Free Weight Watchers

Weight Watchers has an offer this week for free registration. I think that usually costs about $35 to register, so that's a pretty good deal if you've ever wanted to try this weight loss program. I've done it about three times, and so I'm a life time member. That means I can join back up at any time without the registration fee, just have have to pay the weekly weigh-in fee, and it's usually discounted a dollar or two for life timers.

Obviously, since I gained all my weight back more than once after going through this program, it didn't work for me, but I don't totally discount it either. In fact, I know that if I were to go back I could probably get all this weight off in about three to four months. However, then I'd be back at the same problem - keeping it off.

Their new ad campaign says "Be an After. Stay an After," suggesting that you'll get it off and keep it off, but on that, at least for me, I think is where WW does not deliver. After I got it off, each time I was with their program, the support for keeping it off was lacking. And, I soon realized that it really just meant eating about 1200 calories a day forever, and that was something I couldn't do. So, their idea of "keeping it off" is keeping yourself on an extremely low-calorie diet for the rest of your life. I don't need to pay someone to tell me that works - duh.

On the up side, I learned a lot on the WW program, especially about food. Because I'd been so thin most of life, I never thought much about what I ate. If I liked it, I ate it; if I didn't like it, I didn't. Nutrition? Calories? Carbs? What where those? So, I do credit WW with teaching me about food.

The WW program is really geared for people who need to lose a lot of weight, 50 to 100+ lbs, and who have issues with food. Most of the meetings I went to dealt with very heavy people talking about weird things like hiding food in their closets. Or, I used to love it when they'd complain because they couldn't eat all the food they needed to on the WW Points System. Yeah, here I was literally starving for the first three weeks with me 20 points (I got used to being hungry some how for awhile after that), and these people with their 50 points had too much food - wa wa - poor babies.

So, those are my issues with this program. It works in the short term. I learned a lot. But it's not something most people can do forever, at least that's my opinion.