WI results and a decision.

If you haven’t seen my wrap-up post on my two-week Clean Eating challenge, you can check it out here! As I promised at the end of that post, I’m back today with my weigh-in results.

So what did the scale say this morning? I was delighted to step on and see the numbers 169 staring back at me! That’s 2.6 lbs less than my last recorded weigh-in (171.6), and it’s actually 4.2 lbs less than the weight I saw on the Monday morning I started this challenge (173.2 – I guess I had a bad weekend before starting this plan!) So I’m not sure what to count as the official result of this challenge, but I think it’s 4.2 lb. Because that was my starting weight for the challenge, right?

So as you can see, this plan really worked for me, weight-wise. Funnily enough, I was eating MORE calories than usual – 1500-1700 a day, basically. And for the first week, I also tracked it in WW points, and I was eating anywhere from 30 – 35 points a day!! It was weird – when I look at 1500 calories a day, that seems like a reasonable amount, right? But when I looked at it as 32 points, I started to freak out! So I had to stop tracking points.

Maybe you can guess where this is going. For awhile I’ve been feeling like Weight Watchers may no longer be the right path for me, and this has further confirmed those feelings.

I have a few reasons for this.

1. I don’t think 23 points is enough food for me. I am pretty active (even without boot camp, my recent pedometer purchase has confirmed that I average around 12-13000 steps a day, which is quite a lot.) 23 points was equalling only about 1300 calories for me, most days.
2. The ‘flex points’ option seems to distort my ideas of what I can and can’t eat. Tracking calories gives me a set target every day. If I plan to go over that, I better work out, because there’s no ‘banked’ calories option. Although flex points worked for me in the beginning, I don’t think they do anymore – I think it was really bad for my body to eat 23 points on most days and then 55 points on Friday. That’s why every time I had too big of a splurge my body would hang on to it forever … it was getting harder and harder to bounce back from them, so I think I really have to keep a closer eye on them.
3. The above points are not really Weight Watchers FAULT per se, and I could just divide up my flex points evenly and aim to eat 27-30 points a day or something, but that’s just not working for me. I keep trying to work the system. Calorie counting seems to have less room for that.
4. I also like that calorie-counting gives me the freedom of eating more stuff. A lot of times I might want to add, say, a tbsp of hummus to something. But that’s only 35 calories, so not quite a point. And I hate to not get my money’s worth! So I’d either add two full tbsp so that it WOULD equal a point, or I’d skip it altogether. With calorie counting there’s none of that futzing around. 35 calories is just 35 calories.
5. This might be stupid reason, but I know that my weight loss is going to be much slower as I approach my goal, and I cannot stand going into the meetings and having a less-than-stellar weigh in. I am personally fine with my rate of my progess (most of the time), but for some reason weighing in like that just make me feel like crap! And I don’t like that feeling!

Soooo… for all those reasons and probably a few more, I will be stopping WW for now, and just counting calories and weighing in on my own.

I’m sure you guys will have all kinds of thoughts about that, and feel free to share them in the comments! I do honestly appreciate a good counter-opinion.

I HAVE set myself the mental safety-net that if I gain more than 5lbs, or if I find myself avoiding the scale because I suspect I’ve gained more than 5 lbs, I will be promptly marching myself back into my meeting. But for now I feel like it’s time to test my own wings.