Weight Watchers
Overview
Weight Watchers is perhaps the world’s most famous weight loss club, spawning the trend for group weigh-ins when it launched in 1963. Everything you put in your gob is given a ProPoints value based on its protein, fat, carb and fibre content and you can eat whatever you like as long as you can fit it into your personal points allowance, which decreases as you lose weight. You also get 49 weekly ProPoints on top of your daily allowance to spend as you like.
You can also opt to follow the Filling & Healthy program where you choose freely from a list of unlimited food and use 49 points spread across the week for everything that’s not on the list, which can be handy when you’re not in the mood to measure out every single grain of rice you eat.
Typical daily menu:
Breakfast: Bacon, 2 slices brown bread, 2 eggs and beans
Lunch: Couscous with pork, broccoli and peppers. A packet of Quavers and a banana.
Dinner: Filo pie with creamy chicken and leek filling. A bottle of beer and a Crunchie.
Pros
- You can eat whatever you like. Fancy a Twix? Have a Twix! As long as you’ve got the points available, you can have whatever you like.
- It’s flexible. Because you get 49 bonus points you can still go out to restaurants, still have a takeaway on a Friday night, still go out for 7 pints with mates and still lose weight.
- You get the support of a group and leader. If you’re having a bad week you can ask the advice of the group leader, who is always someone who has lost weight using Weight Watchers and is maintaining after reaching their weight loss goal.
Cons
- You have to remember to measure and count. The only ‘free’ foods on Weight Watchers are fruit and most veg – everything else has to be counted and that means measuring and tracking everything you eat, which can be tedious.
- You have to pay monthly. For access to the mobile app, website and meetings you have to pay around £20 a month which will certainly add up if you’ve got a lot of weight to lose. Otherwise there’s no legit way to work out ProPoints.
- Attending a group can be hard for men. Although Weight Watchers are making an effort to provide more support to men, the vast majority of leaders and members are women. So that means talks about how periods affect weight loss and, inevitably, how their husbands wind them up so they eat biscuits. That might be for you, but it might not.