Showing posts with label Weight Watchers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Weight Watchers. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Well, well, well, what do we have here?















For years I have been complaining about Weight Watchers not allowing their members to eat as much fruit as they want.

In my "What is a diet" post, I talk about how my mother-in-law used to eat only a half a banana because it was "too many points" to eat the whole thing and how absurd that seemed to me.

That's not a diet. That's The Idiot's Guide to Eating.

Under the old Weight Watchers' point system, “You could be holding an apple in one hand, which was two points, and you could be holding a 100-calorie snack pack of Oreos in the other hand, which was also two points."*, meaning eating an apple was seen as the same as eating a small bag of Oreos.

I'm sorry, but that's one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. Not to mention unhealthy.

Well, it looks like somebody was listening to my complaints because now—finally!—Weight Watchers has decided to let their members eat as much fruit and vegetables as they want. As The New York Times points out, "All fruits and most vegetables are [now] point-free."

Hurray!

As The Times explains, this is a huge change for the nearly two million devotees of the national dieting program who are used to counting every grape, banana, and pear: "Their world [has] been rocked . . . A 31-year-old teacher from Midtown Manhattan who had barely touched a banana in six years wanted to know if she could really consume them with impunity."

Yes, it's really true. You can now eat bananas until your stomach is full and your heart is content.

Guess I know what I'm getting my mother-in-law for Christmas.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Sea change?














I don't know if any of you have picked up on this, but I've been sensing a sea change about the dieting issue that is making me feel very optimistic.

I've talked before about Glamour magazine's commitment to featuring women of all sizes and the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty's focus on regular-looking women, but lately, I've been witnessing more and more changes in the way we talk about weight loss that make me wonder if there isn't a real paradigm shift going on.

First, Weight Watchers changed their entire approach to weight loss. No longer are they narrowly focused on dieting, and they are so committed to this change that they've incorporated it into their new slogan, which is now "Stop dieting. Start living."

Then, I opened the latest issue of Glamour magazine and read a response that completely caught me off guard.

A reader had written to the magazine's health expert and asked, "I did a cleanse and then gained weight. Did it mess up my metabolism?"

I'm not going to lie—when I read this, I just automatically assumed that the answer would be wishy washy and inconclusive, but I was wrong because this is what Dr. Joann Manson had to say: "In a sense, yes. Many cleansing diets are fewer than 1,000 calories a day; eating that little for a week or more could trigger your metabolism to slow down and conserve calories. When you begin eating normally again, any calories above your new metabolic rate get stores as fat and could cause weight gain."

Call me crazy, but aren't cleanses just the kind of thing women's magazines were encouraging women to do a year ago? And now they're warning people about them? Not only that, but they're pointing out what I've been saying on this blog for a year and a half—in the long run, diets make you gain weight.

And finally, I am ashamed to admit that I was "reading" an issue of People Style Watch recently—reading probably isn't the right word since the sole purpose of that magazine is to feature celebrities in the latest fashions—and I was thrilled to see that in their "What's In and What's Out" column, lifestyle changes were listed as IN, and diets were declared OUT. According to People, "Instead of crash dieting or going on cleaanses, people are learning to eat healthy for a lifetime.

Is it be possible that people are finally getting it? That they're starting to finally understand that being healthy is not about cutting sweets or carbs or drastically reducing calories, but about living your life in a way that embraces moderation and health?

I'm not totally sure that the majority of Americans are catching on, but I do think the media is starting to get it. They're starting to get that we are sick to death of being told we have to be anorexic-looking to look good and that we have to eat 1,000 calories a day to be thin.

And all I have to say is it's about damn time.