This year, one of my goals is to lose weight and increase my fitness levels.
It’s something I want to do for myself and I haven’t shared too much on here about it because I don’t want anyone to think I’m pushing that people should lose weight. Everyone should do exactly what they want to do and for me, I want to be healthier and feel better about myself and this is the start of that!
(Also, I wrote this at the start of January just after I deleted the Weight Watchers app on my phone but didn’t publish it until now as I thought I’d look like a proper fool if I’d gone back to using My Fitness Pal to track my food and exercise and didn’t lose weight 😂)
At the start of the year, I was scrolling through Instagram when I found an advert offering me a free 12-month subscription to Weight Watchers because of where I lived which first of all, I should say that however this is funded, I think it’s such a fantastic initiative! Weight Watchers might be for me personally but that’s not to say it doesn’t work for other people and a free 12 weeks’ worth of membership will no doubt help some people make some amazing changes in their lives.
I filled in a form which took about two minutes and a day later, I was emailed all the information on how to sign up and get logged into the website and the app. It was literally that simple to join with no payment details required at any point so there’s genuinely no obligation to continue after the initial 12 weeks.
The first thing I had to do when I was all logged in and signed up was to answer a few questions about my food preferences and I was given my list of zero point foods, which are basically the foods I can eat without counting or measuring and that was the point I started to worry that I was going to struggle to lose weight following this plan. This was my first list – well the first one I was happy with – the first one, I gave me avocado and porridge oats because of the way that I answered and I quickly realised how the questions worked so I went back and answered a bit differently and got the below…
You’d think it was naughty to answer the questions with an end goal in mind but it’s apparently absolutely OK to change your choices as often as you want to for no reason other than you fancy a change. I decided I’d not really eat anything from the beans category so I went back and answered again and got this list which I decided to settle with.
Also, on the subject of avocado being a zero point food, I just don’t get it!
Anyway, armed with my zero point food list and my allowance of 20 Personal Points a day (with 24 random extra points to use through the week when I needed some extra), I was ready to go and ready to start my journey.
Day one was easy! I found it really easy to log all of my food, water and exercise on the app and was pleased to see that I even earned some extra points for drinking water, doing exercise (you can link your Fitbit and everything) and even eating my vegetables I ended the day feeling full and pleased with myself. 😂
I started day two the same way I finished the first day feeling motivated and ready to go and even made myself a lovely veggie soup for lunch. I input all the ingredients into the app and got some extra points added to my daily total because the soup was filled with good vegetables but then I got distracted by a phone call halfway through so I only ate half of it. I updated the app to reflect the quantity I’d actually eaten and they took the bonus points back – so I ate less and got punished.
That kind of got me thinking about how it all worked and whether it was for me or not so I decided to track my previous day’s food in My Fitness Pal to see how many calories I’d actually eaten. I was (although I shouldn’t have been) quite shocked when I worked out that I’d actually eaten around 600 calories more than I usually did when I wasn’t thinking I could eat all these ‘free foods’.
The fact is that the only way to lose weight is to eat fewer calories than you use.
That’s literally the only way to do it and although I get that Weight Watchers works for some people as they’ll end their days doing exactly that but I just don’t seem to be able to do that at the moment. Telling me something is OK to eat as much as I want with no measuring or limits just isn’t going to work for me personally.
I tried to keep going after I’d discovered how many calories I’d eaten with my zero point foods the day before but I was then thinking how much is too much of these foods and not enjoying them when I was eating them. I don’t want to have an unhealthy relationship with food and be questioning everything I eat, even while I’m trying to lose weight so I made a snap decision after my tea on day two and deleted the app from my phone.
I went back to My Fitness Pal and haven’t looked back!
(I know I didn’t give it much time and there’ll be lots I didn’t understand or take the time to learn about Weight Watchers – if it works for you and you’re happy with it then that’s all that matters. 😍 )
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