Taking a Break from Weight Watchers and Beyond the Scale

Last night I officially suspended my Weight Watchers membership.  I just can't any more with their new program.

I read all of the material online and watched the videos.  I attended several meetings and read the Weekly handouts.

And then I went to the Facebook page and tried to follow along there.  Wow, what a waste of space.  Community leaders seem to respond only to people who are posting about losing an alarming amount of weight, congratulating them on their success.  Those who post actual concerns about the program are patronizingly told that they need to commit to the new program and give it time.  If you are having technical issues, then you are urged to send the team a private Facebook message that will be ignored.

All of this, added to the technical problems with the roll out, and I am out.  I am not interested in being a guinea pig or unpaid software tester any longer.  The stress and annoyance is just too much.  (I received a free month when I complained in December and was offered another free month last night.)  I may return in the future but for now, no, Oprah can do it without me.

Here are my takeaways:

a)  The new eating plan is a version of high protein/low carb diets.  This one is particularly restrictive because the imposed calorie limits.  Eating anything with sugar or, really, carbohydrates in general, and you are penalized so forget-about-it.  I personally have never had much success on severely carb restricted diets.  They just do not fit well with my real life, long-term, and quite frankly, I never had that "I feel SO much better eating this way!" moment by severely restricting sugar and upping my protein intake so high.  With this iteration, Weight Watchers has REALLY lost a lot of the flexibility, moderation and balance that attracted me to their program in the first place.  Previously, I thought of WW as a lifestyle.  *This* is a diet.  Period.

b)  Weight Watchers still has no idea how to work fitness into their program although they do want members to exercise every day.  In their effort to be all things to everyone, they have ended up with a program that is not particularly helpful to anyone.  If you already exercise intensely, expect to be very hungry on the new Plan.  Congratulations, though, you will be earning an obscene number of FitPoints and they hope that makes you feel better about yourself.  (Weight Watchers has already re-worded the recommendation on their site about not swapping your FitPoints for SmartPoints.)

c)  I do appreciate some of the "Beyond the Scale" aspects of the program.  It is important to know why you want to lose weight and to appreciate the better health and increased energy that should accompany the changes you are making.  I worked with some of the tools this summer and really enjoyed them.  If they are looking to differentiate their program from others on the market, I really wish they would have focused on this and not messed with their eating program.

For the past few weeks, I have been tracking on my own using the application that Fitbit provides. While the Fitbit app is more convenient, I have decided to switch to MyFitnessPal.  The MFP app syncs with my Fitbit and provides all of the tools that the Weight Watchers application used to have (some tools were removed during the upgrade or are still buggy at best).