Are you a Weight Watcher

I'm fascinated by the chameleon-like nature of weight loss advertisements. You've heard the new generation of that wants you to believe you can apparently now: "Stop dieting, start living. Weight Watchers works because it is not a diet."

Well I recently read a report on a blog by Michelle May that was very thought-provoking and captured pretty much my thinking about their new slogan.

But my first thought was if they really believe their new slogan, wouldn't it also be wise to change their name? After all being a 'weight watcher' is the most central principle of any diet. That should be your very first clue that this is still the same old diet it always was.

Weight loss advertisements are very clever. Wrap the same old product in different packaging and viola!, it takes on all sorts of magical new qualities - it's apparently a whole new product.

And when I spent all those years weight watching all the components of my diet (be that my weight, food, eating or exercise - or um... usually my lack of exercise) those things were pretty much what my thoughts were wrapped around.

Being a weight watcher definitely wasn't a way of starting to live more - it was a way of living less.

And it will be for you too. Unless your definition of starting to live is being even more focussed on your weight, food and eating. My definition of living in a joy-filled body doesn't!

Why Weight Watchers
is still a diet

Since when does a non-diet dictate how many points you can eat all day? That smacks of dieting mentality to me. I mean, did we come into this world naturally being a weight watcher and counting food points? I sure didn't, but I did spend plenty of wasted time and energy doing just that in the days when I was stuck in Diet City.

Michelle May in her blog asks:If it’s not a diet, then why:

• do you have to earn the right to eat more by exercising?

• do you have to be weighed in?

• how come vegetables are “free” instead of just good for you?

• then why do you have to weigh, measure and write down your food? (unless of course you choose their “Core” plan - then you can eat as much as you want ... but only of the foods they say are allowed).

• is everybody on it talking (and thinking) about food ALL the time?

And let me add:

• why are we 'good' when we stick to their plan and 'bad' when we don't? Isn't that the age old message of every diet? So it's not body driven - it's willpower driven, which is doomed to failure.

Weight watching =
food obsession

These two posts taken from the Mind over Fatter online forum illustrate this well.

"Every day I encounter "diet speak" that has been so embedded in peoples' thinking.....when my mother and i get together we talk about food and dieting such as " I've been good today so its okay to eat this or that" or..." this isn't a bad meal" or "I made meat pies today and ate 2 even though I shouldn't have. The thought of whether she is hungry or not never enters the equation."

"But what do women talk about? FOOD. If I think back to when I was on diet, I did this too : it's a 'safe' subject for discussion because it is so often the central focus of her life......but since I started on this path, I am realizing that the topic of food is an obsessive one, and I am interested in lots of other things besides food....."

* thinks about weight and food,
* talks about weight and food,
* reads recipe books and any weight loss tips they can find,
* thinks about when they'll be able to eat x or y again,
* dreams about food and so on.

And if weight watching increases these activities - then where's the logic? Becoming more focussed on the very thing I was apparently meant to eat less of never helped me.

And according to the law of attraction - if you're a weight watcher, well you have to keep attracting weight to watch!

There's more to
'start living'
than weight watching

There's so much more to life than just obsessing about food and eating. There's loving, living, laughing and a host of other wonderful things to have passionate conversations about, to think about, to read and dream about.

So yes, as Michelle points out,next time someone offers you food, instead of declining by saying: "I can't eat that... I'm on diet", just say:""I can't eat that... I'm on a lifestyle".

The focus of Weight Watchers is still weight loss - and not health gain, or joy-filled living. Remember the law of attraction - if you're focussed on living in a joy-filled body or on health gain - that's what you'll attract.

Weight Watchers still doesn't help you get your head to a place where you make self-loving healthy choices because you want to rather than because your eating points says that's what you should. It still has a sense of restriction which means when I stop I'm most likely to go overboard and binge because at the end of the day, my thinking about food and eating hasn't changed, nor have my fear levels about regaining the weight I've just lost.

Weight watchers doesn't help you figure out what's 'eating you' because this battle isn't about food and eating - it's about subconscious factors that keep us eating. It's about the personal growth journey we need to undertake.

Nor does it help you change your belief system around exercise - so you're likely to be doing it still thinking it's a chore and a bore, and that's not 'living'.

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