Hello everyone! It’s Sarah, Meg’s sister, here to do another guest post on my weight loss efforts! After my first post last Saturday, I spent the rest of the weekend buying a scale, enjoying the warm, spring-like weather by getting one of those mega bubble wands for my girls to play with outside (always a hit) and reveling in my last few days of not being on a diet (I always have that initial resistance to starting a plan).
An old frenemy, the scale
So, first there’s the bad news. After going for a long period of time without weighing myself, I finally stepped on the scale again. And, no, it wasn’t pretty. I gained back almost all of the 25 pounds I lost when I did Weight Watchers the last time. I say “almost all” because there was one little pound that somehow managed to stay off, but the other 24 were definitely back in a major way.
I guess I could’ve been pretty upset about this considering the effort and time it took to get those 25 pounds off in the first place (plus, I still had more to lose), but I kind of knew this would be the case. When your clothes are tighter and you see differences in the mirror and in pictures, it becomes pretty obvious. But, the pounds clearly didn’t reappear overnight and getting sad about it wasn’t going to change the reading on the scale. I’m actually relieved that I didn’t gain back all of the weight and then some, which easily could’ve happened. So, after a quick internal “wah!”, I decided to focus my energy on my plan for getting it back off.
Now there’s good news. I officially started Weight Watchers on Monday because I’m kind of bad about starting this kind of thing on the weekend. After getting over that initial resistance I mentioned – that natural rebellion felt when starting anything that requires discipline and increased effort – I did the plan. Once I get started, I find that it’s not quite as hard as I expected. Plus, it really pays off. I stepped on the scale again this morning and found out that I had lost 8 pounds in less than a week!
I was really, really surprised. I always find that I lose more weight during the first week of Weight Watchers and then it slows down in subsequent weeks, but this is still higher than usual for me. I know part of it is water weight coming off, but that’s ok with me. It’s still highly motivating.
Another thing that’s surprising: I lost this weight after employing a few Weight Watchers tweaks, which includes adding a significant number of extra points to my daily tally. I mentioned before that I don’t think Weight Watchers is a perfect plan and one reason for that is I feel the number of points they recommend is too low, even with the 35 extra weekly points they added to the plan a few years back. I know Megan suspected that this was the case when she was doing Weight Watchers and found that her weight wouldn‘t budge.
There’s a book called Eat Fat, Lose Fat by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig that I’ve found extremely useful and informative. I plan to incorporate some of the principles outlined in this book while doing Weight Watchers. In the book, they explain that the body needs a certain amount of calories for basic functions of the body - like breathing, beating the heart, maintaining the organs etc. – and it’s a surprisingly high number. For example, they say a 132 pound woman needs about 1300 calories a day and a 154 pound woman needs about 1500. This doesn’t take any activity into account and even light activity increases the daily requirement by about 500-700 calories (or more for very active individuals). According to the book, if you don’t take in enough calories for the basic functions of the body, the body thinks it is starving and responds by slowing the metabolism and storing fat at a higher rate. You may lose weight initially, but once you go into starvation mode, “you cannot lose weight, no matter how little you eat”.
This information totally makes sense to me. I always knew that going too low in calories could result in this type of reaction in the body, but I assumed that the calorie requirement was much lower. So, I had to break out the math skills to figure out how many Weight Watchers points would be appropriate for me if I want to avoid starvation mode.
The number of calories for 1 Weight Watchers point can vary, but I found out that it is roughly 50 calories a point. Using the information from Eat Fat, Lose Fat, I divided my weight by .10 to figure out how many calories I need to support my basic bodily functions. Then I divided that number by 50 to get the base number of points I need for Weight Watchers. I will still take the extra 35 weekly points, which will help cover my calorie needs for daily activities.
The base number I came up with is about 14 points a day higher than what Weight Watchers recommends for me. I have to admit, this made me slightly uncomfortable at first and I worried it wouldn’t work. But, I found that it really isn’t that much extra food and I still feel slightly hungry in-between meals. Plus, seeing my results after this week has encouraged me that this is the right thing to do. After all, if you can lose weight by eating more, it’s definitely a win-win situation.
I’ll stop here before this gets too long. In future posts, I’d still like to discuss what I’ve learned from the other diet plans I’ve tried and from going through pregnancy. I’ll also talk about a few of the other tweaks I’m applying to my diet plan.
Have a great weekend!
