Weight Watchers |
Weight Watchers re-invents themselves (but same dog different fleas!Most of us remember Weight Watchers from the Jean Nidetch days. I first joined in 1972 just after they had dropped parts of the original "New York Obesity diet" which had helped the founder to lose a lot of weight. The original Weight Watchers diet included liver once a week, fish 3-5 times a week, all the veggies you could eat (as long as they were not on the forbidden list), fruits and a longer list of foods you COULDN'T eat than those foods you could eat. Offering accountability as well as support in meetings, it remained state of the art as dieting goes. I was an original Weight Watcher (I lost 35 lbs and kept off my weight for a year with the help of 8 cans of diet cola a day which masked the starvation fatigue but when I had to give up cola because I developed an allergy to it and started to feel serious fatigue, I dropped off, and re-gained 90 lbs). Weight Watchers has not stood still. It is a multi million dollar corporation today, (until recently was owned by the Heinz companies but now is an international corporation separate from the Heinz companies). Weight Watchers has a scientific advisory committee which includes some respected authorities in dieting and obesity, including Dr. Stanley Heshka and Dr. Xavier Pi-Sunyer. Weight Watchers now offers two programs - a program in which you count your caloric intake using "points" which takes in consideration the fibre and fat content of foods (not all calories are equal, it is thought). And the CORE program which is similar to Dr Phil's key 5 and Susan Powter's program as detailed in the "POLITICS OF STUPID". Basically the person is given a list of foods, mostly veggies and some lean meats and told they can "eat until they are full" without counting points. They are also given 35 "flex points" a week so they can occasionally add a treat. You count flex points for most white carbs like bread and also foods which are considered to have an "abuse potential" like peanut butter (which is a shame because it's a healthy food). Weight Watchers is the only diet which was proven effective at all in any studies. A Weight Watchers financed study by Stanley Heshka suggested that the average net weight loss over a 2 year period was only 11 lbs which is less than impressive. I found that even staying on the same program and continuing to count points, I had a rebound gain of 25 lbs (after a 27 lbs loss on the same amount of points and with exercising daily which I have done since 1994). Apparently recent research shows that the body will defend the highest weight achieved as it apparently is programmed to take that as the healthiest weight (at least this is true in some of us who are genetically obese). In fact another study showed that 95 percent regained all the weight they lost on any diet within 4 years. So keep in mind that the slim leaders (about 50 percent of them who don't regain and are "let go" by Weight Watchers) and slim clerks are in the 5 percent of diet success stories - which we'd all like to be in but many of us are not in that group. What might be the one of the best parts of the program are the ten "tools for living", cognitive therapeutic techniques for dealing with emotional eating. Unfortunately, few of the leaders teach these tools and the member is often left to learn it for themselves (so they don't take advantage of them). Today's re-invented Weight Watchers is STILL a low calorie diet and if you take their suggestions for the daily points total, you might get metabolic damage because unless you eat a lot of veggies, it's about 800-1200 calories a day, lower than the 1200-1400 calories specified in the old NY Obesity diet which was the Original Weight Watchers program. Maintenance number of points for most women is about 20-24 points a day - very low calorie. Bottom line, most folks cannot stay on Weight Watchers for longer than a few months perhaps a year. Among the leaders I knew, there was a 50 percent attrition rate (i.e. 50 percent were 'let go') due to weight gain. Because Weight Watchers has a very strong support system and offers a healthy diet (although there are folks who would argue that ANY low calorie diet cannot be healthy!), there are those who feel Weight Watchers is one of the most insidious sectors of the diet industry, because it appears to be so good and actually in reality, may be something totally different from what it appears to be. You feel so "right" going to meetings and meetings give you sort of an emotional "high", but a reading of my diary entries written even when I first re-joined Weight Watchers in 2002, evidenced that I was feeling a lot of depression and loss of self worth after I started attending meetings. I do remember after attending for 2 years, my referring to my attending a meeting as a "meeting with my parole officer" and then wondering why I had a parole officer since the only "crime" I had committed is having a genetically obese body. The regain with Weight Watchers for many of us, is bad (probably because of the low calorie diet causing metabolic damage). Even though this time, I did not diet NEARLY as drastically as they suggested, my weight loss was 27 lbs and my rebound gain was 51 lbs. If you have a gain while you have been "OP" or "On Program" they suddenly turn very nasty and tell you that couldn't possibly be true. I was almost asked to leave a couple of times. Weight Watchers judges "eligibility" by BMI which of course is underweight for most people. So we always had a certain percentage who did not require a diet, attending meetings and GOING on a diet. The bad thing about Weight Watchers is that it LOOKS so healthy and is advocated by the medical profession but is, just like all the other diets with all the same risks. You are very much encouraged to give away your fat clothing. That turns out to be a bad idea because should you ever regain (which most folks do) you are without clothing which makes things even more psychologically devastating. Finally Weight Watchers as a corporation has been known to get um... shall we say ... intense about even cheerleaders offering aids and points counting programs (they have shut down a few websites). As one leader told me "if Weight Watchers really worked for most people, they would go out of business (i.e. everyone would be at goal and a lifetime member and not paying for meetings" (that person was later 'released' for gaining weight). Weight Watchers links
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