I have been attending Weight Watchers since early January, and have had good results (over 36 lbs lost as of my weigh in on June 6). If you are having difficulty getting started on your weight loss goals, I recommend them as a sane, safe and reasonably effective way to get jump started. It’s definitely easier to get started when you have somebody independent who is going to be monitoring your progress.

But in a way I think it is kind of childish for me to need this kind of independent auditing. It’s not like I can’t figure out how to eat better/less or how to exercise. In my prime I ran about 20 miles a week, and weighed a svelt 208 lbs (I’m 6’5″ tall). I’ve read lots of nutrition books, and know the healthy benefits of vegetables, fruits and whole grains. I know that moderating meat consumption and eliminating transfats can have health benefits. The problem is that I am (or at least was) kind of lazy, and wasn’t willing to work to make serious improvements. But as I approached my 40th birthday, I was suddenly aware that every year I put off trying to get my weight down was a year it would only become harder. Suddenly, a threshold was crossed, and I knew I had to do something. While I initially lost 16 pounds on my own in the span of two months, I decided I would join Weight Watchers. Other people I know have had good results, and what could it hurt?

Our Weight Watchers meetings consist of 95% females, most of whom who are fifty or older. For them, losing weight is probably a great deal more difficult: exercise is simply that much more difficult, and let’s face it, as we get older it seems harder to change our habits. But for the most part, their problems are not my problems, and my solutions are not their solutions. It’s nice to get some positive reinforcement as you reach goals, but the positive reinforcement of wearing the A’s jersey that last year was tight and now is appropriately baggy is much greater for me.

There really isn’t much magic about Weight Watchers. It really only works if (and only if) you are willing to take some positive steps to control your eating habits and increase your exercise level. The rest is really details, but they aren’t details that are especially hard to grasp. The key so far for me is:

Planning

I actually eat fairly balanced meals if and when I eat them at normal times. It’s the unplanned meals and snacks that kill me. The five or six Cokes during the day that I use to consume, or the quick stop at McDonald’s to have a burger to eat during the commute home. The simple cure for this is to plan your meals ahead of time. By two or three o’clock each day, I’ve got my dinner planned out so that I know what I am going to eat, and I won’t fall into temptation later out of laziness.

Substitution

It shouldn’t shock you that Haagen Das is not the best snack food, although it was a common one for me. The second key is to eliminate bad choices from your immediate environment, and replace them with choices that you like just as much. For me, a good substitute is fresh pineapple or strawberries. My wife likes watermelon. Both are low in calories per gram, and make much better snack foods than ice cream. We replace sour cream with fat free sour cream (really tastes good on potatoes).

Monitoring

To stay focused, you need to keep track of where you were and where you are going. For instance, initially I was losing weight at a rate of greater than 2lbs per week, but now I am settling into a more gradual 1lb or so. It feels like I haven’t been losing as quickly, but if I refer to my graph, I can see that I’ve dropped over 7 lbs in the last six weeks. Monitoring your weight gives you not only negative but considerable positive feedback. For instance, I find that in weeks where I have modest gains, I frequently follow with a week of strong losses. This is undoubtably due at least in part to negative feedback: I redouble my efforts in the following week. Were I not monitoring my progress, I’d likely drift up more before catching myself. This wastes time and delays the ultimate achievement of my goals.

I suspect that virtually any plan which contains these elements would likely work as well as Weight Watchers, at least for me. The Hacker’s Diet contains at least some of these elements, and places a greater emphasis on exercise, which is probably good. I’m reading through it now to see if there is some ideas that I could use in conjunction with my lifestyle changes. I do like it overall because of its greater emphasis on rationality and measurement, rather than support and rote application of ideas like Weight Watchers.

If this sounds like a criticism of Weight Watchers, it really isn’t. In spite of the fact that I am not in the middle of their typical demographic, I’ve had good results with them, and they have been instrumental in helping me clean up my eating habits. Ultimately though I suspect I will do better if I can apply some of my personal strengths (science and math) to this particular problem. Making informed choices and changes is simply easier for me when I have and use more information.