Weight Watchers Diet Plan

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Weight Watchers is another of the old-time standby diet programs, with over forty years in the business and an estimated 1 million followers across the globe at any given time. One of the reasons this weight loss plan has continued success is the focus on overall health: mental, emotional and physical.
Weight Watchers provides the tools and guidance to change the way you eat and live. Rather than tell you exactly what to eat, they provide the information, knowledge, tools and motivation to help you to make healthy food decisions and engage in an active lifestyle.
Group meetings are held worldwide to help you through the weight loss process, but even if there isn’t one near your home or place of employment, you can find community and support online.

Basic Diet Tenets/Nutritional Philosophy (5)

The four tenets of the Weight Watchers program are Eat Smart, Move More, Helpful Habits, and Get Support. In the Eat Smart category, Weight Watchers provides common sense advice, Weight Watchers PointsPlus program that allows you to choose what you want to eat, and prepared meals available for purchase at supermarkets, online, and in Weight Watchers Meeting Locations. There is also an extensive listing of recipes and meal suggestions available in books, at meetings, and online.
Helpful Habits are built on learning what is best for you body, nutritionally and otherwise. By changing the way you live, and developing healthy eating habits and exercise routines, you can take the weight off and keep it off long term. Weight Watchers wants you to sustain the weight loss, not bounce up and down on the scale.
Support is offered to help you reach your Weight Watchers goal. Members are encouraged to attend weekly meetings that include confidential weigh-in, information about weight loss and healthy habits, and will allow you to share with other members and gain insight and ideas into weight loss.
If you do not live near a Weight Watchers center, you can follow Weight Watchers Online, which is a customized online weight loss plan that you follow-step-by-step.

Exercise/Fitness Component (2)

Weight Watchers recognizes exercise can be a very important part of the weight-loss journey While on the plan you can earn additional PointsPlus values by exercising. Weight Watchers Online offers workout ideas, sample exercise demos, articles on basic fitness and exercise modalities and tips to learn to love exercise, an important component of the program.

Food (4)

Weight Watchers employs a PointsPlus program and assigns values to hundreds of foods, both prepared and fresh, based on protein, fat, fiber, and calories. You use these PointsPlus values to keep track of what you eat. It's not too terribly complicated or different from counting basic calories or carbs, but it does require you to be vigilant and stay within your points "budget." The new PointsPlus program is based on new scientific research and means that most produce—both fruits and veggies—will count as zero PointsPlus values. This means you can snack on grapes, enjoy juicy mandarins at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and double up on the lettuce for your salad. The PointsPlus Program encourages the addition of more fruits and vegetables into the diet, which are healthier and can help fill you up faster and better than other low-calorie foods. In addition to the healthy produce, the plan emphasizes lean meats and whole grains, both components of any healthy diet.
Another feature, to help you plan and shop—and keep within your PointsPlus target—is the addition of “power foods.” Weight Watchers makes it easy for you to find these easily in the supermarket by providing detailed options in every section of the store, from the cereal aisle to the dairy case. Over 40,000 real life branded products are listed on the site, helping you to choose the items that are lowest in points and healthiest for you.
Weight Watchers allows your to prepare your own foods utilizing their extensive recipe collection, or you can purchase prepared foods at your supermarket, Weight Watcher meeting location or online. There is also a Dining Companions (a book for members) and phone applications to help you track PointsPlus values at restaurants, including items at national chains like Applebees, Olive Garden, Quiznos, Dunkin Donuts, and McDonalds, among others.
Prepared food includes chilled ready meals (available at Hannaford Markets, Stop&Shop and Giant Food stores), cheese, yogurt, frozen ice cream items, cookies/brownies/muffins, bread/English muffins, pita, and frozen Smart Ones meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner options).

Ease of Use (4)

You have the choice of meetings or using Weight Watchers Online to help you learn all the things necessary to follow the program and change your lifestyle and eating habits. All-encompassing, you will to relearn about food, how to calculate PointsPlus values, and the motivation to stick with it.