Weight Watchers Diet
The Weight Watchers Diet programme is one of the worlds most popular diet programmes, with millions of Britons and millions of others worldwide enroling with Weight Watchers Diet each year looking to lose weight.
The geatest element of the Weight Watchers Diet is arguably the support group element of programme, whereby each week local Weight Watchers come together to be educated on food, reading food labels, calories, exercise and other key component of successful dieting and weight loss.
Don't want to attend the weekly meetings? Have no fear, the Weight Watchers web site has a subscription service where dieters can meet, calories can be counted and members can get a whole host of dieting and weight loss advice from the articles and / or from the Weight Watchers online team / other Weight Watchers Diet members from the online forum area.
Join Weight Watchers Online
How does the Weight Watchers Diet work?
The Weight Watchers Diet basically consists of two diet plans that have the same common goal; to make sure that dieters reduce their daily calorie intake. The Weight Watchers Diet plan is called Switch - as in Switch your diet habits to something more healthy.
The two Weight Watchers Diet plans are called:
- The Points Plan - Dieters can eat anything as long as they stick to a daily points total. This total is based on age, sex, current weight and current activity levels.
- The Core Plan - Dieters stick to eating Weight Watchers 'Core' foods. Dieters can eat these foods until they feel comfortable.
Learn more about the Weight Watchers Diet Points Plan
On the Weight Watchers Points Plan all food and drink are allocated points depending on their nutritional and calorie value. So a food high in fat and calories would have a higher points total than a food low in fat. This isn't to say that the high fat food can't be eaten on the Weight Watchers Points Plan, because it can. It will simply mean that you will only half a limited number of points to eat for the rest of the day.
Learn more about the Weight Watchers Diet Core Plan
The Weight Watchers Core Plan differs from the Points Plan because here Weight Watchers suggest the best types of food to eat. This list will include lean meats, poultry, eggs, vegetables, fruits, salads, brown rice, potatoes and other complex carbohydrates.
Advantages of the Weight Watchers Diet
Like the Lighter Life Diet, the Weight Watchers Diet plan includes some group support and 'counselling' - though this counselling at Weight Watchers meetings this is more about food education rather than food 'therapy'. For people who find dieting an individual struggle gaining support and encouragement from like minded people Weight Watchers meetings are a God send.
Another fantastic advantage of the Weight Watchers Diet is that no foods are banned! Compare this to the Atkins Diet where carbohydrates are banned or the Blood Type Diet or the Zone Diet where certain foods are banned or even the extreme Lighter Life Diet where food is banned (seriously) and you can see why the Weight Watchers way of working is so popular.
Both the Weight Watchers Point Plan diet and the Weight Watchers Core plan diet encourage users to eat more healthily. They also encourage dieters to consider the amounts of food there are eating - both great tools to promote sustainable weight loss.
Disadvantages of the Weight Watchers Diet
Whether you opt for weekly meetings or you'd rather opt for membership to the Weight Watchers web site, the cost can be a barrier to some. Okay, it isn't expensive but during the credit crunch (at the time of writing - 2009) any monies spend can seem like a luxury.
Also, the Weight Watchers Diet doesn't actively go out of its way to promote exercise. Any diet worth its salt should encourage dieters to supplement their dieting with a programme of resistance exercise to build lean muscle tissue and cardiovascular exercise to boost fat burning and increase aerobic fitness.
The Weight Watchers Diet - Conclusion
In terms of health and choice the Weight Watchers Diet is head and shoulders above the likes of the Cabbage Soup Diet, the Grapefruit Diet, the Lighter Life Diet plan and the Hay Diet. In some ways the Weight Watchers Diet is simply a mixed balanced diet that encourages healthy eating and sensibe portion sizes.
Weight Watchers has over 40 years to develop its dieting and weight loss programme and it has done so very successfully, without promoting the extremes of some new fad diets.
Nevertheless dieting and weight loss plans that do promote exercise, such as the TNT Diet, will always have the upper hand when it comes to sustainable weight loss and weight management. Time and again research has shown that diet coupled with exercise allows participants to lose more weight quicker than those who just dieted or those who just exercised.
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