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My Weight Watchers Review
Looking to start Weight Watchers and live in Canada? You can try Weight Watchers Meetings or Weight Watchers Online. It is great that Weight Watchers is available in Canada. I was able to learn very quickly all about the services offered as well as pricing options.
The site does not sell a tangible product; although a wide variety of Weight Watchers products are available in grocery stores. Instead, they focus on selling memberships to both their online weight loss program and their meetings, which are held in hundreds of locations all over Canada. I was able to choose between signing up for Weight Watchers Online, find a meeting, or signup for a package that included both online and in person meetings – Monthly Pass.
Weight Watchers Online features tools that really can make tracking eating and exercise simple. The site allowed me to enter statistics about myself, such as my age, height and weight along with weight loss goal. It then gave me the number of points that I was allowed per day. Some of the other online tools offered by Weight Watcher include:
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Points calculator: Enter the name of any food, including many name brand and restaurant options, and the calculator tells you how many points you must count for that food.
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Recipe Builder: Enter all of the ingredients in a dish and this tool calculates the points per serving.
- Online community: Get support and advice from others who are trying to lose weight.
Is Weight Watchers Worth It? – Key Features and Benefits
There are some things about Weight Watchers that really help it to stand out from the competition.
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Weight Watchers has been proven clinically in more studies than any other weight management program.
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One of the main things that really make Weight Watchers meetings a good choice is the amount of support that is available to members. Both from staff at in-person meetings and from other Weight Watchers members, I never felt like I was alone in my quest to lose weight.
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I was able to sign into my Weight Watchers Online account from any computer with an internet connection or from my smart phone. That made it super easy to enter my meals and exercise.
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The weight tracker that I used through my Weight Watchers Online membership appears as a graph and helped me to easily see my progress. If there was a week that I lost too little weight or too much weight, I would get advice about how to correct that.
- The Weight Watchers Online tools such as the Recipe Builder and points calculator makes it easy to accurately record points, whether I was cooking at home or eating out.
Weight Watchers Cons – Disadvantages
For all of the great features offered by Weight Watchers, I did notice a few disadvantage as well.
While the tools are great, the program does allow for more processed foods than I would like to see in a diet plan. They certainly do push fresh fruits and veggies, but you could also eat a lot of processed foods and still stay within points. This should be expected since Weight Watchers’ philosophy is to lose weight without dieting or depriving yourself from any food.
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I did not choose the in-person meeting option, but if I had, I would have attended a meeting with strangers during which weight would be discussed. While some may not mind that, others would be uncomfortable with it.
- While not required, the prepackaged Weight Watchers food options tend to be pricey as well as processed to some degree.
What Diet Programs Might be Better than Weight Watchers
Weight Watchers Online tools and diet plans are proprietary, so there are no competitors that offer the exact same thing. That being said, there are many other sites that offer ways to track eating and exercise and many do so without charge.
Key competitors include:
How Does Weight Watchers Compare to Similar Merchants?
I looked at some of the competitors listed above to see how they compared with Weight Watchers. Weight Watchers has the largest share in the weight loss market. Their competitors do not offer all of the same services and options, such as in-person meetings. Moreover, their track record cannot compare to Weight Watchers' long history of success. But since all I wanted to use was the Online food and exercise trackers, any of those competitors would have worked just as well for me.
Optifast Canada promises you will lose 2-4 pounds per week which is more than the 1-2 pounds per week you will lose with Weight Watchers. However, Optifast is a DIET and a low calorie one! Your regular food must be substituted with the Optifast nutritional replacement formula. In contrast, while on Weight Watchers you are not dieting. You keep eating your regular food because the goal is to learn the caloric and nutritional value of each food and choose accordingly what you will eat more and what you will eat less.
I looked at some other Weight Watchers competitors, too, such as My Fitness Pal. This site is one of the most vibrant Calorie Counter communities on the web. It has a huge Online database with just about any food you could imagine. If there is a food or restaurant that is not included, you can just send them an email asking them to add it and it will be there within a few weeks.
Because some of the Weight Watchers' competitors’ tools in Canada are available without a cost, and include some of the same features, it would be difficult to justify using Weight Watchers just for the tracking tools. That being said, if I wanted to use the Weight Watcher’s point system instead of counting calories, or if I wanted in-person meetings and Weight Watcher’s specific food items, then Weight Watchers would still be a good choice in spite of the cost.
What is the Cost?
The cost for Weight Watchers Online is $21.95 per month. There is also a one-time sign-up fee of $39.95. At the time of this writing, they are offering a 25% discount. If you agreed to be billed every three months rather than every month, they will often offer a discount by waiving or reducing the sign-up fee.
If you also want to attend in-person meetings, the cost will be more. The exact cost depends on your location. To find out the cost in your area, you would simply need to enter your address and you will get a list of the meetings that take place closest to you.
Once you sign up, your subscription will be automatically renewed at the end of the term and your credit card charged. As long as you cancel before the end of the current term, you will not be charged again. You cannot get a refund for the current term once you have paid. For that reason, you might consider doing just a one month membership until you determine if Weight Watchers is the best choice for you.
You can pay online with either Visa or MasterCard.
What are Others Saying?
As I am sure will be the case with most diet plans, the reviews were mixed, but I would say more people had positive comments than negative. Many mentioned how Weight Watchers is easy to follow because you can eat pretty much any type of food as long as you stay within your points.
A few mentioned the hassle of driving to meetings each week, but this is not required in order to follow the program. The success, of course, will depend on how much a user puts into following the program but, in general, it is as good an option as most other available weight loss plans.
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