Tag Archives: food tracking

The Weight Watchers Plunge

15 Jun

Last Sunday on my lunch break I said “screw it” and I signed up for Weight Watchers. And not in the I’m-doing-it-on-my-own kind of way but in the for real, paid money, am officially a member of Weight Watchers kind of way. It kinda feels like I’ve joined a cult…but full of nice people and so far none of them have asked me to drink anything suspicious or pledge allegiance to anything weird…or anything at all lol 😛

I chose to attend meetings as well as use the online resources, might as well utilize everything they have to offer, right? Right! Since I signed up online on Sunday that is my official start date even though I wasn’t able to attend a meeting until today, Wednesday. At first I was going to wait to start tracking my food and figuring out the system until my first meeting but changed my mind and started using the app and the website on the Sunday when I clued in to the fact that I was already paying for the services so I shouldn’t waste four days of access to the WW  info. This stuff ain’t cheap!

When you first sign in to the website you get asked a bunch of questions, the answers are apparently used to personalize not only the program to me but also the information that will be sent to me. So like, recipes, exercise ideas, food tips, and other such things. I’m thinking the more personalized the program is the better it will work for people…I hope!

I’ve gotta say, so far I have been kind of sucking at the whole Weight Watchers lifestyle, sigh. Which was not what I was expecting! Although, I did cook a healthy dinner yesterday instead of just eating some toast and a couple spoonfuls of peanut butter after I looked at my points tally for the day and realized I couldn’t just eat willy-nilly and not go over my daily points. So I guess that is something…a teeny tiny baby step towards progress perhaps? 😉

Today at my meeting I got given 4 different booklets:

  • a mini journal, I take it each week to meetings and use it to track my official weigh ins. It also has a section for you to write your reasons why you are starting this journey, what your final weight goal is and even a section to write down ideas on how I can be good to myself.
  • the next booklet is the Pocket Guide, this booklet has a food list with corresponding points, a portion estimate guide and FitPoints charts. Oh, there is also a note section at the back.
  • the third, and I think most important booklet is the “Your Plan Guide” which has everything in it. It is basically the how-to book for the entire program, it explains how the program works, how the points work, suggestions for how to distribute your points throughout the day, goal setting, fitness, and being kind to yourself. There are also recipes, meal plans, no-count option list, different fitness / exercise ideas meant to fit in to different increments of time (1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes and 15 minutes) and a bunch of other stuff – I’ll go in to more detail another day, after I’ve had a chance to read the whole thing.
  • the fourth and final booklet is a weekly booklet, I guess I get a new one each week. From what I can tell each week covers a new topic and the leader has a more in-depth version that she uses to direct the meeting. This weeks topic was about self-talk, how we think of ourselves and others and how it can affect your weight loss. A stat shared this evening said that a study showed that people experience 75% more weight loss when they have improved self-image, partly because they tend to treat themselves better and make better choices.

So I wanted to show you what the books look like but as soon as I put them down the cat decided he haaaaad to check them out lol I eventually managed to convince him to move – by plucking him up and holding him in a death grip while rearranging the books and taking the picture lol

The overall theme to this weeks meeting was: Be Positive!

Some ways to do that are to remember to give myself credit for putting effort in to changing. Be positive about how I think about myself. Remember that no matter how slow the progress or how many times I stumble I am ahead of those who are not trying.

Some ways to work on being more successful are to really question myself when I feel hungry. I might actually be bored, or thirsty, or emotional, or who knows what. By questioning myself before heading in to the kitchen I should be able to decrease my mindless eating which can only lead to good things. 🙂

Even though I am keeping track of everything using the app I bought the tracking journal when at the meeting this evening. I really like writing things down, something about being able to flip through the pages of the book to see what I did a week ago vs hitting the previous page button on my phone, I dunno, it is a tactile thing, shrug, just go with it, ok? The book cost me $12 and is good for three months. It is an unfortunate brown colour, ugh, but otherwise I like it.

2016-06-16 00.24.05

The actual tracking page (on the left) is pretty simplistic, you put the date at the top, write down your foods and their corresponding point values, then tally everything at the bottom. There is a line for putting how many of your weekly points you used, in case you went over your daily points. There is also a section for writing down your exercise and corresponding FitPoints earned. At the end of each week there is a 20:20 Hindsight page (on the right), where you can write down all kinds of things. Then there are a couple of pages for notes. Each week is the same, the only thing that changes is the weekly quote, this weeks is:

Some days you just have to create your own sunshine.

At the end of the book are a bunch of pages for notes. I am using one page to remember how many daily and weekly points I get as well as my weight. I know I have the little booklet to keep track of my weight loss but I figure I’ll write it in this book also since this book is only for three months and the little one I take to meetings goes for 16 weeks and well, I dunno, I figure one day the two books will get separated but I’ll probably keep the journal so if I check it out one day a long time from now it might be nice to see the progress I made…or depressing, depending on how this goes… 😉

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Back To What Worked

6 Dec

Waaaaay back, like 4 years ago, I started Weight Watchers. I didn’t go to meetings, I didn’t officially join, I got the books from my mother, the slider to calculate food points, a small notebook I could take everywhere and I started the program. If you really want to know how it went go to the very first post in this blog because that is when I started blogging. (First Post) I used this blog to hold myself accountable, since I wasn’t going to meetings or being an online member. I also blogged on an almost daily basis and listed each day what I ate, how many points it was, and if I was over, under or right on the dot with my daily points. Once I started exercising I also started blogging about that.

It was slow progress, as in suuuuper slow, my body did not want to lose the weight. I was hoping for losing two pounds a week and found I was lucky to lose one a week. Not because I was cheating, I was actually pretty good at following the plan, it was just how my body chose to be, shrug.

Well, after following Weight Watchers for hmm, a year and a bit I think, it stopped working for me. I hit a plateau and nothing I did would get my body to budge. It drove me nuts! And if staying at the same weight wasn’t bad enough, I started gaining weight! I wasn’t sure if what I was actually gaining was muscle since I was working out more, or if it was fat, all I knew was the number on the scale was freaking me out and I was having issues dealing with it.

That was when I realized Weight Watchers left me ill equipped to deal with eating healthy on my own. I didn’t really understand calories or fat grams since everything got converted to Weight Watchers points, I had no idea how many calories I should be eating, what I should be doing to get over the plateau, how or even if I should incorporate going no carb, or gluten free or any of the other fads out there. I felt adrift, with no rules to follow, no program to cling to and no idea how to continue on.

I know, I’m soooo dramatic! 😛 lol

Sooooooo dramatic!

Sooooooo dramatic!

I tried a variety of things once I stopped following Weight Watchers, none of them amazing. Mostly I focused on eating less, but ended up eating way under what I should be eating on a daily basis, and not really getting the right variety of food groups in my daily food, oops! A friend put me on a super strict eating plan, designed to get me lean, because the agent I had at the time wanted me 10-15lbs underweight even though I was at the low end of the weight range I am supposed to be at for my height. The problem with that plan was it is not possible to maintain long term. It was high protein, low carb, high healthy fat, which sounds great but the quantity I was allowed a day was quite small and left me hungry all the time.

When I started the job I am at now I fell off the wagon and fell hard. The plan is also strict about timing, timing between meals and timing of meals to when you exercise and my work schedule impeded that greatly. Combine that with being oh so amazingly strict and I’ve never been able to manage to get back on that plan.

Well, obviously the various things I have tried since falling off that plan didn’t really work. I am not as large as I was when I first started Weight Watchers all those years ago, but I am larger than I want to be, and I am pissed off at myself that I let myself gain some of that weight back. I worked so hard to lose that weight, and it took so freakin long to come off and what do I do? I let myself gain some of it back?? Idiot!

Calling myself names, and feeling bad about what I let happen will not create change. A friend and I have decided that instead of just talking about how we want to look different we are going to actually start working towards creating that change, novel idea huh? 😉

For me, this means going back to what once worked for me, that’s riiiiight, I am going to once again be Weight Watchering it! I know I said the program didn’t teach me how to lose or maintain weight or be healthy when not following the program, and I stick by that, however, when following Weight Watchers before it did work for a time. I am hoping it will work for me again and help me get a little more control over my eating plan and from there, well, I’ll have to figure something out lol 😛

So, I have dug out of the drawer my Weight Watchers books and also found the Points Calculator. I won’t be following the same Weight Watchers program I followed last time because there is a new program out, called Weight Watchers Points Plus and it works a little differently than the program I followed. There is a different way to calculate points, both the amount of points you get in a day and how many points a food is. I can use the calculator to track my points for the day and for the week, eliminating the need for the notebook, but I like being able to flip back and see my progress so I am sticking with using a notebook for tracking. Also, calculating how many points a food is will be a bit more complicated, in the old program you just needed the calories, fat and fiber but now you need more information, so its looking like the points calculator will become my new best friend lol

My Weight Watchers Stuff

My Weight Watchers Stuff

Don’t mind the cat’s leg in the picture, I couldn’t convince him to move, lol.

Today was my first day following the program, I can’t say for sure if I ate the right amount of points as some of the food didn’t have nutritional information so I had to estimate, but I figure it’s better to track and estimate and be close to my points than not be tracking or checking the food’s points values and leaving it all up to chance, right?

That being said, it is the end of the day and omg I am crazy hungry! *rolls eyes* I have a feeling I’m in for a rough first week…

im-so-hungry

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Never Ending Books

7 Nov

I am a reader – I blame this on my parents. I also blame my freakishly good manners, my willingness to try pretty much any new food and activity and my love of tea on them but those are beside the point. lol. 😉

I grew up in a household where it was common to hear the sentence “go and play” or even the almost unheard of today “go outside and play”…yup, that is right, I was not raised by the tv or by video games or by computers, I was raised by my parents and the automatic assumption I had a brain and imagination and could therefore entertain myself for hours on end. It was a good system. 🙂  I have so many fun memories of me playing with other kids, me playing with my toys by myself, just of me playing and really, isn’t that what childhood is supposed to be about?

Not all of my childhood was playing, obviously, I mean I did have to go to school, and do chores and be a brat lol. But something else my parents did for me that I’m not sure is being done for children quite as often anymore is instill in me a love for reading. I got books as presents, my parents would read to me all the time, we went to the library often, heck, in the summers I joined the kids reading club where you were challenged to read certain amounts of books from different genres and you earned stamps in a little booklet to show when you reached certain checkpoints in the challenge. That love of reading has intensified the older I get and I realized when unpacking and setting up my bookshelves that I am a book hog. Yup, that’s right, I own a freakish amount of books considering the amount of space I have to store them.

I am a firm believer in re-reading a book, after all, if a book is good than it is good enough to be re-read and with some books the more you read them the more you get from them. Like Memoirs of a Geisha (which I read before it was made popular via the movie thank you very much 😉 ) I swear, everytime I re-read that book I notice some new detail, I enjoy even more the poetry that is used to create the story, it’s a beautifully written book and so many images are invoked in my brain while I read it. I can see so clearly in my head visions that match what I am reading (there goes that imagination again) that it’s like watching a movie of the book without all the missing parts and added scenes you get in actual movie adaptations.

This wonderous love of reading, the enjoyment I get from a story…this I blame on my parents…and if you follow my logic here that means I can also blame them for the freakish amount of books I now own and the fact that everytime I finish unpacking a box with books in it and finally figure out a way to fit them on my bookshelf and am so happy I am done with that section of my new apartment set-up I manage to find yet another box full of books! You wouldn’t believe the amount of times I’ve opened up a box over the past couple days and sworn in a manner befitting a sailor (or perhaps pirate?) because I’ve found even more books!

I can’t be mad at the books though, at those wonderful pages filled with all those interesting characters that provide me with some mixture of entertainment, education, suspense, horror, joy, wonder and more. So, instead, I will blame the parents…and perhaps my inability to not buy what I am always sure will be a good book! 😉

On the Weight Watcher’s front I have essentially stopped tracking. 😦 Not on purpose, exactly, more out of sheer frustration. My kitchen is still not set up, sigh, my roomie finally moved her stuff in this past Saturday but then left immediately so we did no set up. She came back today but only worked on her room. She says she is coming back tomorrow but we shall see…In case you’re wondering why I don’t just set it up myself it’s cause she assured me she has just as much kitchen stuff as I do so we have to go through both of our kitchen inventories to see what we should use of whose and what should be packed away and put in storage cause there isn’t room in the kitchen. There is no point is me setting up the kitchen with all my stuff just to have to take it all out of the cupboards again, shrug.

As a result, this means my kitchen scale is still packed so I can’t weigh my food (driving me nuuuuuts!), most of my measuring items (spoons, jugs etc) are also packed, I have a couple out cause I found them randomly stuffed in the box with my plates when I unpacked those but not a full set so sometimes I can measure sometimes I can’t…and the counters are so cluttered that I feel as if I can barely move in there.

Oh, and the stove still doesn’t work so I can’t even cook properly lol. I’m existing off of frozen dinners, grilled cheese sandwiches and crackers mostly…oh! and cereal! Yum huh?

One other reason I am not tracking is because I am fairly certain I am undereating everyday, sigh, not on purpose just by happenstance. shrug. When I tally in my head at the end of the day what I ate it’s usually rather pathetic, breakfast is generally two pieces of weetabix with unmeasured milk (the horrors!), my next meal will be a frozen dinner (healthy ones tho, so those steamer things or lean cuisine), and if I get hungry later on a grilled cheese sandwich or some yogurt – so somewhere around 14 points or so per day when I am supposed to be eating 20…plus the physical exertion of moving furniture, setting up furniture, unpacking etc.

I don’t know how this will affect my weight loss, it might falsly bring my weight down because I have less food in my system or it might make it bounce higher cause my body might be freaking out and holding on to it’s fat thinking it’s being starved…I doubt the starved thing cause when I feel hungry I eat so I’m not ignoring my body’s signals to get food, I’m just not eating as healthily as I did before the move…hopefully my body understands and forgives me for this – sooner rather than later! lol 😉

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