Weight Watchers Free - My Program

The following is a summary of the approach my team took to weight loss based on the Weight Watchers four pillars. But first, I will take you through the basic premise behind our competition.

How It Worked

Talk and Plan

• We set our goals to 5 months
• Developed our spreadsheet for the 5 months to input our data and formulate weight loss (click here for spreadsheet)
  > Found the BMI (Body Mass Index) ranges
  > Established our basic BMI goals
  > Weight, % Body Fat, Muscle (To do this accurately, we were lucky enough to have quality scales).
  > Body fat % is very important to us as it puts weight fluctuations into perspective and is a good measure of healthy weight loss.

Goals

The table below shows statistics for our weight at the start of the competition and our goal weight and BMI

Our weight at the start of the competition meant that we were facing the challenge of losing between 17 (Michelle) and 35 (Harold) pounds (7 and 10.5kg) over 5 months.

Why Compete?

The competitive approach that we took to the Weight Watchers program may not be for everyone, but for us it was a lot of fun and very motivating. We found the competition aspect of our journey to be particularly helpful for the Weight Watchers Psychological (Behaviour) Pillar.

• Reward: The person who lost the highest fat % for the week would be immune from putting money in the prize kitty
• Penalty: The other two team members had to put a specified amount of money into the prize kitty
• Reward: At the end of the weight loss competition, the person who had the most weeks of obtaining the highest fat % loss would win the prize kitty
• Penalty: We all agreed that whoever did not meet their goal will be required to bungee jump, something that we all feared

You could tone down the competitiveness of it if you liked, for example

• Minimize penalties applied to team members and just focus on rewards
• Or reward and penalize based only on personal performance, not relative to the performance of other team members

The last thing you want is for the competition to become a de-motivator.

4 Pillars

Food

Because we were friends, not only was the conversation surrounding the weight loss very easy and fun, but we ate out together regularly, making better choices consciously together. We could also discuss the types of choices that we made when eating out with other people and pin pointed problem areas in our diets.

Here are some of the things we focused on in respect to food as a team

• Made sure we drank plenty of water
• Discussed the foods that we enjoyed
• Focused on adapting to smaller servings of food, more times throughout the day
• Larger meals early in the day – light meals in the evening
• It was important for us to try many healthy foods and to give them a good chance. If it turned out there were certain foods we did not enjoy eating – then we would not bother with them
• Listed the foods we would eliminate or enjoy only occasionally
  > Soft drink
  > Milk tea
  > Roast duck
  > Oily or fatty foods at restaurants
  > Buttered popcorn
  > Baked pastries
  > Dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate
  > Fried chips
  > Potato crisps
  > Sugar as an ingredient
  > White rice and bread
• Listed the foods that would eat more of and incorporate into our diets
  > Brown rice
  > Vegetables
  > Fruit
  > Yoghurt
  > Rice Cakes
  > Drink more water
  > Salmon and Sashimi
  > Whole grain bread with seeds (I’m a big fan of the “Burgen Wholemeal and Seeds”, very tasty and healthy)
  > Bircher muesli for breakfast
  > Clear soups
  > Tuna – from a can, in a pasta dish (click here for recipe), in a salad, or with brown rice and vegetables just to name a few examples
  > Honey as a sweetener
  > Tea – even better without sugar, herbal such as green

Meeting (support)

• We decided to weigh in on a Monday. We enjoyed our meetings and it was a good motivating way to kick off the working week.
• It became a fun Monday tradition to meet at my office, conduct the weigh in, document our results then depart for dinner and maybe a movie. It became a fun and relaxing way to spend an evening.

Psychological (behaviour)

• Met once a week for weigh in – same day, same time, every week
• We tracked our progress on our spreadsheet which we filled in together at our weekly weigh-ins. It helped us to establish
  > If we were well on track to achieving our goal within the specified amount of time
  > If we were progressing at a suitable rate and what types of changes we needed to make and how hard we had to work to reach our goals.
• After weigh in we had dinner and caught a movie, a good opportunity to make better food and snack choices together

Exercise

• Walked or cycled to and from work
• Our team took up intensive boxing lessons in the park with our own trainer
• Changed the intensity of our workouts often relating it to our diet
• We recognised the necessity of both Cardio AND Strength training for females also!
• Established a list of the exercises that we enjoyed, ensuring they covered the different parts of our bodies
• Changed the exercises we did regularly so that we would be pushed and tested in different ways. This maximizes the efficiency of exercise.
• Made an effort to do 2 cardio and 2 strength training sessions or activities per week
• I don’t like the gym, so I do all my cardio at the park and my strength training at home with free weights and other exercises that don’t require equipment. My team mates on the other hand preferred the gym

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• Weight Watchers Free - Intro
• The Plan - Weight Watchers DIY Guide
  Two friends and I (2 males, 1 female) decided that we understood the concepts behind Weight Watchers fairly well. So then we figured, why not start our own team and do our own version of the Weight Watchers program for FREE!? So how did we get started?
• My Program: Current Page
  The following is a summary of the approach my team took to weight loss based on the Weight Watchers four pillars. But first, I will take you through the basic premise behind our competition.
• The Results
  We felt extremely confident on reaching our goal weight. We had a whole 5 months and just 5 or 6 kilos to lose each, coming out to just 250 grams a week. Here are our results
• Download Results
  Right-Click, Save to download our spreadsheet for detailed week by week results.
• Download Blank spreedsheet
  Right-Click, Save to download this blank spreadsheet for your own use