Warning! What follows is a lot of geeky numerical comparisons, including some excessively complicated (but highly colorful!) Excel charts. If this kind of stuff makes you want to run from the room screaming…I highly suggest you keep scrolling. 😉 But if you, like me, are curious to see how the new Weight Watchers Smart Points program compared to a pretty standard calorie counting regimen, read on, my friend!
As a reminder, I am a current Weight Watchers member who has been Lifetime since June 2012. In 2014, after running my first marathon, I gained about 10 pounds from my self-chosen goal weight range (115-117). I spent a year trying to get back to goal using the Weight Watchers program before deciding to try something different (calorie-counting) in September 2015. Prior to that time, I had never counted calories, and in fact, had never used any other weight loss program except Weight Watchers (which I had followed on and off for over 20 years before finally finding success in 2011-12).
When I switched to calorie counting, I experimented with an acceptable calorie goal for the first few weeks, before finally settling on 1300 per day, plus whatever extra calories I earned through running. I also decided to adjust my goal weight to 120, which I felt was probably more realistic for me than 115. Using calorie counting, I was able to get to that goal weight right before Christmas, and although the holidays did do a number on me, I’ve stayed pretty close to that weight, weighing in at 120.8 just this past Monday.This week marks four months of calorie counting, and in that time, I have not followed the Weight Watchers program at all. In fact, I wasn’t even using the Weight Watchers eTools online tracker for the first three or so months of that time. When Weight Watchers came out with their Smart Points program in early December, I decided to go through the effort of dual tracking, just to see how the new program compared with the way I was eating using calorie counting.
So, first off, I have to say that dual tracking is a huge pain in the ass!! This is mostly because the new Weight Watchers website pretty much sucks. :/ As someone who used Weight Watchers’ online tracking successfully for almost 4 years, I had a really good handle on logging my food. I can honestly say there were only a handful of days in that four years that I didn’t track, and I never had a problem with it doing it. However, with the new website, I find it to be very frustrating and not at all intuitive. The two biggest frustrations I have are:
1. You can’t search recipes using the desktop version, but instead have to scroll through all your recipes to find the one you’re looking for. As someone who has four years worth of recipes entered on the site, I’ve found that trying to scroll through well over 200 of them can be very frustrating. And because they only come up about 20 at a time, you can’t just use the “find” feature of your browser; you have to keep clicking “more results” until you get to the section of the alphabet that you’re looking for. God forbid I eat “White chicken chili” and want to log it!
2. It’s hard to get an “at-a-glance” snapshot of your day or week. I hate the fact that it doesn’t tell you your total points used in a day; I’m sorry, but I want to know immediately upon logging in how many points I’ve used in a day, and not have to do math every time I want to get an accurate picture of how my day looks. In addition, the reporting tools are long gone, which I also miss. I’m a visual person, and I love charts!
I love them so much, in fact, that I created my own. 🙂 Each week since early December, I’ve created a chart to show me my Smart Point usage compared to goal, and I’ve even gone one step further to add my calorie intake versus my that goal. Here’s an example of last week’s chart:
The red bars are my Smart Point daily totals, while the red horizontal line shows you my daily 30-point goal. The blue line with squares represents my calorie intake, and the blue horizontal line represents that daily goal. Note that the goal of 1500 cal is kind of a misnomer, because my actual daily goal is 1300, but I will eat any extra calories burned during a run. Since I tend to earn about 300 cal per day, I average it out to a 1500 cal per day goal.
While that chart isn’t perfect, the biggest takeaways are that my calories per day are fairly close to 1500 on average, but my Smart Points, compared to goal, are not even close. In fact, I plotted out the entire seven weeks that I’ve been dual-tracking, and here’s the result. (Click to enlarge.)
I know, I know! Chart overload! 😉 But let me see if I can break it down for you:
1. The colors are still the same: blue indicates calories, red indicates Smart Points. But for this one, I chose to do “Calories remaining” or “Smart Points remaining” to better indicate how well I’d stayed within my goals.
2. Check out the blue horizontal line. That’s the zero line, and anything above that line means that I was within my daily goal. Anything below that line, for either calories or Smart Points, means I was over my goal. (Note that exercise–running only, not strength training– is included when I calculate calories used, but, per Weight Watcher’s”Beyond the Scale” guidelines, I chose not to swap Fit Points for food, so no activity is included in my Smart Points calculations. )
3. The actual numbers shown, either blue or red, indicate the deviation from goal, positive if I was within or below my daily goal, and negative if I went over. I tried to line them up as best I could, but I didn’t always get it exact. Sorry! But, for example, you can see on day one, December 7, 2015, I was 54 calories below my daily goal (the blue number) and 20 Smart Points above my goal (the red number).
4. The green vertical lines indicate a separation of weeks, and then, at the bottom, the numbers in the green boxes indicate my actual weight change for that week.
OK, now that I’ve given you a general overview, one thing should be fairly obvious: there is not a single day in the last seven weeks that any of the red bars go ABOVE the zero line, i.e. there wasn’t a single day in that time that I stayed within my Weight Watchers Smart Point goal of 30. Now, to be fair, I wasn’t actually following the Weight Watchers plan, so I wasn’t paying attention to Smart Points as I made my food choices. I continued to focus on my calorie goal, and as you can see, with the exception of a couple of weeks, I did well in that regard.
The two weeks I did poorly were Christmas week and the weekend of the Pittsburgh hockey tournament, and both Smart Points and calories were in serious deficit those particular weeks. Not surprisingly, those were the weeks that I gained weight. But all the other weeks, when I stayed within my average daily calorie goal, I lost weight. This, despite the fact that I clearly was way over my Smart Points in all of those weeks.
It’s widely known that the new Smart Points program is focused on limiting saturated fat and added sugar. Saturated fat is not typically a problem for me; however, sugar…that is my Achilles’ heel. Because I can track actually added sugar in the My Fitness Pal app, I did a chart for that too.
In that graph, the blue line with squares still indicates calorie intake, but the red bars show my sugar consumption. So any red bar that extends below the zero line indicates that I went over my sugar goal for the day. I’m not going to lie, I was actually surprised to see that there were days when I DIDN’T go below the line!! :p
I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what this chart tells me. My sugar consumption really does seem to be all over the board, and I don’t see a direct correlation between going over my sugar limit and gaining weight. I suppose, if nothing else, it shows that there are a lot of factors involved in weight loss, and one specific type of food or nutrient probably isn’t going to make or break you. Thank goodness, cuz I loves me some sugar. 😉
No, seriously, all kidding aside, I HAVE become much more conscious of my nutrient consumption since I began using MFP, specifically sugar and sodium, both of which I’ve been trying to cut back on. I definitely think that looking at my overall food choices, not just a “points value,” has helped me make better decisions. I think the scale has reflected that, and I know that my body and the way I feel about it definitely have reflected it!
So, now, after 7 weeks of comparison, it’s time for me to decide what game plan I follow going forward. Back in September, when I first started counting calories, I really didn’t expect to actually LIKE it. Twenty-plus years of Weight Watchers programs was pretty solidly engrained in my head…and it clearly worked for me!
But after four months of calorie counting, I have to admit that I really do like it. And I don’t think it’s just because it’s “different.” I’ve become much more mindful of the kinds of foods I’m putting in my body. I had no idea that I was eating so much sodium before I started actually tracking it! I also like the flexibility and the ease-of-use with calorie counting. It’s so much easier to track calories on the go, versus the Weight Watchers points. Plus, I like that counting calories is a pretty exact science, as opposed to the point system, which often requires rounding. Sometimes the rounding would be in my favor, but a lot of times, it wasn’t. And that was frustrating!
So, the bottom line is that I’m going to stick with calorie counting for the foreseeable future. I’ll probably continue to track Smart Points for a while, just out of curiosity more than anything else. I definitely would not continue paying for the Weight Watchers eTools if I didn’t already get them for free. The site has become extremely difficult to navigate and, honestly, not worth the money in my opinion.
I’ll continue to weigh in at Weight Watchers every month, and I might even attend an extra meeting or two if I can find the time. I will say that even though I’m not necessarily as enamored of the Weight Watchers program as I used to be, being Lifetime is still important to me, because it represents something I worked very, very hard for over a long period of time. And I still firmly believe I couldn’t have gotten to my goal weight, and to the healthy person that I am now, without the help of Weight Watchers. But, I think I’ve matured in my healthy habits, to the point now where I can manage on my own a lot better than I could when I was first starting out and needed the structure, encouragement, and handholding that Weight Watchers provides. Their program definitely has its place for those who are beginning or in the middle of their weight-loss journey. But for me, I think that after four solid years of successfully living a healthy lifestyle, I feel confident in the knowledge that I’m never going back to where I was, and it’s time for me to solidly take control of my own (healthy) destiny. 🙂
Wow, this post got way more serious than I expected! 😉 But the truth is, I feel really empowered right now. It’ll be four years in April since I hit goal, and that’s a long damn time to keep off a significant amount of weight. The last four years have been an incredible learning process, but I’m not fooling myself into thinking that I’m done learning. Not even close! But I think the most important thing I’ve learned is just how strong I am, both mentally and physically. And every day, when I look in the mirror and smile because I actually like what I see…well, that’s motivation enough for me to keep doing what I’m doing.
So there you have it! Let the next phase of my journey begin!! 🙂
Thanks so much for reading!
This is a lot of information. But I don’t think it’s a fair comparison mostly due to the activity points (or whatever they call them) that are missing. You say your daily cal goal is 1300, but you make it 1500 on the chart and then you don’t add in points earned to the WW points – so that stays at 30? That automatically skews the chart. Make your cal goal line 1300 or add in the activity points. That’s the only way that chart would be fair. And how many points would you actually earn?
Is the 30 points a “lose weight” point number for you or a “maintenance” number? I wasn’t sure about that, but it seems in order to reach that number you’d have to severely cut back on calories. I think the calorie to point comparison was most interesting to me, because I’ve always wondering about that correlation. But I think any charts showing the above or below “goal” isn’t fair given the lack of activity points.
Thank you for commenting, Jen! 🙂
You’re right, it IS a lot of information. It took me a couple of weeks to compile it all, and then another day or so to determine HOW to chart a comparison, just because there’s so much information, it’s hard to know what’s useful and what’s not!
Thanks for mentioning the “missing” FitPoints, as it were. I meant to explain my stance and then forgot! (Probably because I was already at 2000 words for this one post! 🙂 )
I can see where my charts do seem “skewed,” and I did struggle with how to account for my exercise. However, when Beyond the Scale first came out, the message was very clear: the new program was designed to get you to be active for the health benefits, not to earn extra food. I originally looked at that and said, “Screw that: I’m eating my exercise points!” But then I discussed it with my friend Katie, and she pointed out that I wasn’t really representing an accurate picture of the new BTS program if I swapped FitPoints. I realized she was right, so I changed my settings, because I wanted to model the way the program was designed, and not put my own flavor onto it.
For calorie counting, however, I chose to use the calories burned for running, because that’s how I’d been doing it since September. Note that I don’t earn calories for any other “activity” when calorie counting, as I would with FitPoints (housework, strength training, and other things designed to get you to move more).
So yes, while I can see where the charts seem skewed, I believe that in not accounting for the WW FitPoints, I’m following the true spirit of the new program, and that’s what I wanted to base my comparison on. For what it’s worth, I did log the actual running activity as well as my strength training in WW for the 7 weeks. (I also log the strength training in MFP, but it doesn’t earn me any extra calories.) I was very consistent in earning about 46 FitPoints per week, so about 6.5 per day. Still not enough to get me under my goal of 30 points per day (my average number of weekly points “left over” at the end of each week was -131! 😮 ).
In answer to your other question, I am currently in “weight loss” mode, so the 30 point goal is supposed to help me lose weight. I think that if I set my profile to “maintain,” it would add another 6 points a day (but I haven’t gotten there yet, so don’t quote me!).
Again, thank you for reading and taking the time to comment!
I do dual track calories and SmartPoints. (BTW, if you have the mobile app you can search recipes and get a total of SP eaten in a day). I don’t think it is against WW not to swap FP. Yes, early on they took that position, but there were materials online that said even then that there was an exception for people highly active such as someone training for a marathon. I think you are active enough you fit in that group. Also, in the current FAQ WW now says it is totally up to use whether to use them or not. And, basically, you were eating them. If I get 30 daily points and 28 weekly points (which I do) for a total of an average of 34 a day and I earn 70 FitPoints during the week, then if I ate an average of 44 SP a day then I’ve eaten my FP whether I swap it on the site or not. And, if I do that and I’m happy with my weight loss (or maintenance) then it is fine. The people who shouldn’t eat FP are those for whom it stalls or slows their weight loss. If it is doesn’t then it is totally OK to swap them.
I think it would be interested to go back and look at your numbers and count the FitPoints you earned. You might still be over but it would be by a lot less. And, you may not even be over at all.
BTW, love your charts. After one of your posts on this I sent a copy of your chart to my DH and had him make me a nifty chart like yours.
These charts are like porn to me! 😉
With or without adding in activity SmartPoints, my typical daily calories would put me WAAAAY over what Weight Watchers recommends. When I dual tracked for a week, I used every last daily SP, weekly SP, and even went into the negative in just one day… while keeping my calories “normal”. I think I was 100+ SP in the negative that week, but lost 2 pounds.
I love that you are enjoying calorie counting. I’m so glad I switched to calorie counting before WW rolled out this new program. The SP program is just not do-able in my lifestyle.
I do find it interesting that WW has changed their stance on whether you can swap activity SP. They’ve gotten so much backlash about this program that I’m really not surprised.