The Blog of Harald

Well, Weight Watchers appears to be working for me. 6 weeks, 12.6 pounds weight loss; see the link or the graph in the sidebar.

I like the system. It’s simple enough to carry around in my head. It’s not a “fad” diet, so there are no food restrictions; anything goes as long as it fits into my daily points allottment. This cannot be under-emphasized: the combination of knowing which foods are “expensive”, combined with the ability to plan in advance for those expensive foods, is what is working for me.

I’m a geek; systems like this appeal to my orderly mind. With data, useful decisions can be made; guessing and waving-of-hands wasn’t working for me. And data is everywhere; Weight Watchers publishes books; lots of websites publish recipes; and the USDA Nutritional Database is online! In fact, I have a copy of the database, combined with a search engine that calculates points. (No link, sorry; it’s password protected so that they don’t send their lawyers after me :-).

I joined the At Work program at Lombard, where my friend Gerry works. That’s important; it’s a 5 minute walk from my office, and I go at lunch time instead of in the evening when I’m usually busy. I’m pretty sure that if I had to switch to evening meetings near my home, I’d stop going because of the inconvenience factor (even though the closest meeting is about a 15 minute walk from my house :-).

I can get by without the motivational stuff that is discussed in meetings; I internalised most of that stuff years ago, as part of other changes in my life. On the other hand, the Weight Watchers scale is accurate. That lets me measure steady weight loss, which is part of my incentive to stay on program. With the best personal scale I’ve found so far, I could vary my weight by 5 pounds just by leaning forwards or backwards. Most of them probably work ok, but it’s impossible to measure a 0.4 pound loss on those things.

(Anyone who has a good scale recommendation, send me e-mail. :-)

I also find the meetings useful for some of the tips exchanged between the group, but as a ‘netizen I can get those online, too.

Anyway, overall I’m quite happy with the program. It’s is worthwhile investment, in my humble opinion.