Like many out there, I've tried a thousand and one ways to lose weight, with varying degrees of success. I had always avoided Weight Watchers, though. Maybe it was because as a girl I went to weight loss meetings with my mom, a kid in a room full of self-loathing adults. Maybe it was because I didn't have the time or the interest to track what I ate.
Last year about this time I started hearing more about Weight Watchers Online. It was January, so I was feeling motivated to get fit and start losing weight for real. With the online program, you can opt out of meetings. While I'm sure they're great for some, I didn't want to relive those meetings of my youth. And as for that food tracking I didn't want to do, I discovered that for every food and exercise you enter, you get back something wonderful: data.
The program gives you a daily and weekly allotment of food points based on your weight, height, gender, and age. If you go over your daily points, you dip into your pool of weekly points. You also track activity points, which can be traded in for more food points.
The data I was generating - my food points, my activity points, and my weekly weight - made me start to think of the whole endeavor in a new light. My body became my science experiment. My experiment was helped tremendously by Weight Watcher's introduction of progress reports, all my stats at a glance. It's a data geek's dream.
I grew to be able to predict with a high degree of accuracy what my weight would be when I stepped on the scale based purely on that week's data. If I went more than 15 points into my weekly allotment of food points, but it was coupled with exercise over 20 points, I probably stayed the same weight. If my exercise exceeded 40 points, unless it was a week of a lot of liquid calories (oh, red wine and lattes, you keep trying to bring me down...) I lost 1-2 pounds.
In weeks where my experiment fails me and there's weight gain, I know precisely why, and even with my holiday gain I'm not discouraged. I know my body and I know I can continue to lose more weight. I've lost a net of 20 pounds so far, and I'll have fun with scientific inquiry along my way to lose more.