Tag Archives: points plus program

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

Advertisement

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Weight Watchers Points Plus Program

27 Jan

Or as I like to call it WWPPP…actually, lol, I don’t call it that, that’d be even weirder then saying the whole name. I just call it WW still, or the Plus program, anything but the entire name cause that is just toooooo long.

I wanted to put pics with this post, to show you the new WW stuff (aka tools and books) I have that go along with the program buuuuut I may have slightly misplaced the cable to attach my phone to my laptop so I can’t upload the pictures, oops. I will however keep searching for the cable and upload the pics as soon as I can. 🙂

One of the biggest changes tool wise is that now you have to use a Weight Watchers calculator, this is what you use to calculate how many points you get per day and how many points a serving of food has. You can also use it to track what you eat everyday and it stores the information in its memory for a week so you don’t have to use a handwritten tracker anymore if you don’t want to. I however prefer writing down in a little book what I eat and the points values, I like the tactile sensation of writing and it helps me to be able to go back and look at foods I ate in the past. Also, I remember better what I have handwritten down as opposed to typed, shrug, just how I roll. You can use the calculator for the Filling Foods WW Program also, and even, *drum roll* as a regular calculator! Oooooh, the complexity of this little machine lol. 😛 It is pocket sized, blue, easy to use, has large font, really, can’t go wrong. I, being the weird person that I am, will miss the little cardboard slider that I used for the old program, it was easy to casually slide it to the appropriate numbers without really taking it out of my purse at a grocery store so I could calculate the points of a food I was considering buying without anybody seeing. Also, I’ve been through a lot with the little thing, I’m a tad attached to it. I am going to cut the emotional string bond I have to it (is that even a possible thing to have?? lol) and lend it to a friend who isn’t looking to follow the plan completely but wants to be able to track her food at least a bit to get a better idea of how she is eating.  It’s usefulness will be passed on. 🙂

Something else I also have is this decently sized Weight Watchers PointsPlus Getting Started book, it has 102 pages, including charts to help you plan your meals, recipe ideas and a walking plan if you need/want help with becoming more active. As I was reading it I felt like I should be taking notes or something because I kept thinking “oh this seems important to remember” but there is only so much you can remember when reading a new informational book over the course of days. So I went back through it and put those skinny post its on “important” pages so when I need to look something up I can find the most likely pages the information will be on. It now reminds me of my text books in university…yes, I was that girl lol.  😛

After that the next book I have is the Weight Watchers PointsPlus Pocket Guide, which I am sorry to say wouldn’t fit in to any pocket I have…well, maybe my winter jacket pocket but that’s about it. Luckily I am a girl and it is socially acceptable for me to carry almost all my worldly possessions in my purse so phew, the “pocket guide” can come out with me. This little book is packed with useful information, it has an A-Z Food List with points, Weight Watchers food list (including lots of yummy sounding WW foods we can’t get in Canada), dining out ideas, a help guide to reading a menu, food substitutions, condiments and seasonings worth zero points, and a handy quick guide to portion sizes…all of that is just in the first section! The other sections have Power Foods, good health guidelines, aisle by aisle shopping guide, holiday help, weekend ideas and charts to calculate Activity Points. I’ll give more detailed info on what the book says in posts to come. 🙂

Lastly, well almost lastly, I have the Canadian Complete Food Companion book and the Canadian Dining Out Companion book. The food companion not only has a huuuge listing of foods with their points values it also indicates if something is a Power Food and not to be outdone in usefulness the dining out book has an A-Z list of dining out foods and menu items from over 45 restaurants with their points values and an ethnic and regional section with foods listed and the points values for the foods.

If you attend the meetings, which we all know I don’t, you also get these weekly booklets, although, they are so tiny they are more like a flyer. Each flyer has an inspirational story, a recipe, suggestions for your week or how to make something easier or better use your time. There is a ‘moving more’ page with some simple exercises and a suggestion for something to try this week as a challenge. I think I like the recipe page the best lol.

So there we have it, my new tools and books to help me on my journey of trying the Points Plus Program. 🙂 Wonder how long it will take for them to look as worn and used as the books I had for the old program? I’m betting not long at all! lol

Tags: , , , , ,

Been Gone A While

23 Jan

So I’ve been gone a while, I hadn’t even realized how long until the other day when I logged in and saw when I last posted and I immediately thought “aw crap, I’ve been gone way longer then I thought”. I did want to post that day, I had a topic and a vague idea in my head about what I was going to write but the entire site was blacked out in protest, seriously? I finally get my ass back on to wordpress and it’s all blacked out?? What are the odds? *rolls eyes*

Any normal person would have just said ah well and logged on the next day, written their post then, but I am not normal in any way and somehow that just didn’t happen…I think cause I was busy with, ya know, life…or something resembling it anyways…

Here’s a little catch up on things:

I got back from Alberta safe and sound, got back to my apartment to find my roomie’s cat was crazy sick (some kind of cat cold) and she hadn’t even noticed (the poor thing was having sneezing fits lasting 10 sneezes or longer at a time, and his poor darker coloured then normal really wet nose, sigh). I ended up hanging at the house for a couple days right after getting home nursing the poor cat back to health (may I remind you, it’s not even MY cat!!) but I can’t let him suffer alone just because his owner doesn’t pay attention or want to take him to a vet, sigh.

The guy I was seeing and I broke up so I spent some days wallowing in self-pity, depression, despair, sadness – doing all the things girls do at a time like this (I watched Dirty Dancing and got drunk and ate pie). What made it even better was my roomie was dumped two days before my break up so there were two of us going through this together…the amount of chocolate and pizza that has been in this apartment since those days is amazing. Then I decided to give myself a good kick in the ass cause what kind of girl am I? The whiny crying stupid kind? Hell No! I had a really good couple of days where I hit the gym, stopped listening to depressing music, starting wearing makeup again (it’s amazing how pathetic I got…) and then I ended up going for dinner with a friend who spent the entire time yapping about her new boyfriend and how happy she is and how great he is and how wonderful being in a relationship is and blah blah fucken blah…I couldn’t wait to get away. So that dumped me back down in to a pit of despair. I know! I’m rolling eyes at myself right now, I am well aware how pathetic I was (am?).

During this I pulled myself together and met with a guy who went to the same film school as I but a couple years prior, he is starting his own production company and we had a meeting (ie interview) to see about collaborating together, sweet! He wants to get a team of actors and crew and writers together, start filming small scenes that showcase the writing and acting skill/talent of the people involved, then show those to backers and get funding so we can film small films and enter them in to Film Festivals and then get more backing from that and film Feature Films. How awesome is that?! He really liked my demo reel and we are meeting this week to go over the first script he wants me to work on, he said at the interview he already had two characters he thought I’d be great for and he now has a third (which I will be learning more about this week), so way excited for that! There is no money involved, because it’s all entry level, all a bunch of us who are just starting and trying to find a crack in the industry wall that we can get through to get noticed but hey, at least I’m trying. 🙂 The Production Company is going to be focused on sci-fi/fantasy so I’m betting I’ll be working on some pretty crazy scripts, yah!

What else? Oh yeah, I damaged the back bumper of my suv, sadness. I was reversing on a twisty narrow road that cuts through a forest on a freakishly steep hill in the pouring rain as the sun was setting and a tree that had fallen and was partially crossing the path came in to contact (painful contact) with my rear bumper. sigh. I am fairly certain it is cosmetic damage, but by the time I was leaving the area it was too dark to check out the suv (and there is always the fear of wild animals deciding to jump out and eat you…not even joking!) so I waited till I got back and parked in the underground parking that comes with my apartment, turns out I brought part of the frickin tree home with me, all squished in to the crack that is now in my bumper. Awesome huh?

Oh and lastly, my roomie convinced me to start a Plenty of Fish account (for those of you that don’t know it’s a dating website) because she thinks the best way to get over my ex is to start dating someone else. I don’t know about this logic but am willing to give it a try I guess, shrug. Well, turns out I seem to hold a lot of appeal for random guys on dating websites as I have been getting weird emails to my account inbox since I opened the silly thing, which was oh about, 24 hours ago? *rolls eyes* I started emailing with one guy and we are tentatively making plans to meet for coffee this week but I dunno, now that the plans are being made I don’t know that I want to go through with it…I’m not really into this whole internet dating thing, I always think it’s better to meet people the old fashioned way, ya know, in person? Seems to be a dying trend though, shrug.

How does any of this relate to my weight watchers? Well, it kinda does kinda doesn’t. I haven’t been tracking but I have been measuring and portioning my foods (well, except for the “dark days” when I pretty much stopped eating completely, then the couple days after that where I lived off pizza, pie and chocolate…but we won’t go in to that lol) I have been getting to the gym about 3 times a week and the days I don’t go to the gym I make sure to walk somewhere that is a decent walking distance away, so the grocery store, the seabus terminal, purolator…basically, I look at it as there is no physical reason I can not walk to do my errands so walk them I will. It’s working out well. The walking gives me time to get outside, breath fresh air, listen to my iPod and just be by myself but not isolated in my apartment. It’s been almost therapeutic and the days I don’t walk somewhere I find a little sad. Oh, I took a kick boxing class last week, it was alright, not as good as my boxing classes were but decent.

I am reading the books to learn how to do the Points Plus Program and will be starting that soon, perhaps tomorrow? I haven’t finished reading the book yet but maybe I will finally get through it tomorrow. It’s funny, I got so used to the old program and when people would ask I’d say how it’s so easy, nuthin to it, stuff like that, I forgot how overwhelming it can be to read that first book of the program and be introduced all at once to all the crap you have to remember/know/learn, all the rules you will have to follow, just all that stuff. I am reading this book for the new program and just keep thinking I should be taking notes somewhere cause this seems like a lot to have to remember and am I going to want to flip through this book everytime I need to refresh myself about something? But oh well.  I am a (vaguely) smart individual who should be able to figure this out…and if all else fails I’ll call my mom, she’s on this plan so she’ll have answers to all my questions lol.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, yes I am still doing Weight Watchers unofficially, so no going to meetings or using the online support tools for me, I’m still poor, shrug. 😛 A whole new Weight Watcher’s adventure is about to start for me!…I really hope this new program gets me off my plateau, here’s hoping! 😀

Tags: , , , , ,

%d bloggers like this: