Going to my first Weight Watcher’s meetings was akin to jumping on a merry-go-round carousel in the middle of a rotation. You’ve got people there who have signed up repeatedly over the years, people who have been going to meetings for a year or more, and complete newbies. When I told the receptionists on two different meeting days that I was new to Weight Watchers they seemed surprised. Excuse me, but I didn’t spend my life obese, I got that way thanks to an industrial injury that severely cramped my formerly active lifestyle.

Truthfully, I was and continue to be somewhat skeptical that Weight Watchers would work for me. For one, I had heard that the National Weight Loss Registry reports that the only people who maintain weight loss permanently are those who spend, on average, 1-2 hours per day exercising (10,000 steps per day). Since I can’t take up running or jogging and don’t expect I will find the time to walk nearly two hours each and every day, I was skeptical that diet alone would work for me. The good news is that I’ve lost week every week since I joined Weight Watchers. The bad news is that I’ve lost such a small amount of Weight that I haven’t even managed to shed 10 lbs. yet. There was no dramatic initial weight loss at all, and I started to plateau almost right away. Fortunately, I fully expected to see slow weight loss on this program. Why? Because several years before I started Weight Watchers I had all but eliminated red meat, fried foods, candy, sodas, coffee, juice and other empty calories — none of it having resulted in a single pound lost. For all the healthful changes I made in my diet, I continued to gain weight. That is despite the fact that I have always been the type to eat salads, vegetables, legumes and whole grains. I have always been the type to bring home almost half of my meal at a restaurant in a doggie bag. The vast majority of time, ice cream, chips — I would throw them out iced over or stale because I wouldn’t go through them fast enough in my house. No thyroid problem. No gluttony problem. My problem amounts to being too sedentary — and there are medical reasons for much of that.

Honestly, I found WW meetings confusing, on the one hand, because they don’t run it like a class. There is no “new enrollment” group. Everyone, men & women, experienced WW and new members, are lumped in randomly and new and old members come and go at will. I suppose the benefit of this One Room Schoolhouse approach is that you can learn from people who have been a part of the program longer. Yet when I asked not one but several Weight Watcher’s meeting center Leaders what the differences were between all the various plans Weight Watchers has advertised over the years, including this latest, “Momentum” I was met with long pauses and vague answers. For instance, there is another technique, Simply Filling, where you don’t count Points, but none of the Leaders had used that method to achieve their own lasting weight loss so they really couldn’t be of much help in that regard.

Speaking of Points, what makes them work is the fact that you are tracking them every single day in the form of a daily Points target and a weekly Points allotment. What makes the Points system not exactly so great is that it is based upon a proprietary, patented mathematical formula that converts body mass statistics to a Daily Points Value, and caloric information to Points values for individual foods. You will need the nutritional information to convert every food you consume to Points. This means you are not only counting calories, but then adding an extra step of converting that data to Points values. It also means that if you home cook or use cookbooks without nutritional data for each recipe, calculating your Points is a nightmare. You will have to save ALL the labels off of everything in your pantry and refrigerator and convert the servings to Points using the Weight Watchers calculator or online database. If you eat out of a box or a can, no problem. If you cook fresh you will have to search out the nutritional information, add the Points value of every single item in the recipe (dependent on quantity) and then divide the total by the number of servings the recipe makes.

Prepare to do a lot of counting and math using Weight Watchers, just as you would on a program that counts calories. For a cheaper approach, just ask your doctor for a calorie goal or go to the US government website on the Food Pyramid and keep a Food & Exercise journal. They key is that if you write everything down religiously, you’ll lose weight. There are studies backing that approach. Weight Watchers, then, is best if you know you won’t do any of that without the accountability and camaraderie of a group. If that’s what keeps you motivated most, that is where Weight Watchers shines. Whereas other diets are sketchy on support, Weight Watchers revolves around it, and that is what makes the program successful for so many people.

Given that I’m not much of an extrovert and that what I was learning in the meetings were only scratching the surface of the many diet and health books I’ve read over the years, I am happier simply using the Weight Watchers eTools. These online Tracking tools are helpful because they save all the info. from day-to-day and month-to-month, graph your progress, log your food, activity weight, etc. That isn’t to say that the eTools are perfect, however. The entire Weight Watchers website has been known to go down for hours on end, and there is no courtesy attempt on the part of the Weight Watcher’s corporation to notify or explain the outages to paying subscribers, either. Was my personally identifiable information safe from hackers? That’s one disadvantage of the eTools online system for Tracking because EVERYTHING you enter resides on their servers. If the site is too busy or subject to a denial-of-service attack, you’ll have to wait with fingers crossed.

Secondly, the eTools are created with FLASH, and while FLASH has its uses on the web to create interactive, animated content, it is very slow. Beyond that, entering one’s personal data into the Tracking software requires a “loading data” time that is roughly 1-2 minutes on a high speed connection. Weight Watchers claims that dial-up users will only wait about 2 minutes, but that is what I am waiting for my Tracking data to load on a HIGH SPEED connection. Consequently, I would not recommend Weight Watchers online at all for someone on a dial-up connection. Meanwhile, I would recommend their meetings only if your main struggle is with “emotional eating”, you don’t realize that fast food has a ton of fat & calories (Points) compared to veggies & salads, and you are a complete newbie to dieting. Translation? If you’ve read any of the bestselling diet books in the past few years, what they talk about in the meetings — the fact that a given number of Points in jelly beans is going to be less satisfying than that same amount of points in something bulky, like a giant salad — that’s not going to be news to you. If you already know that you can eat twice or three times as much vegetables or fruits and not approach the calorie (Points) equivalent of a highly processed food such as a candy bar, hamburger or a bag of potato chips the “educational” content of the meetings is going to be far too simplistic to hold your interest. If, on the other hand, you are a real extrovert and will benefit from the social aspect of the meetings to keep on going, Weight Watchers is a great choice.

From what I’ve gathered thus far, Weight Watchers emphasizes the low fat angle, which was popularized in the 1990s. For instance, you are supposed to drink fat-free milk and skim or low-fat cheese — otherwise the Points per serving are too high and you will feel hungry throughout the day for eating the full fat version in such small quantities. Meanwhile, Weight Watchers International are not yet doing enough, in my opinion, to emphasize the fact that not all carbs are created equally. The Momentum Plan introductory pamphlet — which is about as much “explanation” as you will get when you join — sounds vaguely like it is based on the Glycemic Index or some other such approach to minimize wild blood sugar swings — and the hunger that yo-yo blood sugar “spikes” cause — yet it stops short of actually EXPLAINING anything in great depth or in terms you may recognize from diet & nutrition books. Hence, if you buy Weight Watchers brand frozen dinners, for example, you will find that a vast majority of them revolve around starchy white pasta. These are not “filling foods”, in my opinion, because the carb counts are off the charts and the vegetable content is surprisingly low coming from a diet food manufacturer.

In my experience, eating high carbs and low fat is a recipe for HUNGER. Dieters need a balance between protein, carbs and fat in EVERY meal or snack to really maximize fullness. But Weight Watchers makes no distinction between the fact that eating an apple with a handful of nuts or a bit of cheese is going to keep you much more full than eating that apple by itself or eating the nuts or cheese by itself. It’s the combo that works, yet Weight Watchers presently designates an Apple or just about any other fruit or vegetable as a “filling food” regardless of whether or not you combine it to achieve a good balance of carbs, fiber, fat and protein. That’s not adequate, in my experience, as someone who suffers from reactive hypoglycemia, as I suspect many who struggle with obesity do. The fact that a particular vegetable or fruit is unprocessed and has plenty of fiber and nutritional value does not “trick” my body into feeling full if there is no protein and/or fat to round it out. Thus, I think the diet approach advocated by the Zone, South Beach or similar diet is probably more realistic for someone who really struggles with hunger (vs. stress eating). Momentum doesn’t quite cross the threshold into telling dieters what they really need to know. And though Weight Watchers, on the whole, is the most highly vetted of all diets out there, they are surprisingly vague on the science. Since many of us dieters have “been there” and “done that”, it’s somewhat odd to join a weight loss program that doesn’t scratch much of the surface. Where is the book that goes into all the scientific details that Make Momentum, or any other plan they’ve advertised in recent years, work? Weight Watchers boils every new marketing campaign down to a pamphlet a 7th grader would find unchallenging. Fortunately, the mechanics of their system — a supportive atmosphere paired to religiously journaling your activity, weight and consumption habits — work.