Calorie Counting vs Weight Watchers

I promised I was going to do this last week, but then I got sidetracked with a little project I’ve been working on. It seems like I’m always working on a project. Which is odd because I’m not really the crafty sort. :p

At any rate, I’ve been thinking for a while about writing out my thoughts with regard to the difference between counting calories and counting Weight Watchers points, or PointsPlus, as they like to call them. (I don’t call them that simply because I think it takes too long and they’re really just using the term to differentiate this version of the plan from the one they had five years ago.) Before I get into the comparison, you should probably know my history with Weight Watchers.

I first joined WW back in 1988, when I was still 16 years old. My mom had joined, and since I was a chubby kid, she decided it would be a good idea for me to join with her.  I suppose they didn’t have the restrictions back then that they do now as far as teens on the program.  Or maybe it just didn’t matter, since it was my mother who signed me up.

Back then, they didn’t use points, but instead they used “exchanges.”  You got so many exchanges of a type of food each day. For instance, you might get five exchanges of protein, and three exchanges of bread, and two exchanges of dairy.  When you signed up, they gave you a free booklet that offered typical foods and their “exchange values.”  The book wasn’t very comprehensive, so of course you ended up buying the big, thick one that had all the foods known to man, and then you also bought the “eating out” book, and the “ethnic foods” book. And of course, you could always buy their food scale to help you weigh your food accurately, and their prepackaged foods that were already marked with the appropriate number of exchanges. Now that I think about it, it was a pretty good racket. :p

I lost a decent amount of weight on the program, maybe 25 pounds? I just remember that I started my senior year at a size 10, and my senior pictures, which were taken that fall, show me looking pretty skinny.

Wow, look at me…how cute was I? 😉

I stopped going to WW pretty much as soon as my senior year started, and by the time I graduated, I had gained back all that weight.  So, my graduation day photos are not quite as flattering.  :p.

I’m the only girl in the front row in the picture above, wearing the silver cap and gown. The boys on either side of me were looking in my lap because I had a hand-held electronic word game, very cutting-edge in 1989, and of course, we geeks in the front row were all fascinated by it. 😉

Walking out of the gym with all my honors and awards in hand.  Yes, I was a total geek…but it paid my way through college, so don’t knock it! 🙂

I believe it was around 1994 or 1995 that I joined WW again, and by that time, they had tossed out the “exchange” program for the new “Points” program.  (Note the capital P. Weight watchers seems to think they own the word “points,” I guess.) Now, instead of exchanges, every food item was worth a specified number of points. And of course, you needed a variety of books to know how many points were in each item. :/ On the bright side, vegetables didn’t have any points. Unfortunately, all the things that I actually LIKED to eat did. 😉 Still, it did seem easier than trying to track all the exchanges. It was basically just a game of addition and subtraction, and I can certainly do that.

I went back and forth on the points program with moderate success. I ended up losing enough weight to get me close to where I was in high school, though not quite there. I remember being a size 12 when I stood up in my best friends wedding in 1998.

I had actually ordered a size 16 dress for that wedding, but then I ended up losing weight before the dress came in. It turned out that another bridesmaid had gained some weight, and she and I ended up switching dresses, so that I ended up wearing a size 12. Now, don’t get me wrong, they did have to let it out a little bit, but it fit!

After that, though, I pretty much just let it all go and gave up on dieting. The following year, I was in another wedding, but this time, my dress was a size 20.

That was August 1999. Oh, and I also had pinkeye, which is why am wearing my glasses and not my contacts. God, I hate those wedding pictures. :p

In May 2000, I had to buy a size 22 bathing suit to go to Italy. At that point, I knew it was time to do something. I joined Weight Watchers again, and they were still using the Points program.   It hadn’t changed much, and I was able to slide right back into the habits I had created before. I attended a meeting near my work, and I found a leader I really liked. I made going to my meetings every week a priority, and after about 15 months, I had lost 50 pounds.

Then I had a baby…

I struggled with the baby weight for a couple of years.  I tried to go to meetings again, but having a young child, and a full-time job that required a long commute, made it just about impossible. It was in January 2004 when I discovered that there was a new online component to Weight Watchers. You could use the computer to track your food, and it would calculate everything for you. No more carrying around a paper tracker and lugging three different books to try to figure out how many points your meal was. Being a techno-geek, I was sold! By October 2004, I had lost almost 30 pounds, and was down to 145.

That was actually what I weighed when I graduated from high school, which was about 10 pounds more than what I weighed when I started my senior year. But I wasn’t about to complain!

I kept that weight off until July 2005…when I got pregnant again. :p it used to be that Weight wWatchers had a specific program for pregnant mothers. However, after what I assume was a rash of lawsuits, they nixed that program and determined that any woman who became pregnant had to go off the program. Thus, I stopped Weight Watchers until after my baby was born in February 2006.

By that time, I was really busy with a very cranky baby (which was a total shock; the first one had been an angel!), and finding the time to diet, even using online tools, was just impossible. This went on for about five years, actually. I actually kept up my eTools subscription for almost that entire time. Yes, that meant I was paying $13 a month for nothing. However, I kept it simply because I just always wanted to know, in the back of my mind, that if I was ready to recommit, it would be there and waiting for me. And I definitely needed it.

Sometime around 2009, I actually did cancel my subscription for a brief moment. Probably two months.  I was bummed at having to lose all my past weigh-in history, but I knew I needed to save some money, and it seemed like a wasteful expense. And then, about two months later, I decided I wanted to try to lose weight again, so I re-upped my subscription…for an extra four dollars a month. :/ On the bright side, they reactivated my old account, which meant I got to keep all my weight history.

That weight loss venture didn’t last very long, but from that point, I maintained the subscription even when I wasn’t actively using it. It was around Thanksgiving 2010 when they made the switch to the new PointsPlus program. I remember it being a fairly significant change at that time. Prior to PointsPlus, you were allowed to have a fraction of a point. For instance, you might have a serving size that equated to 2.5 points, and it would accept the fraction.  With PointsPlus, fractions were no longer allowed. I discovered pretty quickly that my favorite foods, like pasta, all went up in points, ostensibly to allow for the lack of fractionals. :/  Among the other changes brought by PointsPlus included the decrease of allowed daily points, but also…fruit was suddenly free! Where as before, a banana or an apple might be one or even two points, now they were suddenly free. Obviously, nothing is free, but as far as Weight Watchers was concerned, you could have most fruits and vegetables in abundance. The explanation was that they determined people were not eating enough fruit, because obviously if you’ve got two points left, and you could either spend them on a banana or a cookie, most people are going to choose a cookie. Well, OK, maybe not most people, but I think the people who are on Weight Watchers in the first place are probably going to be the one to choose the cookie. I know I would!

It was this PointsPlus program that was in effect when I finally decided to start my weight loss journey for the last time, back in November 2011. (Hey! I just hit my four year anniversary! Yay!)  This program definitely worked for me. I discovered that I DO like fruit when it’s “free,” and that the new plan offered me enough flexibility to lose the weight without starving. I also discovered the benefits of REALLY exercising. Seven months and forty pounds later…I made Lifetime.  That was the first time in all my adult years on the program that I’d actually accomplished it! I maintained at goal or just a touch above for about 3 years. After my first marathon in April 2014, I gained ten pounds, and I was unable to take it off using the program.

So why did I go into that whole long diatribe about my history with WW?  The reason is because I wanted to make sure you realize that I have had a life-long commitment to Weight Watchers, even when I wasn’t “fully” committed, and thus, veering away from the program wasn’t something I did on a whim.  After 20 years of familiarity, and nearly four years of almost perfect tracking (seriously, in that time, I could probably count on two hands the number of days I didn’t track), it was a real mind-shift for me to switch to something else.

However, when I did finally make the decision, I did it “whole hog.”  I didn’t choose to track both calories and Weight Watchers points when I made the change back in September.  I had briefly tried that a couple of years ago, when a nutritionist suggested I try tracking both to see how my eating habits looked when calories were used, but I hated it.  Tracking is hard enough…tracking twice is an exercise in frustration!

So now that I’ve counted calories for over 9 weeks, I can honestly say I’ve learned quite a bit. One big thing I learned is that I was eating way too much fruit.  Yes, fruit is good for you, but like pretty much anything, it’s only good in moderation.  I was eating a lot of fruit, especially this past summer when it was cheap and abundant, and I can say that I noticed a difference in how I felt. I just felt “heavy” and bloated all the time.  When I went to calorie-counting, I discovered that fruit has a lot of calories, and I eventually cut it out almost completely.  I might still eat it now and then, like if I’m out and it’s the best choice in front of me, but mostly I steer clear of it now.

Another thing I noticed is that I love me some sugar.  Well, that really didn’t come as a shock…I’ve always known that!  But just how MUCH I love it was surprising even to me.  Below is a chart of my sugar consumption over the last three months compared to the daily goal calculated by the My Fitness Pal app  (the goal was variable, depending on the exercise calories I might have earned).  Every bar below the line represents a percentage of how far OVER my goal I was.

Eeek.  I also discovered, to my shock, that I ingest way more sodium than I ever thought. I do eat processed foods for lunch most days, and that’s not going to change because they’re just too easy, but I HAVE started buying low-sodium versions of foods whenever I can. Before this calorie counting experiment, I would’ve told you, “Oh, I don’t eat much sodium.” But as it turned out, I do!

Another thing I learned was that I wasn’t really earning all the activity points I gave myself credit for. Yes, I run, and I run quite a bit, but I was adding in values for things that probably don’t burn quite as many calories. The MFP app doesn’t let you count activity like housework, strength training, or gardening towards your calories. While I definitely think those do require some effort, it probably isn’t burning very many calories in the grand scheme of things.

One big item that I came to realize was actually pointed out to me by my friend Katie. She also started calorie counting this year after doing Weight Watchers, and she pointed out on her blog that Weight Watchers does allow you to do some “legal cheating” with their points program. Because the point values weren’t down to the decimal, you could have a range of something, and still be within the allotted quantity. For example, I know that two-thirds a cup of non-fat Greek yogurt is the same points as three-quarters a cup of yogurt. So which one do you think I was going to have? I honestly never thought of that as cheating until Katie pointed out. The reality is, while I wasn’t cheating the program, I was cheating myself, in the fact that I wasn’t helping my weight-loss goals.

So, while you can’t cheat with calorie counting, there is the benefit that you do have exact measurements. Sometimes I would get frustrated because the Weight Watchers points program would penalize me for having less of something. For example, one of my beloved English muffins is worth three points. If I happen to have half a muffin, you would think that would be worth 1.5 points. However, as mentioned earlier, Weight Watchers doesn’t do half points anymore, so if I had half a muffin, it used up two points. And that didn’t seem fair! Especially when I only get 26 points in a day.

With calorie counting, an  English muffin is worth 120 calories. If I have half of a muffin, I’m only using up 60 calories. If I put 1 tablespoon of sugar in my coffee, it counts for 45 calories. If I put 2 teaspoons in, because I’m trying to cut back on sugar, it only counts as 30. I just feel like it’s more fair, and I don’t feel like I’m being penalized for trying to actually eat less of something.

Probably the biggest difference I noticed when doing calorie counting is the fact that I don’t have to remember a bunch of numbers.  After all those years of using the points program, I could rattle off the number of points of many foods pretty quickly. An English muffin is worth three points, a cup of pasta or a cup of rice is worth five points, a cup of fat free milk is worth two points…I could go on. The problem was, for the things that I don’t eat often, it was a real pain in the ass to try and figure out on a moment’s notice how many points it was. Yes, there’s a calculator that Weight Watchers has in its app that allows you to plug in the necessary figures that you would typically get from the nutritional notice on the back of the product, and then that will calculate the points for you. Sounds great, except you have to find those numbers, which is not always easy, and then you’re also hoping that you have cell service if you’re out and about.  Or, my least favorite experience, trying to decide between a variety of items, such as if I was standing in a gas station on the way home from a late hockey game and trying to decide between a bag of chips, a package of trail mix, or a granola bar.  I’d be standing there for five minutes trying to figure out which one had less points, while my husband was at the checkout waiting for me. :/ With calories, it’s pretty easy: just choose which one has less calories, as shown very easily right on the back!

So now that I told you what I think about calorie counting in general, let me give you some thoughts on the My Fitness Pal app. Besides Weight Watchers, about the only thing I can compare it to is SparkPeople, which I briefly toyed with a couple of years ago when I was trying calorie counting while doing Weight Watchers. What I like about the MFP app is that it is pretty easy to enter items. It remembers what you ate for meals in recent days and pulls them up immediately when you go to track for that meal, such as lunch or dinner. You can just check them off and add them all at once, or you can even choose to copy a full meal from a specific date. Since I eat the same thing for breakfast every morning, I do that all the time.

Finding foods is pretty easy, and the calories seem to be accurate, from what I can tell when comparing the MFP numbers with what I find on the back of packages. I find searching to be much easier in MFP then in either Weight Watchers were SparkPeople. SparkPeople tries to pull up matches while you type, and although that sounds like a great idea, it makes the process very slow. MFP also has little green checkmarks next to items that are “verified,” which makes me feel a little bit better that perhaps the data is truly accurate.

MFP does have ads, but they aren’t as in your face as the ones on SparkPeople. eTools from Weight Watchers doesn’t have ads, which it shouldn’t, since you’re paying up for it, but I won’t say it’s the best looking application. Now, I say that, but the truth is that Weight Watchers just completely redesigned their interface within the last few weeks. It looks completely different now than when I was using it several months ago! However, based on the number of angry comments in the community forum, and the length of the apologies they are posting on their site, I think they still have some bugs to work out. I know for a fact that I lost some data, but I was at least smart enough to go through the painful process of logging all my weight into Excel from the last 11 years when I first noticed that they were making changes. So I do at least still have those, although I am very disheartened to learn that I lost all my prior waist and hip measurements. :/  One thing I will say about MFP is that, while it isn’t very flashy, it’s very simple and clean-looking, and to me, as a designer, I prefer that.

So, those are all my thoughts on the difference between calorie counting and Weight Watchers, and the two electronic tracking tools they use.  You’ve heard all about how this change has affected my outlook on weight loss and my habits. But, you’re probably wondering how this change has reflected on the scale.  The truth: in three months of calorie counting, I have lost exactly 4.6 pounds. That doesn’t exactly sound encouraging, does it? However, you have to remember a couple of things: I started out wanting to lose about 7 or 8 pounds, so, although it is taking a while, I can at least say that I’m more than halfway there. But, besides the scale, I feel great! My clothes fit wonderfully, I have plenty of energy, I’m not feeling heavy or bloated anymore, and the best part:

I wore that shirt to church on Sunday!  I bought it when I was at my skinniest; it’s an extra small, and I haven’t fit into it in well over a year. Unfortunately, the size 4 pants I bought at the same time are probably going to need to be donated, because I don’t think I’ll ever fit into those again, but just wearing that shirt again after so long made me feel awesome!! 🙂

So, after three months of calorie counting, I’m going to say something that as recently as four months ago I would’ve told you I’d never say: I don’t have any desire to go back to Weight Watchers points program right now.  I really love the My Fitness pal App, and calorie counting in general.  It feels so much easier–and so much more accurate!  I’ve actually toyed with the idea of even paying for the premium version of MFP, because I like it so much.   I haven’t made the leap yet, simply because, other than removing the ads, I’m not sure what the benefit would be. But I definitely like how this has been working for me, and I see a lot of benefits from calorie counting that I just wasn’t getting with Weight Watchers.  I don’t want to sound negative about WW.  I’m not!  I don’t think I could have lost the weight without it.  The program has a lot of benefits, especially for people who have a lot of weight to lose. But now that I’m in maintenance and need to either stay the same or lose just a few pounds, I think calorie counting is a better solution for me.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have heard repeatedly that Weight Watchers is doing their annual “November/December” program change beginning this coming Sunday.  They’re touting it as “our biggest change in 50 years,” and from what I heard from my leaders at the last meeting, it is a pretty big change.  I won’t say they sounded positive about it… 😮  Of course, no one really likes change, right? 😉

So, that’s my comparison.  I hope you found it helpful, or at least, interesting!  Thanks so much for reading this very long post!