Low Carb Diets: Weight Watchers

By Jonathan Berohn

I’m sure you’ve all seen Fergie shilling for Weight Watchers on TV.  She certainly makes a great spokesperson as she demonstrates quite well that Weight Watchers can work.

Apparently they don’t like the idea of losing market share (and really—that’s no surprise) to all the new low carb players, so they’ve crafted a low carb approach, too.

In addition to their traditional plan, they have a new low carb version you can try instead.  As a first step, you can learn more about Weight Watchers at their website.  You can also sign up for an online meeting substitute and manage your diet virtually.

For those of you that don’t know, the meeting is the central feature of the Weight Watchers approach.  Basically, you show up at weekly meetings where you weigh in and listen to motivational type speeches and practical tips that are supposed to help you re-train your body to eat in a healthier manner.  The second part of Weight Watchers approach is the food diary, where you write down what you eat every day and—traditionally—count up food “points” to make sure you don’t overeat.

Again, as Fergie demonstrates, it can work well.  The switch to the low carb option, though, seems to abandon some of the very strengths of the Weight Watchers program.  One thing Weight Watchers stresses is that you can eat anything you want as long as you eat it in moderation and compensate by eating less of other foods as appropriate.  Weight Watchers also focuses, as I said above, on retraining your eating habits to make you successful in the long run.  The low carb approach doesn’t quite fit in so well with these principles.  As with any low carb approach, it can help the pounds melt away, but it’s unclear how the traditional long-term Weight Watchers approach will help you keep off the weight once you decide to go back to normal eating.

My wife and I both tried Weight Watchers before—OK, she tried Weight Watchers and I ate the same things she did without going to the meetings—and we like the freedom and variety inherent in the traditional plan.  Certainly, it requires you to show a little more initiative than the scripted low carb plans, but that’s what made it appealing for us in a longer term situation.  Abandoning that approach doesn’t seem to make Weight Watchers low carb plan any more appealing than any of the others, unless you really like the whole meeting business.