Brandon at Random Reviews

Weight Watchers

As a person who has lost tons of weight and put it back on and lost it again several times over, I’ve tried my share of diet plans. Keto, Paleo, Vegetarian, Atkins, Noom, and of course, Weight Watchers/Wellness Wins/WW. All of these have their perks and drawbacks, and obviously it always depends on the person for what’s best. But WW was my least favorite I tried. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I lost weight on it, but I really didn’t like it.

Let me give you a little explanation of how WW works nowadays for those of you that don’t know. And I’m going off of memories from 2 years ago so forgive me if it doesn’t cover everything accurately. You start off downloading the app. You answer a bunch of questions to help figure out what suits you weight loss-wise and what plan to put you on. You then get put on one of three plans: Green, Blue, and Purple. One gives you a number of daily points and allows you virtually any fruits and vegetables as “Zero Points Foods”, the next plan gives you fewer daily points but more Zero Point Foods from additional food groups, and the next plan allows even fewer points daily and even more Zero Point Foods. Every food has its amount of points based on caloric values and nutrients, and you have to plan your food intake accordingly to stay under your daily goal. But then you also have weekly points you can use when you want to treat yourself some days. You can choose to roll over daily points every day that you don’t use into your weekly points so you can cheat more. These weekly “cheat points” expire at the end of the week. It all seems kind of nifty, you just have to stick to the goals, right? Maybe.

The whole point of WW’s design is to teach you better eating habits and help you lose weight. Which is great. But it really doesn’t. It’s fucking trash.

My first problem is with any of these zero point foods on any of the plans. There is literally no limit for these foods. For one plan, the fruits and veggies seems harmless enough, but you can’t maintain or reduce your weight by eating endless amounts of these foods. Vegetables maybe, but fruits? They may have a lot of vitamins and nutritional value, but they also typically have a ton of sugar and are pretty calorically dense. You shouldn’t be able to eat an entire pineapple or down an entire bag of grapes with seemingly no consequences and act like it’s showing you how to eat right. It gets worse with the other tier plans that allow you to have a greater variety of zero points foods. Chicken, fat free yogurt, brown rice, beans, avocados, fish, whole wheat pasta, and many others. You can’t just eat this type of shit nonstop and expect no consequences. All I suggest is to maybe reduce those point values from what they would normally be when you calculate food points. That’s it. Problem solved.

Ultimately when I tried WW I got to a certain point where I would either not lose or just plain gain weight, so I switched over to my tried and true methods.

My Weight-Loss(es)

I’m a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to dieting. I’m a big proponent of straight-up calorie counting and eating daily calories at a deficit. Calories in/calories out. And being more active. And hating yourself. And reminding yourself you don’t deserve a treat. And looking at that scale every morning with complete disdain. Fuck.

I feel that even with my discomfort with trying to be confident, I can honestly say I’ve mastered getting into the groove and losing all the weight I want to when I decide it’s what I want to do. I don’t have as much control over the amount of time it takes to hit my goal as I want but what can you do? The hard part for me is keeping that pesky weight off. I’m dying to hit my goal of being somewhat perma-sexy. At least kind of perma-not chubby.

I think one of my bigger frustrations in dieting is this: when I’m in my unhealthy state and significantly obese, the only one who has the heart to pipe up is my doctor at a physical. And I’m not saying people who aren’t doctors should do that to people, because that’s a bad idea. But I’m saying that all of a sudden when there is visible weight loss, all people want to do is ask how much I’m planning on losing and how much I’m eating everyday in a sort of investigative way. They’ll say they think I might be losing too much based on absolutely nothing and that I’m eating too little. My doctor told me to do this. My doctor told me last summer she was good with what I’d lost so far and then said that I needed to keep at it in January when I saw her again. I am now in the high end of a healthy BMI range based on my height and weight. I intended to get to my goal weight which is in the middle of that range. Enough said. Don’t be the person who was more worried that I was losing too much weight than they were about just commenting about how much I’d put on behind my back. Not cool.

The Foods

A lot of people ask me “Brandon, what the heck do ya eat when you’re on a diet?” And that’s obviously a loaded question, but I try to answer. I eat a lot of protein/meal replacement bars. Always have a protein bar for breakfast and when I’m working it’s one for lunch too. I love the Costco ones that come in 4 different flavors. I do that in order to make food as little of a production as possible. When I do eat non-bar based meals, I often make- gasp -meatless/faux meat products. I find that MorningStar Farms has great lower calorie options and I think they taste pretty good too. They have faux corn dogs, boneless buffalo wings, taquitos, pizza bites, nacho bites, chik’n nuggets, black bean burgers, and other burger patties. I thoroughly enjoy their products, I just pop em in the air fryer and let it rip. Once I picked up some pineapple and teriyaki chicken meatballs from Costco that were really good. As far as snacks, I do fruit, some veggies, low-cal snack bars, low-cal ice cream (Halo Top has some wonderful products), dark chocolate-dusted almond 100-cal packs, and I generally just try shit that has the right calorie counts and seems like it’d be decent. Then I drink an irresponsible amount of energy drinks and my Crystal Light fruit punch that I have a wonderful tutorial video for that you should check out.

The other thing is that I observe my own personal 1200-1500 calorie plan. I generally try to stick to the 1200, but if I have a rough day or temptations get the better of me, I will allow myself up to 1500 calories. This has seemed to work very well, although I must admit that I try and keep the 1500 days to a bare minimum for fear that it will then become a habit.

The Habits

I rarely snack between meals, especially during work. I know that they say it’s good to have more small meals throughout the day, but that makes me feel like I’m constantly eating all day and that’s not good for me. I also have an issue with grazing, you know eating casually between major meals. I have a bad tendency to do that and eat while I’m doing stuff like watching movies or…well basically just that, I have no life to speak of. These are things I’ve done differently than the last dozen times I’ve dieted.

Another thing I try to stick to is to avoid any instances of cheating. I will not bother giving myself an inch (such as one Oreo cookie) of indulgent foods so that I can potentially open up the door to take a mile (such as one entire cheesecake). In my experience, I have not been able to indulge in those unhealthy urges without letting it all come crashing down. You can if it works for you. Some people are able to diet by eating whatever they want, just consuming in moderation. I don’t know any of them personally that this has worked out for, but I’ve heard tales about it.

For me, I eat almost completely different foods when I diet. Snacks, meals, whatever…there isn’t a ton of overlap between my diet foods and my non-diet foods. This might seem odd, but it’s important for me to tell myself “this is diet food/this is not” and adhere to that philosophy with a psychotic level of discipline.

One thing I did this time around is not hardly consume alcohol. I did drink some wine when I visited my sister and brother-in-law because they’re a couple of fucking lushes. But I still stayed within my daily goals and that shit is hard to do on vacation.

One thing I have generally always done successfully while dieting is to track everything I eat. And you should too. Sure, I generally will skip some food occasionally or it’ll just slip my mind, but I always have an idea in the back of my head of what my running total is. I use the MyFitnessPal (MFP) app to track, it’s pretty much all you need and the free version gives you all the necessary features to be successful. Sure, you could splurge on the premium version if you want to track more nutrients and set more tailored goals for yourself, but generally the non-paid is all you need. It lets you look up foods easily or scan barcodes on food, you just have to be careful and make sure it’s accurate. There are definitely some other similar apps out there, but generally I always come back to the tried and true MFP.

Exercising

Physical activity is one I find myself doing in spurts when I diet. I walk. A ton. Then I don’t walk. At all. And I actually have been avoiding it more this time around since I know I won’t actually make a real habit of it once the weight loss is through. I do like my walks, it gives me a chance to listen to music and free my mind and take in my surroundings. I don’t generally do weights and lifting because I know how intimidated by me you’d all be if I were some ripped meathead looking dude. These are the sacrifices I make. For you people.

People say that exercising and doing things releases endorphins and stuff, but as a person who is generally very depressed and anxious, I guess I’ve just never found that to be true for me. I just don’t get happy for nothin’ y’all. It’s the fucking worst thing ever.

The Miracle Cure

If you’re looking to shed some weight, you can absolutely ask me what I do to be so successful and I will recite this entire blog post back to you if you’d like. Or maybe I’ll just like tag you in it or send it to you or something. But seriously, I’m happy to help, but understand that there is no secret solution to this thing. You can’t get around what you have to do to make it work if you really want to lose weight. You’re gonna be hungry. Let that hunger drive you. You’re gonna want to let yourself cheat. Slap that piece of cake right out of your own fucking mouth you candy-ass piece of shit, have some fucking willpower. Like that annoying Rolling Stones song with the kids singing says: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and it’s pretty true. Learn to deny yourself. If you can’t do that and you don’t want to change, then you are lost. You’ve got to want it bad enough and then you’ve got to want it even more every time you step on the scale.

When I worked at Meijer I had a coworker approach me after I had lost 65 lbs and say “So what are you doing to lose all this weight? And DON’T say diet and exercise, I WON’T DO IT!” That person was obviously a complete asshole, a delusional one to boot. But that’s what people want, a easy solution they don’t have to work for. Take this pill, you’ll lose weight. Try these multi-level marketing pyramid scheme Saran wrap things that you tightly wrap around your torso to shrink your gut, it works I swear it! Supplements, ointments, pills, sensory deprivation tanks, or whatever else they come up with. None of it works the way hard work and discipline do. Quit being such a little bitch.

After Weight-Loss Philosophy

I cannot emphasize enough that I’ve done this multiple times, so obviously the part I’m not great at is keeping this fat off. This time around it is my intention, when I hit my goal weight, to continue on. Tracking calories, adjusting my daily allotment of calories to suit a maintenance-type plan, weighing-in daily to know if I begin to stray, remain fairly active, and continue with eating the foods that have made me successful to that point, just with planning a few hundred more depending on what different websites say about it.

People often say that it’s not dieting, it’s a lifestyle change and that you need to do it for the rest of your life in order to be successful. I find that this must be true because every time I’ve hit my goal, I inevitably revert back to those old bad habits. This doesn’t happen immediately, mind you, but it does happen. I remember one time it was a BBQ pizza that wasn’t even that great, and I fucking ate almost the whole stupid fucking thing. I can’t let this kinda shit happen this time around.

Compliments

After a while, when you start to look physically different, people will start to point it out to you and say nice things and ask what you’ve been doing. They’ll say things like “Lookin’ good, Brandon!”, “Wow, you’ve really lost a lot, how much are you down?”, “You are so sexy right now, I can hardly stand it!”, or “Let me bear your children, Brandon!” and that’s all very nice to hear, but I never really know how to respond.

Conclusion

If you’re looking to shed some poundage, you can assume there will be some hurdles, but you don’t have to spend money on one of those paid weight loss plans to get there. Do what you know in your heart you can do and don’t settle for any less. I love all of you people, definitely far more than I love myself, so give it a whirl. No gimmicks, no stupid fads, just good ol self loathing and keeping on keeping on.

Don’t let your story be one about how you fell off the horse once and never got back on. Make your story a success story, one about perseverance. Kick life in the face, and let it know who’s boss. Godspeed.

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”

-Wall Art Available at Wal-Mart

*I am not a nutritionist or dietitian. I have no educational background on this subject. This is for entertainment purposes only.