Thursday, December 15, 2011

A Bit Disenchanted

With a daily average of 33 "points" on WW (not counting any earned for activity), I find that I am sometimes hungry. Each point is worth about 50 calories, so that's 1650 calories a day for me. It's not exactly 50 per point, but that's a fair approximation. Anyway, I find that I AM hungry with that many points, but not terribly hungry. I want to be hungry for meals anyway -- food tastes so much better if I am. The real restriction for me is that I can't really eat anything "extra" without being hungry. If I "spend" points on a cookie, that's less nutritious, filling food I can eat. So even though they SAY "you can eat anything you want", you really can't if you don't want to spend part of the day hungry. At my points level, anyway. I imagine that if I used 33 points a day on healthy, nutritious food only, I might not really be all that hungry. There haven't been too many days like that, though. Unfortunately, a few of my days have been 60 or 100 points, while others have been 21. Not very smart or healthy of me.
Honestly, I've averaged something like 40 points a day since I started and I've still lost 5 pounds. I think I've gotten away with such a high average because I'm usually quite active. Aside from purposeful daily exercise, I usually get 10,000-12,000 steps a day on my pedometer.

I was a bit disappointed in our last WW meeting because the leader actually brought up the stupid 1 point hot dog! Here I was thinking that WW had changed over the past 6 years since I first joined, but apparently, it hasn't changed all THAT much. The discussion was on how to provide variety to prevent boredom with your meals, and we were talking about sandwich outsides, fillings, and sauces. Someone had mentioned a hot dog bun, which she said you could really fill with anything, but if you wanted a hot dog, what was the best kind to buy? I wanted to yell out "one with no nitrates", but didn't have the nerve. Someone suggested a turkey dog, and the leader said you'd think that, but no! There was a FAT FREE 1 POINT HOT DOG out there! I was glad that a member challenged the leader by asking about all of the crap you'd put in your body by eating a fat free hot dog, but the leader took the easy way out. She said WW isn't here to tell you what to eat because that is up to you. They are simply here to help you know what you can eat and stay within your points. I thought that was a rather specious answer. As a leader, I would assume she is there partly to provide a healthy example of the way to maintain your weight loss. Apparently not.

3 comments:

Lyn said...

That's too bad. But WW isn't really about nutrition in the case of points, which is my beef with it. I don't know a lot about the Core plan but that seems more nutritious in general. I would think WW would have some zero point foods you could munch on when you're hungry, though. Isn't fruit free now, or something like that?

wife2abadge said...

Yes, Lyn -- most fruit and vegetables are now "free". The only ones that aren't are dried fruit and a few starchy vegetables like potatoes and sweet potatoes. The Core plan would be kind of the same as the points plan for me, I think. I'd have to look into it more, but you eat howevery much you want of certain foods, but still count points for others. I have to count points for things like beans, potatoes, etc., even though they're healthy foods.

I have discovered some other weirdnesses with the point counting. I entered a recipe into the recipe builder on the WW site the other day and it wanted to count 9 points per serving for a recipe that had no added fat, and was all vegetables and beans. That makes no sense whatsoever. When I entered in the nutritional information, it awarded it 5 points per serving. I've had some really healthy vegan recipes that it wants to count as 11 or 12 points per serving. That's ridiculous. An extremely good for you vegan dish shouldn't be given the same points value as a piece of chocolate truffle pie!

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