Lifetime membership is reached when one maintains within 2 lbs. above (or any amount below) goal weight for, I believe, 6 weeks. That is not particularly demonstrative of actual long term weight maintenance.

I don’t hate Weight Watchers, though I’m not someone who does well with that kind of structure (I have authority issues), but becoming a lifetime member isn’t indicative of whether or not a person will ultimately keep weight off long term – at least in my experience.

So do I. I can’t remember exactly how old I was when I first joined WW, but it was somewhere between 12 and 15. I suspect I’d be at least 20 lbs lighter than I am now had I never been on a diet and had instead been taught to eat intuitively from a young age.

Also, I was 112 lbs. in 5th grade (so around age 10 or 11), but wasn’t at my full adult height by that point…

That said… I’m still not a wholehearted gung-ho Weight Watchers booster. It’s damned expensive, and they really REALLY want you to spend your money on their ooky packaged foods and their scales and clickers and tickers and counters and crap. It’s no wonder that the dedicated members have that much average income. And as kind and fluffy and friendly that the official company line is, strange and unpleasant things tend to crop up within the meetings. While I find myself using the WW stuff as a framework to hang up my HAES beliefs and my desire to try more interesting foods, other people see it as a good place to hang serious restrictions and deprivations. Or to hate themselves for some percieved ‘weakness’. A seed has to grow in the soil that it’s planted in. With the way that society messes with our ability to eat and our self-esteem, is it no wonder that there are so many bad WW stories?

This is all something hard for me to actually post about, within the realm of the Fat-O-Sphere. I mean… I came to terms with myself and I like myself and I’m cool with my fatness and HAES! HAES! …but here I am, on my knees like I’m at the electric confessional. I’m telling myself that I’m treating this as a science experiment. A big chunk of my friends are On The Plan, and… it looked… interesting, watching them. I’ve never done this kind of thing before, and I want to see how my body reacts. I’m maintaining, even as my friends gush at me for “how good” I’m being or looking, that the moment the whole thing starts to piss me off or make me feel unwell, I’m quitting.

And, I’m not a Weight Watchers, or diet, apologist. (I don’t think I’m so accused, but to be clear.) I commented to offer a perspective neglected in this thread, that of a person using Weight Watchers to create what she feels is a safe structure to reclaim her balance and health–not to dismiss others’ experience or insights. But, I do, I admit, have difficulty with comments based on simplistic black and white, political either/or, easy-peasy right or wrong thinking rather than the integrative, nuanced both/and thinking that allows for the conciliation of supposedly competing theories and biases. And, I do think comments marked by the simplistic often are based in projection.

Too, I do believe it’s possible to eat intuitively within the structure of Weight Watchers. That’s been my experience, though I am guessing it doesn’t fit within the formal parameters of what intuitive eating is because Weight Watchers is the structure I choose.

I believe, too, that for me (emphasis on ‘for me’, thus also to emphasize perhaps not for you, whomever you may be who reads this sentence and finds it vexing) to carry excessive weight constitutes potential for harm to my health greater than the harm associated with weight loss. And, I don’t think that my belief that this is so is based in social indoctrination or shame, that I need to reject these notions entirely, be radical, to be whole. I don’t think it’s so simple.

I agree (as you note in your response Michelle) that the risks, the harm, inherent in weight loss can be “compensated for and balanced”.

To find the balance between extremes: A recent study that got much media attention suggested that extreme caloric restriction lessens the likelihood of debilitating disease. A link: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/87/8731sci2.html. (Admittedly, that’s not a link to the study, but to a news piece.)Michelle, I’m curious how you would respond to this science.

(And, for the record, I don’t have a stake in these scientific claims, don’t agree or disagree. If anything, I’m terrified they justify my step-sister’s apparent eating disorder: she’s a cancer researcher accustomed to making these claims to justify what appears to be an undiagnosed form of anorexia. But, in posting this link, asking this question, I’m merely curious how this science might be received by a person working within the paradigm you’ve claimed, Michelle.)

Finally, Deeleigh, you may determine a thirty pound range of healthy weights to be restrictive. And, of course, that’s for you to decide for you. I don’t find it so. Even on my large-boned five-eight frame, thirty pounds is significant, makes a difference in how I feel: how tired, how well. I appreciate that the set point, the weight at which one experiences balance, stability and stasis, is individual, though.

What undermines your rationale in terms of the cause of rebound is contained in what you say here;

Now you start giving them grain again in the same amounts, but they each get more grain as there is less of them around ..

Why the same amount, when there are less chickens?

Because your body decides it’s energy requirements, not your conscious mind, when you use the latter to try and usurp the role of the former, you merely subvert it’s intent, you don’t change it.

In the mean time, your body is registering it’s distress and doing everything it can to get you back on it’s course.

When you can no longer sustain your WLD efforts, you revert back to that course.

That’s rebound, and that’s why in essence dieting doesn’t work, it doesn’t alter that course, at source, it merely attempts to correct it after the fact at the weakest point of the process. The conscious parts of our mind.

For example, a 5′-7″ tall person might have 200 pounds as the center point of their healthy weight range. Another might be at a healthy weight at 130, and another at 300. It all depends on their genetic makeup, habits, dieting history, and other aspects of their environment. The way you figure out what a healthy weight is for you is to adopt habits that make you feel strong and energetic. The weight that puts you at is healthy for you.

Yeah, I know. Radical. No diet company would agree with me.

I do understand that putting structure around our eating often helps to organize our nutrition and our self-care — in fact, that kind of structure has proved crucial to my own eating habits, as well as what I teach my clients (that is, to have discrete meals at set intervals.)

I have no doubt that there are positive aspects to what Weight Watchers teaches, depending, of course, on the individual. People often take positive lessons away from various weight-loss diets — whether it’s having tried new foods, or having eaten more fruits and vegetables, or started to exercise. Those things are arguably positive (though I still think it is harder for habits like those to stick when they are made contingent on an external weight goal, rather than intrinsic motivation.)

What I continue to see problematic with Weight Watchers, and all weight-loss diets, is the idea that adults must be given an external limit to how much they can eat, rather than trusting entirely to their internal limits and preferences. The body knows how to regulate itself, if we’d only let it.

Dietary restriction of any sort brings with it the risk of harm, inherently. Now, you can of course compensate for and balance those risks, but it is disingenuous to deny that they exist in the first place, and that is what I often see happening with weight loss apologia. Especially considering that the health effects that people are hoping to gain from weight-loss dieting can be achieved without setting weight loss as the explicit goal, (thus avoiding the risks of dietary restriction at the outset) I do not think that the benefits are worth the risks.

And probably just as many people could share their individual stories of being significantly harmed from such diets, just as you were helped. Their stories are no less valid.

From this perspective, based on my experience using Weight Watchers, I’m stunned at the extremism in some of these posts. From a psychoanalytic perspective (though I am not a psychoanalyst), such extremism is, perhaps, projection on the part of commenters. Weight Watchers doesn’t advocate extremism, such as eating fewer points than are suggested each day, each week. In fact, Weight Watchers cautions members not to restrict caloric intake at such a rate, to eat all the points alloted them, warning of exactly those outcomes the Fat Nutritionist details in her responses. And Weight Watchers doesn’t determine one’s goal weight, urging an unhealthy poundage. I’ve decided that. (And I opt for tiny increments, ten pounds, twenty at a time, feeling my way down, as if with fingers extended in the dark, to a weight that feels good on my large bones.) As I understand, if I were to let Weight Watchers determine my goals, the healthy weights proposed for a person of my height are based on medical charts featuring a large (30+ pound) range of possibilities. As I understand, one becomes a Lifetime Member when one maintains the goal weight she or he has chosen.

Importantly, I didn’t decide to “diet” because I hate myself: I decided to nourish myself in these ways, using Weight Watchers as a guide, when I did the deep work of dealing with my own emotions, my past, and ceased to punish myself using food.

Fat Nutritionist, yours is a blog I’m keen to visit often. Your pieces are always thought-provoking, often inspiring and ever engagingly well-written. I’m struck by your sometimes messy honesty. And I don’t appreciate these qualities less when I don’t agree — in fact, I think I value these qualities more in instances like this. Thank you, sincerely.

Oh, and statistically I’m not on the normal curve for Weight Watchers members: I’m 32, un(der)employed, with much more weight to lose than just a few pounds.

It was hard to relate.

I’m not getting you, what is the reason for the yo yo effect?

Additionally, measuring overall lean body mass /= measuring potential loss of organ mass. Now, I don’t know *for certain* that organs are affected on the typical contemporary weight loss regimens, but it’s a possibility, and thus a risk, given what we know happens during simple starvation and semi-starvation.

And thanks for the links — Dr. Sharma writes some good stuff.

ETA: Sorry, I don’t mean to keep adding stuff, but this question is interesting to me. Anyway, it’s important to remember that body composition is not fixed — it’s actually a dynamic process. Even when that body composition remains stable over years, it’s a dynamic equilbrium. Meaning, things are broken down and replaced and being remodelled, constantly. Weight loss is no exception — body tissues are just being broken down in greater proportion than they are being added from what you eat. And, due to biochemical necessity, some of those tissues ARE going to be lean body mass, even if you’re eating enough protein to replace the gross mass. If the idea is to strengthen your organs AND your muscles, without facing the risk of loss, why not just exercise without inducing a calorie deficit? That will build lean mass, as well, but I think it better balances the risks.

If you haven’t read Laura Fraser’s book Losing It, you should. She describes being put on a diet as a child, and subsequently developed bulimia. Scary stuff.