Thursday, 5 September 2013
Battling the kilos with Weight Watchers! :D
Dear readers,
As some of you might
now, I have been battling the kilos for a while now. As weight loss is
quite a hot topic lately, I thought I should share my experiences with you. Since
I can imagine some people are just anxious to know if the diet works and would
not care to read about my motivations for starting a diet, I have divided this
post up in two sections. Feel free to jump to the second section if you are
just interested in the program itself. And for those of you who really don’t
give a hoot about diets: don’t worry, this is one of the two posts in total
that I will post on this topic. The second post is of course going to be when I
actually attain my goal.
Why did I go on a diet?
Many of you may
wonder: why did I want to lose weight? More importantly I was starting to feel
really insecure about myself. I was pretty much whining to myself about not
liking the fat on my back and that I started to outgrow my clothes (seeing that
I am rather proud of my collection of cute, adorable and witty shirts, this was
a pretty big issue for me). I was basically now stuck in between normal sizes
and big girl sizes. One day I was getting really sick of my own whining (which
I mostly did to myself, so most of you will not have known that it was an issue
at all lol), I looked it to diets picked one and signed myself up for Weight
Watchers. Although I have a tendency to grow a little impatient with people who
complain about something which they can easily change, with myself I absolutely
have 0 tolerance for this hahaha. (Please note that I don’t mean that losing
weight is easy for everyone! Some people really struggle to lose weight and
still only lose a few pounds.
Ever since I started
studying (which is now about 7 years ago) I started to gain weight. When I
started at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, which is a University College, I
weight 68 kg. When I started Weightwatchers I had gained 13 kilos (over
6 years); I weighted 81 kg! So yes, time for a drastic change. I decided that I
wanted to lose 12 kilos, which would put me on my healthy weight (my height is
169 so I should weigh 69 kg) and a healthy BMI.
Why not aim even lower and be all nice and skinny? One word: HIPS! I have naturally wide hips (those are bone, not fat), so if I loose too much weight, I will end up like this (but without the sexy vibe):
(All credit to Amy Mebberson for this awesome artwork!)
Although this might look cute (and awesome!) on the artwork, in real life we would call this disproportionate lol.
Ok, so does Weight Watchers actually work?
I would say; definitely. It has been about 3,5
months since I joined Weight Watchers community. I decided to only follow the
online program as I do not have the time to attend the meetings. Plus I believe
I don’t really need the support of a coach; I am pretty confident I can do this
on my own. The online subscription allows you to log into the website and keep
track of what you eat and drink as well as how much exercise you are getting.
The program is very straight
forward. When you get started you are asked to enter your weight, height and
age online. Based on this information the system will determine how many
propoints you are allowed to eat each day. Using the handy (and very easy to
navigate) online logbook, you can keep track of everything you eat and can
check the number of points the things you eat and drink are. So you really need
to keep an eye on what you eat (but don’t worry, at a certain point you will
just know by heart how many points some of the food and drinks are). Next to
your day points you also get 49 week points. You can use these week points for
the times when you want to go out to dinner with your boyfriend or family, you
have been craving for fries so long that you dream about them (thankfully that
hasn’t happened to me yet), or even go on a holiday (try finding a healthy, low
calorie breakfast in England… nope the local pub doesn’t do those!) etc. You
are allowed to actually use up all of your week points, though I would advise
everyone to avoid using too much of them.
The activities that you
do might award you active propoints; you are encouraged to eat 50 to 75% of the
active points which you have earned. In order to track how much walking I do
when I for example go to work, I bought a weightwatchers pedometer. This nifty little
device will tell you if you have taken enough steps to earn one or more
propoints. It’s really awesome.
Although I had to give
up on eating cheese sandwiches and drinking lots of milk (apparently there’s a
lot of sugar in milk o.o) the program has been really easy to follow and to
uphold. Especially since you can sometimes just use some of your week points
and eat a piece of pizza or some fries without having the urge to kill yourself
(you will often still lose weight if you just stick to your day points on the
other days! :D). It’s good to note here that Weight watchers is definitely not
a crash diet, but an actual change in your lifestyle. So if you, like me, have
the tendency to put on weight easily, this is definitely the diet for you as
you can also still follow the program to keep your weight balanced.
The only problem that I
have had so far is that I have not been able to find the time to actually do
some sports. Whenever I have some spare time (:O THE HOLY GRAIL!) I am usually
so exhausted that I simply can’t do anything at all. Example of how it usually goes:
I had actually planned to start swimming once a week as per this week… and then
my teacher gave me a two week deadline in which I need to finish a large part
of a chapter and told me I had to teach class once a week (needless to say,
panic ensued).
However, even without
going to the gym or swimming I have been able to lose 7 kilos already! Today
the scales indicated that I weigh exactly 74 kilos! :D Whoot! So Weight Watchers
also works if you have one heck of a busy life and don’t get that much exercise!
Would it have gone faster if I had exercised? Undoubtedly. However, I believe
it is pretty amazing that I have already lost over half the weight which I
accumulated over six years(!) within 3,5 months! So yes Weight Watchers definitely
works! :D
So now I just have 5
more kilos to go. It would be totally awesome if I could get those off before
Christmas!
Are you trying to lose
weight and would you like to share your experiences with me? Then please leave
a comment. I always read and reply to them :D. I will also be more than happy
to answer any questions you might have about the weight watchers program.
Love,
Blacky
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