Give me the opportunity to do so and I will sing the praises of Weight Watchers to anyone who cares to listen.  I’m not going to rehash my entire Weight Watchers story here, but I firmly believe that the program saved my life in a very literal way.

Weight Watchers has gone through several changes since I started the program.  Heck, there have been a lot of changes since I became aware of the program back when I was a kid (you know, back when if you were following Weight Watchers you had to eat liver every week).  While they haven’t done anything quite that extreme with the latest iteration, they’ve made a few changes that, in my opinion, have really added value to the diet and made it even easier to live with on a day-to-day basis.

Several years ago WW introduced the Core program in an effort to appeal to members who had an aversion to writing down everything they ate.  The idea was pretty simple in theory – Eat until you feel full from a very specific list of foods.  To be completely honest I believe the program was created in response to the popularity of the Atkins and South Beach Diets that were insanely popular at the time (the food lists you were allowed to eat from were full of low/no carb foods).  While the program seemed to work for some folks, it wasn’t overwhelmingly popular among the Weight Watchers masses and I suspect it didn’t quite work out as well as intended.  As a result, the Core program has been kind of “hidden away” in the latest iteration of the diet.  It’s still there in a sense, but now it goes by the name of Filling Foods and it’s kind of mentioned in passing after you’ve been a member for five weeks.  It’s also a little confusing, because the Filling Foods are part of the regular program as well.  Filling Foods are marked with a green diamond in all of the literature and online tools, and if you’re following the regular program you’re supposed to eat those kinds of foods as often as possible.  They are what is known as Low Energy Density foods.  Simply put, they fill you up without using a lot of calories.   If you were a fan of the Core program you simply eat those Filling Foods like you would the old Core foods and use the 35 weekly Flex POINTS for anything outside of that list.

Recognizing that journaling can be an exercise in frustration at times, though, Weight Watchers has taken the theory behind the Core program (eat until you are satisfied) and combined it with the POINTS program using something they call “Set Points.”  The concept is a little hard to get your head around at first (at least, it was for me), but once you grasp it you’ll find things like dining out considerably easier.

When using the Set Points for a meal there are three different categories of foods :  Lean Proteins (chicken, salmon), Starchy Vegetables (Potatoes, Corn), and Fruits (umm…fruit).  Each list has a set POINT value.  Lean Proteins are worth 5 POINTS, starchy vegetables are worth 6, and fruits are worth 2.  As long as you stick with one type of food in a column you pay the set POINT amount and eat until you are satisfied.  It may seem odd that a starchy vegetable would be worth more than a lean cut of steak, but the purpose is to give you an overall average that is going to be close to what you are actually consuming.  To demonstrate how this works, let’s say you go out for dinner and order grilled salmon with a baked potato, steamed broccoli, and strawberries for dessert.  The meal, in total, would be 13 POINTS.  5 for the salmon (lean protein), 6 for the potato (starchy vegetable), 0 for the broccoli, and 2 for the strawberries (fruit).   Simple, right?  It DOES get confusing, though…and this is how.  Say you got a “surf and turf” (lean steak and lobster tail).  That would count as 2 lean proteins and thus be 10 points.  The same goes if you get a mixed fruit bowl – you’d count 2 points for every type of fruit in the bowl.  If you stick with one food from each column, though, this addition to the program really opens up the possibilities when it comes to dinging out and removes a lot of the stress from those situations.  As I’ve gotten comfortable with it I’ve started to use Set Points at home as well instead of weighing portion sizes or measuring them on my scale (a friendly reminder, though!  You still need to count the POINTS of any condiments you put ON your food!).

The final change in the Momentum program I wanted to note here is the one I am the most excited about, but also requires a bit of explanation.  Up until recently you could earn extra POINTS to use during the day by exercising, but these Activity POINTS were “use it or lose it” POINTS.  If you didn’t burn them off by the end of the day they were gone.  As such, you would use them first before using any Flex POINTS when you surpassed your daily POINT allotment.  With the new Momentum program that has reversed.  Your Flex POINTS are now the first thing to be used, and your Activity POINTS go into reserve and can be used when you have exhausted all of your FLEX Points.  To demonstrate why I think this is such a great change I have to explain my situation.  I weigh in on Thursday night and, like most people, I tend to do most of my recreational eating over the weekend.  If I had a particularly decadent weekend and went over my Flex POINTS allotment I would spend the rest of the week staring at a negative number in my e-Tools interface.  No matter how good I was for the rest of the week I could never make that number go away.  With this change I can actually use activity to counter that number and balance out the week!  This change also helps Weight Watchers members prepare for a big event, like Thanksgiving.  If you know the day is coming you can exercise in advance and then save those Activity POINTS for the big day.  When I first started the program they had a similar system where you could “bank” POINTS and it has been one of the things they got rid of that I missed the most.

The good folks over at Weight Watchers are constantly working to refine the program and make it easier to live with.  The changes they have introduced with the Momentum plan are really exciting to me personally and have lit a fire under me to re-dedicated myself towards losing those last few pounds.  If you’re looking for a lifestyle change that is easy to live with I highly encourage you to check out Weight Watchers, and if you’ve tried the program in the past and lost interest it might be a great time for you to check it out again and see if Momentum is right for you.