Weight Watchers wins my too much time on my hands competition....

As I indicated earlier, I have had a lot of time on my hands after my back surgery. So, I experimented with using a calorie tracker and weight watchers online system to track my food intake.  Weight watchers, despite the increased cost, wins.  Here are the top 11 reasons:

11) If a food item is not in the database, it is easier to enter it into Weight Watchers than a calorie counter. All you need are the carbs, fat, protein and fiber. You don't have to enter in the entire label, which is annoying and takes a long time.

10) Weight watchers has tons and tons and tons of awesome recipes on the site. You can enter in ingredients that you have in your pantry and the online software will actually find a kick ass recipe for you using your ingredients. This is good for me since I have decided that I finally need to start learning how to cook using recipes (Without recipes, I end up boiling shrimp in porters and boiling lettuce instead of collard greens, mmmmm........)

9) My sister, who lives in Ohio, is also on weight watchers, and we are doing a challenge together and can send each other messages and support on the site, which is cool. It is not cool that my sister lives in Ohio. She really should live in Seattle. But because, according to my friends, I am not allowed to force people to move to Seattle, we will have to do the online weight watchers support.

8) Weight watchers has this healthy checks function, which has you click a check box every time you drink a glass of water or eat a fruit or vegetable. It is a really good reminder that I do not ever drink enough water. I will note that some calorie counters have the clear liquid counting feature.

7) You cannot survive on weight watchers without eating tons of fruits and vegetables. Without fruits and vegetables, you end up eating around 1000-1200 calories a day, which sucks and would make me incredibly hungry. However,  you can eat as many fruits and vegetables as you want without penalty on the program. So, I figure, even if I were to gain weight with weight watchers, at least I would be eating a lot of healthy food while doing it.

6)  It is easier to get weight-losss benefits from exercise on weight watchers.  When I am in non-back injury mode and exercising several hours a week, I tend to eat at least enough calories to make-up for my work out and then some. Example: after a 1000 calorie run, I might have a 1200 calorie hamburger at red Robin with a beer as an after workout treat.  This plan of eating tons after I exercise does not relate to lots of weight loss. However, on weight watchers an activity point is worth far less than a food point. So,  if you trade activity points for food, you end up eating less than the amount you workout, making the workout a weight loss instead of a weight gain activity.

5) If you go over your point total for the week, your point deficit shows up in a nice bold red color. -5 points  remaining is what my online software says this week. This is good because it reminds me every time I look at it, that I cannot eat tons of food until my points reset for the week on sunday.

4) Even if you go over your points total for the week, everything starts fresh once a week on weight watchers. It is as if the krispy kreme donut spree(mmmmm donuts), the hamburger at red robin and the pounds of shrimp and salmon I ate last week disappeared into the ether. Every week, I get to try again and there is no penalty for being a dork the last week. Calorie counters just keep going and going and are constant reminders of my shortfalls.

3)  The weigh-in is very supportive. If you gain weight the computer provides a nice caring message about how things happen and how you will do better next week. If you lose weight, you get a really great message even if you only lose .1 pounds. And the fact is, that all of the weight I have lost over the last several years has stayed off mostly because I lost it in .1 pound increments. Better to lose slowly and stay thinner, than lose quickly and gain it all back.

2) There is a list of healthy food on the site and there are little green triangles next to super healthy foods and foods that will fill you up for very few calories.

AND THE NUMBER ONE REASON WHY WEIGHT WATCHERS IS BEST IS:

1) Weekly points. Without any remorse, I can choose to have a day where I go out with friends, eat a bunch of fries and hamburger and have a couple of beers. I just enter in my wonderful guttony into the online calculator and it subtracts my unhealthy food choices from my weekly points. Now, I can't do that every night (but wouldn't it be cool if I could), but I can go to the awesome pig roast I was invited to next weekend without worrying about whether the pork and mojitos would go to my thighs.