weight watchers

What is it exactly that's "over your head"? It's not a difficult program.

You get a certain number points a day, like MFP gives you a certain number of calories a day.

Every food has a points value.

Eat what you like until you hit your daily points value. You also have 49 "weekly" points that you can use as you see fit...spread them out over the week, or save them for a dinner out. Or don't use them at all. (I was on the WW minimum of 26 points a day, so I used some weeklies every day).

What is your question about the plan?

The mobile app isn't good for much except logging your food, so I don't know how much help you'll get from it.

And again....try the WW forums. There is a Newbie board there where people more knowledgeable than I am will be happy to help you.

afatpersonwholikesfood wrote: »

WW is great. I would happily use it if it was free. I think they do focus quite a bit on healthy eating, and I don't see how that's a bad thing. Common sense tells you that eating half a watermelon or 4 bananas every day because you think it's "free" isn't going to end well. Generally, though, people don't gain a lot of weight by filling up mainly on fruits and veggies.

I agree with you about if it was free and everything else you have written.

I have done both and have been more successful with MFP, probably because it seems simpler by design. You can look up how WW calculates points and just calculate them yourself if you don't want to pay for the program. It's something like fats, protein, carbs and fiber - http://www.calculator.net/weight-watchers-points-calculator.html.

In any case, I have known people that have been very successful with WW- it just boils down to personal preference.

Also the getting started guide is pretty straight forward. I used it a couple of times but I am a monthly pass member, so I have etools. I would also advise you to at least eat your daily points. I eat my daily points and weekly points but I learned from the past that I CAN NOT eat my activity points. I seem to over estimate my activity and when I don't eat them I lose a pound a week. If you attend meetings then talk to your leader. I've always found my leaders more than happy to help me understand. Good Luck.

NotGnarly wrote: »

I have done both WW and MFP and I lose better with WW. The accountability at the meetings keep me honest. As others have mentioned before fruits are not free and you can't just eat a ton of bananas and expect to lose and my leader has also mentioned this. She's always said, "let your weight loss be your guide". Points values are very easy and I find WW food tracking a lot more simpler than MFP. MFP does have a HUGE food database but I found that confusing because there were so many different cals posted for something as simple as a chicken wing. WW website IMO is more straight forward and I find the meetings very helpful. I guess it all depends on what works for you. Pick a plan and stick with it and don't try to combine calorie counting with points and vice versa.

That's a major problem with the MFP database. It was designed so users could add entries easily for different foods, but a lot of times people add one-off personal things that nobody else needs. It gets harder and harder to find "good" entries for some common foods since there very few options to filter.

It seems MFP has made some efforts to purge entries that aren't used, but it seems they need a means to "downvote" items so they get suppressed from the public search.

Also for those who might not know already, WW has added fitness watches such as garmin, fitbit, UP, etc. to their website. My fitbit automatically syncs to WW and I can clearly see that I was overestimating my activity in the past. My acitivity points (AP) adjust according to how active I am, so no more having to manually log AP.