Goodbye to Weight Watchers

As most of you know, I have been on the Weight Watchers"123 Success!" program for about 10 months now. I honestly expected that by this summer, a full year on the program, I would have lost 50 lbs and been down to my ultimate goal weight. WW worked for me in the past and I had every faith that it would work again.

But here's the thing: I have only lost 12 lbs. Yes, I suppose that is better than nothing, but it's not earth shattering by any means. I realize that Weight Watchers, or any program for that matter, cannot be 100% responsible for whether or not its members lose weight. It's not as though they follow you around all week and make you eat healthy food. For me, though, it has gotten to a point where going to the meetings is no longer inspirational. In fact, it's the opposite. Every time I leave a meeting on Fridays, I am upset, frustrated, and downright disgusted.

I refuse to sit through another meeting where a 130 lb. waif complains that the "weight has just come off sooooo slowly... it's been like a pound a week, and it's sooooo hard." A pound a week?! Give me a break. Most of us are lucky if we average out half a pound a week. The last person who said that she has had a really hard time of it and that the weight has come off really slow and has taken her a long time made me perk up a bit, interested in her story and whether she was like me or not. When the instructor asked her how long she'd been coming to meetings, her reply was "I've been a member since January (and it was April)." I almost got up to leave. She reached her goal weight in less than four months and she's giving us some sob story about how LONG it took??

The other thing that bothers me about the Weight Watchers "Success" program is the food they sell under the Weight Watchers name. At the grocery store, I can buy a 1 point fudge bar that is delicious. But if I eat two of them, they don't equal 2 points total, it equals 4 points total. 4 points! The zero point soup is the same way. If I eat one serving, it's zero points, hoorah! But if I eat the entire can, which is 2 servings, it's 3 points! See a pattern here? Basically, they are bringing the calories and fat in their products to the absolute edge of what's acceptable for the amount of points they want to label it with. The 1 point fudge bar is so close to being 2 points that if you eat 2, it's 4 points. However, instead of putting 2 points on the box which is really closer to the truth, they put 1 point and then sit back and laugh at us all as we eat them and only count them as 1 point. Then we wonder why we gained weight while they take their precious $40 a month.

Think of it this way, if everyone lost weight on their program and was successfully losing an average of 1 pound a week, they would lose millions of dollars. Do they really want us to be successful when they are getting so rich off of our desperation? I am not convinced they really have my best interests at heart. So, with that being said, I am going to stop paying them $40 a month and stop going to these meetings that make me feel worse every week. Instead, I am going to think about what did work from that program and create my own diet plan. If it takes me 10 months to lose the rest of this 40 lbs that I want to lose, I'll just give myself a $400 bonus because of all the money I saved doing it on my own. And I'll go buy a really sexy little size 6 dress. :)