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Diet advice based on real
world personal experience!
“Weight
Watchers
Just Didn’t Work For Me
&
Unfortunately,
It
Likely Won’t Work for You Either!”
My Weight
Watchers
Experience
What you’ll
find in this open letter is information that will help you better
understand the Weight Watchers approach to losing weight and my
experience with
it. I wish I had this information before I spent my hard earned money
on Weight Watchers. It's my hope that you will find
my
experiences and my recommendation to be of
great value as
you evaluate your weight loss options.
Hi there.
My name is
Jessica Seymour.
At the time I'm
writing this, I'm 38 years
young and have a
fantastic family of 5 including Craig my handsome hubby, and our 3 boys
- Conner, Alexander, and Trent. That's us below in
a recent picture.
I've been
pretty active and
physically fit for most of my life and didn't really have weight issues
until I gave birth to our first son Trent just over 5 years ago.
A year after giving birth to Trent, I still weighed 173 pounds and I
was so embarrassed about how much I weighed that I knew I had to do
something about it.
The extra
weight made my sleep fitful, my ankles
would swell up, and I would get headaches daily. Unfortunately though,
my body had so many aches and pains that I couldn’t find the energy or
will power to be more physically active, so I had to focus my efforts
on diet.
My first
choice (because they make the food look so good in their
ads) was to try the Nutrisystem
Meal Plan program but
I should have known it wouldn't be that easy. My Nutrisystem
experience proved to be a
short lived, eye opening experiment I’ll just call; “Can Guess what
you’re eating now?” Read about it here.
I then joined
Jenny
Craig, but
that turned out to be a huge mistake for a number of reasons which you
can read all about here.
About six
months after my Jenny Craig fiasco,
I decided to give dieting another shot and signed up for Weight
Watchers at the urging of a good friend whose father had seen good
results with it. You can learn more about my unsuccessful Weight
Watchers
experience further on down this page.
The good news
is that at the time of writing letter, I weigh in at a healthy
and happy 128 pounds, I've lost my belly and most of my
butt and have maintained this weight within a
couple of pounds for over two years now.
This despite
my lack of success with Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and
Nutrisystem.
My secret
weapon is a comprehensive weight loss program that uses a unique
Calorie Shifting approach, But
before we get to what is working for me, please take a few minutes to
read about my experience with Weight Watchers.
About Weight Watchers…
Founded in the early 1960's by Jean Nidetch,
Weight Watchers runs one of the most popular weight loss programs in
the world. The program is based on reducing the number of calories you
eat each day. But rather than count calories, you use weight watchers
points.
A Weight
Watchers Shepherd's Pie, for example,
contains 241 calories — the equivalent of 4.5 points. No foods are
forbidden, although you're only allowed a certain number of points each
day. Since it began, Weight Watchers International has helped millions
of people worldwide to lose weight. However, the weight watchers points
system ignores several nutrients that are important for anyone wanting
to lose weight and keep it off for good.
Weight
watchers points… The higher the
calories in a food serving, the more points are in there. Numbers in
the low tens are easier for people to deal with than the numbers in the
thousands which calorie counting involves. Most dieters follow the
weight watchers points program by joining a class, where they're
weighed
each week, meet other dieters, and receive support and advice from the
class organizer.
For people
who want to lose
weight without
the hassle of weighing food or learning about good nutrition, the
weight watchers points system is reasonably effective. Not only is it
based on the main "law" of successful weight loss — eating fewer
calories than you burn — the program incorporates several techniques
proven to make losing weight easier, such as keeping a written record
of what you eat.
My experience
with Weight Watchers…
What excited me about Weight Watchers is the
fact that you have 2 options to choose from, neither of which requires
you to purchase expensive, bland, pre-packaged foods from Weight
Watchers. The two program options to choose from are the Flex Plan and
the Core Plan. I chose the Flex Plan because you can eat whatever you
want, which works well for me because I have to cook every day for my
family and it’s just more practical if I can eat what they eat, when
they eat. The downside is that you have to watch portion size very
carefully and keep tabs in your food journal. Sounds easier than it is
in practice, as I learned, and it can be a real pain in the butt.
Their other system is called the Core Plan. The
Core Plan does not require a food journal or recording the Points
values of your food. It does however require that you eat from a
limited list of foods that have a low risk of abuse. You are supposed
to eat these foods until you feel satisfied, not full. That’s a pretty
fine line for me, so another reason why I chose to follow the Flex
Plan.
The good news…
I set a goal
that I would get to buy a new article of clothing for every 5 lbs I
lost and it was great motivation for me. I lost about 2 pounds a week
for the first 10 weeks while I was faithful, followed the plan and went
to the meetings.
The bad news…
For me the whole Weight Watchers environment was a
love – hate thing. Being part of the weight Watchers community was
inspiring in the beginning. But after two months on the program, I
found that being weighed in front of others resulted in a “success” or
“failure” tag that I wore on my sleeve for the following week. I also
found that when I went to meetings — and I was lucky to have some of
the best leaders ever — I got caught up in the “lost weight = good
week” and “stayed the same (or god forbid if I gained a pound) = bad
week” mentality.
Ultimately, it turned out that
as much as I disliked keeping that food journal, I disliked the
meetings even more. I didn’t like the time they took me away from my
family. I found them repetitive, boring and cheesy.
The results...
I was active in Weight Watchers for
about 6 months in total. Even though I was well short of my goal of
losing 40 pounds in one year, I did manage to keep the 20 pounds off
for the entire year.
My experience demonstrates that
Weight Watchers can be successful for those people that are
willing to commit to a lifestyle change approach to weight loss. Weight
Watchers provides lots of support, expertise and motivation if
you're willing to work their plan. You have to commit to it or you’ll
fall back into your old comfortable routines like I did. I stopped
tracking my food in the food journal, I went to fewer and fewer
meetings and after my sixth month anniversary of joining I admitted to
myself that Weight Watchers wasn’t a good weight loss option for me and
I officially quit.
3
Key Learning’s…
My personal
recommendation…
Ultimately the downfall for me with Weight Watchers was more about me
than the program, as I know it has worked wonders for many people.
The flip side of that coin is that I also know that it has failed for
at least as many people for many differant reasons - some of which I
fell victim to myself and which I have overviewed above.
Weight Watchers proved to be a program that I couldn't live with as I
didn't have the will-power to make it work within my lifestyle.
As a result I chose to move on.
The key point for you to consider when assessing if Weight Watchers is
a suitable weight loss program for yourself is to ensure that you fully
understand the demands of the program and then ask yourself... Can I
truly commit to Weight Watchers and make it work within my
lifestyle?
If your answer is YES... then I urge you to give it a shot and I wish
you the best of luck.
If your answer is NO, or if you're unsure... then I urge you to
consider the weight loss program that I eventually found after much
trial and error.
The program that has worked wonders for me and so many others is
called “
Fat
Loss For Idiots”.
As the name
implies, the “
Fat
Loss For Idiots” program really
is simple and it's also very inexpensive when compared to the other big
name diet options out there - But
don't let that fool you because it's
also extremely effective.
- A big
positive is that it works
without you needing to
radically change your lifestyle.
- It uses a
unique but simple approach called Calorie Shifting
which teaches you
how and when
to eat in order to turn your body into a fat burning furnace.
- It's convenient
because you eat
real food, that tastes great and that you buy at your local grocery
store for reasonable prices.
- You won't be
tempted to cheat because you eat 4-6
times per day, and NEVER feel hungry.
I'm
not
suggesting
this is an eat anything you like, as much as you like plan...but it
really is almost effortless, and the results are amazing!
You'll
change
your eating habits for life without even really trying.
That,
combined
with a real simple cardio plan worked wonders for me.
Ultimately,
I
guess I never really went on a "diet". I just changed my approach to
eating for the better, which helped me increase my energy and lose a
few pounds quickly, which enabled me to become more physically active.
It worked so
well, that my husband tried the “diet
thing” again and had
even better success than I did! Together, we reached our goal weights
and have been able to maintain it.
It's changed
our
lives and I'm certain that if you give it a fair shot, it will change
yours too!
Best of
luck, and
please be sure to
contact us to let us know about your success!!!
Yours
sincerely,
J.Seymour
Jessica
M. Seymour
Jessica(at)Diet-411.com
www.Diet-411.com
P.S.
You can
Click Here to learn
more about
Calorie Shifting to lose
weight.
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