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Imagine the promise of it all! "Lose weight fast!" and "Eat the foods you want and watch the pounds vanish!" and "Forget about killing yourself with sweaty workouts." (Ahem. And just ignore the fine print: "Actual results will vary.")
These promises come almost verbatim from a brochure that landed in my mailbox this week. Each page pushed the hot buttons of my post-Christmas, calorie-conscious mindset. Fast! Easy! No work! No forbidden foods! Oh yes -- and Guaranteed!
Right.
Don't we all wish it were that easy? If only wish we could eat all the bacon and eggs and pancakes we want for breakfast, all the chicken salad we want for lunch, all the pizza we want for supper, all the cookies and cake and ice cream we want for dessert.
And the truth is -- some people and some diets do make losing weight look easy. But some of us have to work harder at it. We bypass the cabbage diet, the peanut butter diet, the ice cream diet, the never-eat-fruit-again diet and all the other crazy schemes out there. We spend months, some times years, to take off pounds the old-fashioned way, by eating healthfully, by exercising often. For us, there's no quick fix, just steady, week by week results.
Earlier this week, I asked the readers of my own websites where the Weight Watchers recipes will be especially popular for the next few weeks, for their best tips for losing weight.
TEN TIPS for LOSING WEIGHT FROM PEOPLE WHO FOLLOW WEIGHT WATCHERS
"My best diet strategy is to put my husband on a diet!!!"
"Tell everyone you're on WW and go to meetings and participate. Screw being embarrassed. Embrace that YOU are doing something to be healthier and look better while others continue to talk about it."
"My best strategy for achieving/maintaining a healthy weight for me is to use smaller plates -- my daily plate size is 7 inches across ... I can fill up that plate to overflowing, but still because it is small the portion size isn't too much."
"My best strategy for achieving/maintaining a healthy weight for me is ... taking the decisions out of eating. I make one or two healthy dishes over the weekend and package them in single serving portions. That's what I eat for dinner all week long."
"My best strategy for achieving/maintaining a healthy weight for me is exercise! I exercise one hour 5 days a week."
"My best tip is to get on a body fat scale daily. If I am making progress I see it and am encouraged. If not, I notice and get back on track."
"My best strategy for achieving/maintaining a healthy weight for me is to use the Weight Watchers app on my phone. It's the easiest way for me to make myself keep an accurate log."
"My best strategy for achieving/maintaining a healthy weight for me is to keep that food diary/points faithfully. It's really hard to lie to yourself about how much you've eaten if it's written right there on the page."
"Probably my best tip is when eating out - NEVER have the salad dressing that 'comes with' - I carry fat free in my purse (I don't trust that their idea of "lite" is the same as mine), or I ask for 4 or 5 lemon wedges that I squeeze over the salad. That's surprisingly good!"
"My best strategy for achieving/maintaining a healthy weight for me is ... to plan my meals. I usually shop on Sundays and cut veggies and cook meats for 3 - 4 days worth of meal. I'll freeze what I don't plan to eat in that time so that it can be thawed out when I don't have time to plan/prepare."
For even more tips for losing weight with Weight Watchers, check out my own tips about How to Lose Weight with Weight Watchers, especially the common-sense advice from readers in the long list of comments. Plus -- add your own weight loss tip to this post and enter to win a kitchen scale!
Given the number of folks who follow Weight Watchers, given the importance of maintaining a healthy weight, given the growing health crisis related to obesity, you'd think there would be more food bloggers who calculate nutrition and Weight Watchers points.
But there are only a handful of us -- perhaps because it takes discipline to weigh and measure as we cook; perhaps because it takes extra work to calculate the nutrition information for every recipe; perhaps because, well, calculating nutrition would expose
