amount).

Weight Watchers encourages regular exercise and their website which can be found at http://www.weightwatchers.com, has several different options. One of the changes to their program is that instead of penalizing the dieter for not exercising, the program encourages exercise by adding additional points for those exercising.

Meetings

One of the other keys to the Weight Watchers programs is attending meetings. While you can use the on-line program, the support and guidance from in-person meetings greatly enhances the success rate. It’s always helpful to hear real experiences from fellow dieters and learn from their weight battles and make the necessary lifestyle changes to maintain your weight.

Weight Watchers diets do not work for everyone. The core of the diet is based on calories. There can be potential health problems linked to weight issues such as adrenal fatigue, carbohydrate sensitivity, low serotonin levels, or intestinal parasites. Also, since members need to stay within a point total, they have to eat a well balanced diet to consume all the required nutrients and vitamins the body needs for good health.

Sometimes counting points can be become tedious or lead to a food fixation. The cost of partaking in all the weight watchers programs can be quite expensive. There is a $30 sign up fee for the on-line plan and $17 per monthly, and that’s in addition to your food, and depending on the area you live in, attending weekly meeting usually costs about $10 per week.

The big question is, are people successful at losing weight with the Weight Watchers programs. In a study printed in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2003 (and funded by Weight Watchers), individuals following the Weight watchers Points program lost an average of six pounds after two years. Dieters attending at least 78 percent of the weekly meetings almost doubled the weight loss to 11 pounds, to be successful in losing weight, you need to seriously follow all aspects of the program.

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