What I Wish I Knew My First Week on Weight Watchers: Advice for Newbies / Beginners

I had a terrible time my first couple of weeks on Weight Watchers because I couldn't figure out what to eat. The veterans must have a bunch of things they pick up without thinking about it, because if you ask, they tell you, "Oh, just poke around on the Weight Watchers website! There are great recipes! I love the chicken teriyaki with greens!" or "Flip through the guide! There are great ideas, organized by points!" or "Eat whatever you want! That's the great thing about WW! Just make sure you track everything!"

That last one is particularly bad advice, because if you do that, you've used up your points by the time you're done with lunch (or maybe before). The others are actually good advice, and true, but they don't help any when you get back from running errands at noon and you're starving and you don't want to fix poached salmon and roasted asparagus for lunch. That's not to say you shouldn't cook lunch from scratch, but sometimes--especially that first week--you just want to eat.

They didn't understand that I needed actual food recommendations, not just generalized advice. So, here you go, the foods I wish I'd known about my first week. I'm a newbie myself, just four months in, so take this with a grain of salt. Also, forgive the amateur photos, I don't have the patience to set up those gorgeous food shots.

- I've said elsewhere that I'm not a fan of wasting points on supermarket bread, but sometimes you need to get the sandwich filling from the plate to your mouth. Sara Lee Delightful works well for that, and it's one point per slice. Also, "light" english muffins are two or three points, depending on the brand. Compare either of those to my old favorite sandwich bread, which is five points per slice.

Sara Lee Delightful sandwich bread and
Thomas light english muffins

- What to put between your Sara Lee slices: deli turkey and canadian bacon are 1 point for 2 ounces, which is plenty for a sandwich. Turkey bacon is one point per slice. My go-to breakfast is a single slice of Sara Lee bread made into a half-sandwich with either deli turkey or canadian bacon. Thank the lord I love deli mustard because it's zero points and adds a lot of flavor.

- The single serve pack of StarKist Chunk Light tuna in water is ZERO points. How amazing is that? So you can add a tablespoon of light mayonnaise (1 point) and two pieces of bread and you're still at 3 points. You can stir in minced onion, carrot, or apple for extra flavor (zero points). Or you can add capers and a squeeze of lemon (also zero points) to go Mediterranean.

Progresso Light soup and a Chunk Light Tuna pouch

- More lunch ideas: If you don't have a problem with salt (and recent research has shown that not many people do), Progresso Light soups are good, easy choices, although be aware that there are two "servings" in a can. The chicken and vegetables with rosemary in the picture above (my favorite) is 2 points per serving, so four points for the can. Other brands of light soup are also good.

PB2, both flavors, and lightly salted rice cakes, also known
as edible styrofoam, but sometimes they serve a purpose

- PB2 is powdered peanut butter which has somehow magically had 85% of the fat removed. At our grocery store, it is on the top shelf over the regular peanut butter. Is it as good as real peanut butter? No. But it's not bad. Two tablespoons are one point (as opposed to three points for one tablespoon of regular PB). You stir a tablespoon of water into two tablespoons of the powder and you have peanut butter (use a little extra water so it spreads easier). It also comes in chocolate, which is-- astoundingly-- the same number of points. My favorite late afternoon snack at the moment is a plain rice cake (1 point) spread with two tablespoons of chocolate PB2 (1 point), topped with banana slices (zero points). It's actually pretty dang good.

- More snack ideas. I really, really needed something I could carry in my purse for when I'm out running around. WW has some mini granola bars that are two points, but they're hella expensive and they're about a bite and a half. I've finally settled on Nature Valley Peanut Butter Dark Chocolate Protein bars. They're six points, which is a lot, but they're relatively inexpensive, they're easy to carry, and they have 10 g of protein and only 6 g of sugar. If you're having a craving for something sweet, they do the job without blowing 15 points on a small hot fudge sundae from Dairy Queen (which I have also done, and sometimes it's worth it). There are lots of other options-- I spent about fifteen minutes in front of the granola bar section at the grocery store scanning bar codes in the WW app to find one that I liked.

Nature Valley protein bars and Pop Secret 94% fat free popcorn

Also in the picture above: 94% fat free microwave popcorn is 2 points for 3 cups of popped corn. I ate about five gallons of popcorn my first week because I didn't know what else to eat.

- And check this out. If you ate everything on the plate pictured below, it would be ZERO POINTS, and of course that goes for almost all fruits and vegetables eaten without any added sugar or fat. (The only exceptions I know of are avocados, corn, potatoes, and sweet potatoes.) This is my favorite thing about weight watchers. If I put out a plate of cherry tomatoes, baby carrots, broccoli florets, clementines, etc, not only do I eat them instead of other snacks, the rest of my family does, too. They don't need to lose weight but it never hurts to eat your veggies.

I know. If I were a real blogger I would have
found a banana that looked more appetizing. 

- If you can't eat raw veggies without dipping them in something, try Opa Greek Yogurt salad dressings (with the refrigerated salad dressings in the produce section). They have a definite plain yogurt tang, but that's OK with me. The Feta Dill flavor is one point for two tablespoons. Yogurt can be a good snack, too, as long as you check carefully-- my old favorite (Dannon Cherry Orchard) is eight points, but various different "light" and non-fat greek yogurts are 3-5 points per serving. The Oikos Triple Zero shown in the picture is sweetened with Stevia, which has kind of a funny taste but is only 3 points.

- Late evening hot beverage. Having a cup of decaf coffee or herbal tea about an hour before I go to bed has saved me from many an evening snacking binge. I doctor it up with a quarter cup of soymilk (1 point) and a half teaspoon of maple sugar (0 points) and it is a life saver.

One more little trick. On the Weight Watchers app, if you pull up an item-- say deli turkey-- there is a default serving size. For deli turkey, it is two ounces. But if you edit the serving size, you sometimes discover that the next size up is still the same number of points-- three ounces of deli turkey is still one point. It's surprising how often that works. That's how I know that 94% fat free popcorn is two points for three cups, even though if you pull it up on the app, it says two cups are two points. Obscure WW knowledge.

So, hope that is helpful. And may we all persevere, even after we screw up and have to forgive ourselves and get back to it, which is where I am right now. I got halfway to my goal and got lazy, but I'm not giving up. I know a few of you are also in WW, any tips to add? 

7ToF: the world's gonna wake up and see / Baltimore and me

1. Since I seem to have lost my enthusiasm for fiction these days, I've been reading memoirs. There are so many good ones out there you could read forever and not run out. When I get to the end of my current TBR list, I'll pass along the best ones. If you've got any recommendations, let me know. My favorite so far is Indian Creek Chronicles by Pete Fromm, the story of the winter he spent 40 miles from a paved road babysitting a couple million salmon eggs. Or maybe Upstairs at the White House, written by the guy who was the chief usher at the White House from Roosevelt to Nixon.

2. Some of you may remember my stories from back in the 90s when I was involved in several women's circles that were exploring feminist spirituality (this post, for example). It's a phase of my life that I'm not really planning on revisiting, but there was some genuine searching going on, and I loved those women and our group meetings. One of the things I loved most was the smell. You would walk in and there was this spicy scent, maybe a little bit of sandalwood, a little patchouli, a little cinnamon, but I could never find it when I was standing in front of the incense section of our tiny new age store. I looked for it off and on for years.

3. A couple of days before we left on our trip, I was wandering around our local beauty supply store looking for sample sizes of various toiletries for our travels. I've heard about Kenra hairspray for a long time--in my mind it's the original fancy, expensive hairspray, and I've heard many women swear by it-- but I'd never tried it because it's so expensive. But it was on sale, and the trial size was $7, so I thought what the hell, and bought it. I pulled it out of my bag in Mexico and sprayed it on, and OMG, there was that scent. The smell of 90s New Age feminism that I'd been looking for all those years was hairspray. Made my week.

(for the record, it doesn't work as well as the cheaper stuff I get at Target, but it does smell better.)

The rest of these are my Weight Watchers update, move on all ye who are not interested.

4. So, Weight Watchers. Still doing it, still working, although slowly. I can't tell you how happy I am about this. Other than post-pregnancy, I've never successfully lost more than about three pounds in my life. I only joined WW as a last-ditch effort, one final thing to try before I gave up and moved on to size 16. But after the first couple of weeks (which were admittedly awful), it hasn't been bad, and it's working. I've been losing a half a pound to a couple of pounds a week for three months now (with, admittedly, the occasional week where I go up a half pound). I'm more than halfway to my goal.

5. The main thing I've learned is that I eat too much. I live with two athletes, guys who can eat massive amounts of food without gaining weight, because they exercise like crazy-- Dean is a runner/skier/tennis player/hiker/biker, MadMax is a skier/lifter/thrower. I never ate anywhere close to as much as they did, so I didn't think I ate all that much. But once my body adjusted to the new way of eating, I realized that I was eating way less than I had been before and not really feeling hungry.

6. My one big complaint about the program is --and I think this is probably true of most diet programs-- it's really easy to start seeing food as the enemy. That's not built into the program-- you can eat whatever you want on WW, as long as you account for it in your points. But there's certainly a flavor of that in some of the conversations that happen at meetings.

I'm not going there. Food is not the enemy. I don't want to get to the point where I can't enjoy food, where I panic at the idea of gaining a pound or two on vacation, or can't eat a piece of my own birthday cake, or feel bad about having a margarita with my friends. For all of human history, food has been part of human celebrations, part of the joy of socializing with people you love, part of the celebration of being on a bountiful planet with amazing resources. I need to lose some weight, but I don't ever want to get to the point where I can't enjoy good food. I just needed to cut out the crap, eat nutrient dense food, and stop stuffing myself (which I didn't even know I was doing, see #5.)

7. I'm getting up on a soapbox here, but I really think this is important. I think it's why so many of the people who were so vocally enthusiastic about the program back in January are no longer there. If you deny yourself, deny yourself, deny yourself, eventually you're going to binge and/or quit. On the other hand, if I eat healthy most of the time, I seem to do just fine if I have the occasional bowl of ice cream, or a piece of bread out of the bread basket at a good restaurant (my theory on bread-- if it's good, and fresh, I'm eating it. It's the boring, supermarket stuff I can live without).

Word geek extra: Google tells me "eat healthy" is now considered correct, even though "healthy" is an adjective and it's being used as an adverb. I know I'm not the only grammar goddess around here, so I'm feeling a bit defensive. I did have "eat healthily" in the previous paragraph, but changed it because The Google says it's OK. :-)

So, packing up my soapbox.... Sorry to rant at you. Have a great weekend, and celebrate spring with some good food. And a margarita.

7ToF: Weight Watchers edition

Obviously I don't have much to say these days since I missed posting on Tuesday again this week. Not sure when I'll get back to it. Sometimes when I'm driving around I think of half a dozen post ideas, other times my brain is a barren desert. I'm headed to Texas in a couple of weeks for my mom's 80th birthday, maybe that will get me back in writing mode.

The rest of this is about Weight Watchers, now that I've been going for a month. You've been warned. If you're new, you missed all the posts in my old blog about my objections to our culture's obsession with thin-ness, and my absolute conviction that no one except you can tell whether or not your weight is healthy for your body and your life.

I won't re-hash all that right now, I just wanted to make it clear that I'm only doing this because a) I want to be able to keep up with my active family, and b) I'm starting to have some joint problems that I suspect will clear up if I lose a bit of weight. If I hit my goal, I will still be well above the culturally deemed acceptable weight for my height--no worries that I'm going to be fashionably thin, because that's never happening again.

OK. Now that we've got that out of the way.

1. The first question people ask me when I tell them I joined Weight Watchers is if I have to eat their food all the time. The short answer is no. I think you can buy various different snacks that are Weight Watchers brand, but I've never tried any of them. I fix my own food and look things up when I'm at a restaurant.

2. Do I go to the meetings? Yes, I do. The meetings are a mixed bag. On the plus side, they're probably the main reason why I stuck with the plan when I wanted to quit early on. Even though no one would know if I utterly screwed up one week (there is a weigh-in, but it's not public and no one looks at what you ate), still the embarrassment factor of quitting so soon after I started kept me from throwing in the towel. Our leader is upbeat and positive, even a little snarky occasionally, without being overly cheerleader-ish. I have to confess that the meetings can be kind of fun. There's lots of laughter and friendliness and you learn some good tips.

On the negative side, though, it is 45 minutes of listening to talk about food and weight loss and dieting, which is really difficult for me to sit through sometimes. Some of the members are absurdly enthusiastic, which makes me roll my eyes. But in their defense, WW has given them a program that works and some have lost vast quantities of weight using it. I would probably be a bit of a fanatic, too.

3. How does the point system work? You get a certain number of points per day based on your height and weight and how much you want to lose. You also get a set number of weekly points, which you can use for extras. You can divide up the weekly points to get a few extra points each day, or you can save them up and use them to splurge. One woman said that she uses her weekly points for a nightly glass of wine.

You could be extra exemplary and never use your weekly points--apparently that's what a lot of people do-- but that's never going to be me. The second week when I was about to quit, I still had most of my weekly points, so I went to a bakery and bought two 4" peanut butter chocolate chip cookies and ate them both sitting in the car (they were fabulous). I had enough points to do it, it kept me sane, and I still lost a pound that week. That's what keeps me going -- if I keep within my points, so far the system has worked, even if I use my points for stuff that is not at all diet-ish.

4. The good parts about the points system: Pretty much all fruits and vegetables--eaten without added sugar or fat-- are zero points. So if you get hungry, you can have a banana or an apple or a handful of sugar snap peas (or all three) and it doesn't count. The only exception I know of is avocados, which are crazy high points. (Disappointing, because I love avocados.) After a few weeks, you become adept at knowing a handful of low-point foods that work for you so you're rarely without something you can eat, even if you're down to one or two points at the end of the day.

5. The bad part about the points system: You end up chasing after foods that are low points rather than figuring out what you want to eat or what is healthy to eat. For example, there's a powdered de-fatted peanut butter called PB2 that I've been using in smoothies for couple of years now, but I would never have eaten it by itself (you add water to make it into a peanut butter-ish substance). But I do now, because PB2 is 1 point for two tablespoons, and real peanut butter is three points for one tablespoon. Also, many of my favorite go-to quick foods (Kind bars! I miss you, Kind bars!) are off-limits for now because they're so many points. You start choosing your food based on the points rather than any other consideration.

6. But you know what? A few weeks in, once you get the hang of it, you realize that the points sort of make sense. They're based on total calories, with points added for sugar and saturated fat, and points reduced for protein. If you stick to your points, you lose weight. I suppose the literal truth is that for the most part, things are low points because they are low calorie, but while I'm absolutely opposed to counting calories, for some reason this doesn't bother me so much. Maybe because of the freebie fruits and veggies-- there's always something you can eat.

7. The best advice I received (thanks, Mary!) before I joined: when you register, don't set a huge weight-loss goal. First of all, you'll hit your goal sooner, and when you do, you become a "lifetime" member and Weight Watchers is free thereafter. Secondly, the higher the number of pounds you want to lose, the lower your daily points total (I think. I haven't actually researched that, it's just my impression from listening to the talk around me at meetings.) Oprah made a big deal this past week saying that she had lost 26 lbs while eating bread every day, which surprised me. I've eaten bread every day, too, and it never occurred to me that I couldn't, but maybe I have a fairly high points allowance.

So there you go. After only a month, I'm hardly an expert, but I'm starting to feel a tiny bit confident that I can reach my goal, and I was completely demoralized by my weight before I started. That's a plus.

p.s. The point system was completely overhauled a couple of months ago, and many of the people who have been in WW for a long time hate the new system. I can't compare them because I joined after the new system started. The new system is working for me.

So....I joined weight watchers.

I wasn't going to tell you about joining weight watchers until after I'd been through the first month, but let's face it-- it's January and I haven't read a good book in a couple of months and if I don't write about this, I have nothing to write about.

I joined online Sunday night after New Year's, and went to my first meeting that Wednesday. I've never been a huge fan of New Year's resolutions, but I had given myself until the end of December to find a way to lose the weight on my own. Which didn't happen.

I thought maybe I should just take another blogging break rather than subject you to my musings/thoughts/rants about points and food tracking. But I finally decided, as I always do, that you don't have to read it. I put "weight watchers" right up there in the post title so you can click away if it's not a topic that interests you. I'd probably do the same if our positions were reversed.

I've thought for several years now that if I couldn't manage my weight loss on my own, I'd try Weight Watchers. Mainly because I know several people who have had good success with it (some of whom read here). But two things kept me from signing up: one, I was so sure I could manage it on my own; and two, I hate tracking what I eat. 

The first thing--I was so sure I could lose the weight myself-- has proven to be abundantly false. I have more or less figured out how to maintain, to stop the upward creep, but I have not managed to lose more than 2-3 pounds on my own. (For those of you who are new, I gained about 20 pounds a few years ago when I was in grad school and went through menopause at about the same time, on top of already being a bit on the plump side.)

The second thing--that I hate tracking what I eat-- is trickier. I've done it (tracking) several times before, and although I start out with enthusiasm, in a couple of weeks I'm playing all kinds of mind games with it and it completely backfires. I end up mentally arguing with the tracking, and losing touch with the idea of developing better eating habits. If there were mind games at the Olympics, I would win the gold medal in a flash. I am terrific at mind games.

But that ended up being a non-issue because WW has a new plan that doesn't require food tracking. I haven't tried it yet--I can manage the tracking for the first couple of weeks, so I thought I'd try the "Smart Points" plan for awhile until I adjust to the new eating style. But I'll probably switch over to the no-tracking system eventually.

I'm not saying anything about the results, maybe never will, because TMI. But I'm hoping the fact that I pre-paid three months will mean I stick with it at least that long. Stay tuned.