Who here has been on weight watchers??

I've never been on weight watchers, but I know people who have and have had great success.

Losing weight requires a committment, and part of that committment is learning portion sizes.  So until you get the hang of eyeballing what a serving size is for various foods, you will have to weigh and measure.

Is this the newest one on WW, the Pro Points?. I'm starting that next week because l had to buy the new calculator.

Heres a question though?. The 49 points extra over the weekend, can l divide them into my weekly points if l wanted to?

I just wanted to wish everybody the best of luck!

There's no way I can afford WW. So I'm just going back to what I do best....count the calories and measure what I eat. It may be a PITB, but it works the best for me. I have a food scale and I weigh as I go; the scale lists calories, carbs, protein, fats, etc (I'm more concerned with calories and fat than anything else). It was a hassle at first, but I've been doing it for so long that it's become second nature now.

I do not do Weight Watchers, I use myfitnesspal to count calories. I know it'll be different with Weight Watchers, but when I make things from scratch I calculate all the total calories in each ingredient and divide it by the number of portions. Then it comes with a firm number of calories in the meal. 

I have a couple of friends doing Weight Watchers and they've lost approx.15lbs each. They do go to the weekly meetings and both love them! Good luck!

Quote:

Originally Posted by x2006nkg 

I do not do Weight Watchers, I use myfitnesspal to count calories. I know it'll be different with Weight Watchers, but when I make things from scratch I calculate all the total calories in each ingredient and divide it by the number of portions. Then it comes with a firm number of calories in the meal. 

 

I have a couple of friends doing Weight Watchers and they've lost approx.15lbs each. They do go to the weekly meetings and both love them! Good luck!

I use myfitnesspal to keep track of my calories as well! It's so easy and i found out that I was totally UNDER eating by ALOT so it has helped me to figure out how much food I really need to eat daily. 

Quote:

Originally Posted by nanner 


It may be called something different over in the UK - here it's called PointsPlus 2012. And, the 49 points are weekly extra points, so you can use them any way you want. 

 

Yes, it's the same but with a different name

I think i'm going to divide my 49 points up between my weekly ones then l know where l am. I have to write it down as well just incase l go over

I heard on the news yesterday that they are adding chicken mcnuggets to their list of endorsed products. Hmmmmmmmmm

Quote:

Originally Posted by nanner 

I'm on a new kick of cooking alot on the weekend, and then freezing portions, so that I have something on hand if I have a crazy day and don't feel like cooking at night. I made a huge pork loin on Sunday night, with root vegetables and rosemary, (a Weight Watchers recipe, actually) and it made so much I divided it into portions and I've been eating it since Sunday, and some of it will go in the freezer. But I always have veggies on hand to steam and eat with whatever I've made as a main "meat" course.

Cooking over the weekend for the coming week is an amazing way to watch your money and keep control over what you're eating for dinner. If you have foods in the freezer, you're going to be less likely to call for take-out/delivery and, chances are, you're going to eat healthier. Spend a Sunday afternoon in the kitchen. Make some soups or stews. As Nanner did, make a pork loin, then use the leftovers in other dishes throughout the week. Yes, it's leftovers and I know you've mentioned before about not liking leftovers, Utopia, but depending on what you do with it, you can create new and really good meals!

On Sunday, I made a beef roast with a barbecue sauce. It was really good. But the roast weighed over 3 pounds. So I sliced it and weighed out 8 ounces of slices and put that in the fridge. The rest of the slices, except for what we had with dinner on Sunday, went into the freezer, in 8-ounce portions. And on Thursday night, Rick is bowling early so it will be hectic. We're having those refrigerated beef slices heated up on the indoor grill with sauteed mushrooms and some pepper slices and I'm thinking green beans with some almonds. Maybe next week, I'll do a stir-fry with some of the frozen slices.....just cut into thin strips, saute, add lots of fresh veggies and a good stir-fry sauce. Rick will have his over brown rice; I'll have mine plain. Honestly, leftovers can be so delicious! And you're saving money.

If you make soup on Sunday, you can also throw together a pan of healthy muffins. Put your soup into individual freezer containers. Freeze your muffins in a freezer bag. Then on one of those nights during the week when you're really busy and stressed-out, nuke a container of soup. Wrap a muffin or two in paper towels and nuke them. Or wrap in foil and heat them in the oven. And you've got a quick supper. It's healthy and fast. Really good on those nights when you come home from work and you're starving to death. Soup is a good lunch, too, for work. With a muffin. Or a salad. (You can make your own salad dressings and then you know the ingredients in them. We hardly ever buy salad dressings anymore. Homemade salad dressings don't last as long as commercial dressings.)

We buy a lot of pork tenderloin; they come two to a package. Well, because of how we eat, one tenderloin will give us two meals....most weigh right around 1 pound, or a little less and we eat about 4 ounces of meat at a time. But if I don't open the package and freeze each separately, I'll make both of them....and then cut the extra one in half and freeze individually. So from one pack of pork tenderloin, I get four meals. I like to grill them. Use 4 ounces of the meat for your dinner, and save the rest for another meal. Be creative and it's not really leftovers. Pork stir-fry would be nice with lots of fresh veggies and maybe some pineapple chunks. Or slice the tenderloin into thick slices, skewer them and grill them again, just to warm them up. Or broil them if you don't have an indoor grill. Skewer some chunks of peppers, pineapple, mushrooms, tomatoes, etc. and grill/broil them, too. Quick and easy.

Often, our store will carry pork loin at Buy One Get One Free. So I'll get my two loins. Get them home and freeze one roast whole. But I'll slice the other roast into individual slices or chops. And freeze them two to a package, one for Rick and one for me. I'm getting several meals from that meat. So I'll do a roast on Sunday afternoon, slice it and throw it into the freezer in portion-size bags. And I have dinners for about two weeks or so. You can do the same thing with chicken....roast the chicken on Sunday afternoon. Bag it up into recipe-sized portions and you have cooked chicken for many different dishes for a couple of weeks. And because the chicken is already cooked, you're also cutting some time off dinner prep.

Here's our menu for this week:

Sunday - the barbecued beef roast

Monday - bean stew (we do Meatless Mondays) done in the crock pot with parmesan basil biscuits

Tuesday - grilled ham steak with steamed carrots (with a bit of brown sugar, butter, apple cider vinegar and chives)

Wednesday  (tonight) - grilled chicken breast (with a sauce made with apple slices and thyme) and steamed squash slices

Thursday - grilled beef slices (from the roast) with sauteed mushrooms (over brown rice for Rick) and pepper slices with green beans and almonds

Friday - spaghetti squash with a spicy tomato sauce and a slice of garlic bread from the freezer with a salad (it's meatless)

Saturday - curried pork chops with a sauce made from a jar of unsweetened tropical fruit (and I'm thinking of serving it over coucous, but haven't decided yet) Those pork chops are from a loin that I got on sale and sliced.

These are not exotic dinners by any means. But they are healthy and they are good. With the exception of that beef roast, everything will be ready in well under 45 minutes. (I nuke the spaghetti squash in the microwave, so it will be much faster than doing it in the oven.)

And I know that's more than anybody ever wanted to know about the way I cook!

Somebody told me one time that one WW point is right around 50 calories....I don't know that for a fact. But since you're on WW, you could still try some healthy recipes that aren't necessarily WW recipes, and then for every 50 calories, convert it to one WW point. Would that help?

Hi I am doing the online weight watchers and the answer to your questions is that you can use the weekly 49 points exactly as you want to a few daily or all in one go for a weekend treat  on a night out anything at all as long as you keep track and stay with in your allowances. I am on my second week and I lost 6lb the first week. I have a calculator and I am toying with the idea of buying their kitchen scales because if you only have 1 pro point left in a day you can put that into scale and then pick cheese for instance and it will tell you how much you can have for that 1 point. I think they are expensive though so its stil a maybe. Good Luck and a Ha ppy new year.

Congrats, dragonmyst47, on your weight loss! That's really excellent!

Utopia, you have a really good mindset for weight loss! And Nanner, thanks for the Hungry Girl site! Cool!

And I am not a gourmet chef, not by a long shot. I'm just somebody who likes to cook. And I know that I'm the only one who can be responsible for my weight. It's not up to anybody else....it's just me. So I'm always looking for healthy recipes that taste good and, esp throughout the week, are easy and quick. I can't do it without my Sunday cooking. And I enjoy that afternoon, being in the kitchen and trying recipes. We cannot afford to go out all the time...we just can't do it. So I have to cook.

Thyme is an herb....you can grow it in your herb gardens, you can buy it fresh from the store and it will keep in the fridge for a few days. Or just buy it dried at the store. I love thyme. Next time you make frozen peas? Toss just a bit of thyme into the pot after you've drained the peas, put the lid back on the pot and toss the peas and thyme together a bit. It's really good and gives you a bit of an added taste. It's good with many vegetables, but we like it best with peas. And there's no recipe, I was trying it out one night and we really like it. Similarly, lemon-and-pepper is delicious on corn. I love bay leaves with potatoes and will throw in two leaves when simmering potatoes. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Our kitchen is very well stocked with spices and herbs.

Pork loin is usually the roast from the center area of the pig (I think....I'm not a butcher, so I'm not sure). It is leaner than some of the other cuts, so it can be a little expensive. You can either get a loin roast with the bones (ribs) or boneless.....I'll go with boneless most of the time. That's what's usually on sale around here. And I don't really buy it unless it's on sale. You can either roast it in the oven, do it in a crock pot, or slice it into "chops" and saute them or grill them. I love to marinate chops for a bit of extra flavor....which is good, too, because pork today is much leaner than it was years ago, and if you're not careful, it will dry out while cooking. I usually cook pork to about 145-150 degrees, then tent it with foil to let it get up to about 155 on its own. I think 160 is actually considered the "safe" temp for pork, but for me, it's too done at that point. It used to be that you almost had to cook pork to shoe-leather texture to make sure you killed all the "little beasties" inside, but pork today is very safe.

Stew is pretty much like a thicker soup. It is heartier than a soup and you feel fuller after a bowl of stew than you would soup....depending on what kind of soup it is, I guess. I love beef stew more so than beef vegetable soup, although both are delicious. Chicken stew, vegetable stew, bean stew, the possibilities are endless. Oh, and then there's chowder! I'd say chowder is kind of a cross between soup and stew....made with anything (vegetables, chicken, beef, seafood, etc.) and that is usually thickened with either milk, cream, half and half, etc. I love potato chowder or a good chicken chowder.....I wouldn't recommend freezing chowder, though, because of how it's thickened (the dairy ingredients). Many other people have frozen chowder with luck, but I've never tried it.

I buy my groceries, based partly on what is on sale at the store and what we're having for dinner the following week. I keep a list of items that we need throughout the week on the fridge. Usually a night or two before we hit the grocery store, I go through the store ad and add things to my list. Then I go through my cookbooks to see what appeals to me, how many meals I might get out of it (as for a roast or a whole chicken), and how easily I can make it. I check out the freezer list (also on the fridge door...it's called What's In The Freezer? and it has every single food in our big freezer in the basement) to see what I already have, and then take it from there. I'm on a grocery budget and I really try not to go over that amount....some weeks are harder than others. I have at least one meatless dish (sometimes two, if I think I can get away with it), one or two chicken/turkey dishes (one might be soup, the second boneless/skinless breasts for the grill or oven or a chicken stirfry), a dinner with pork, and then a dinner with either shrimp, salmon, or tilapia, depending on what's at the store...we really like salmon. Swordfish is wonderful as is tuna steak, but unless it's on sale, it's too expensive to eat all the time. I really try to have a variety of meals on hand and it's important that they're healthy.

I also make sure that I always have what I call staples: boxes of whole wheat pasta, cans of beans, dried beans, apple juice, pineapple juice, tomato juice (all great for marinades and sauces), cider vinegar, white vinegar, balsamic vinegar, cans of pureed tomatoes, diced tomatoes, tomatoes with chilis, tomato sauce, and tomato paste, mustard, ketchup, Worcestershire, all different kinds of mustards, things like that. When the store has canned/frozen veggies on sale, I stock up. Oh, and brown rice. Noodles. Panko (Japanese bread crumbs). Chicken, beef and vegetable broths. These are staples and I need them. All kinds of condiments (as Nanner said, you can switch them around to suit yourself).

Flour and cornmeal are stored in the freezer in freezer containers. My yeast is stored in the fridge. Barley and rices in the fridge. I love barley and you can add it to ground beef, not only to stretch the beef when making meatloaf or soup, but also to cut some of the fat from using all beef. It's a grain, so you should store it in your fridge, unless you're going to use it all quickly.

On Sundays, we'll usually have a roast either in the crock pot or in the oven (I don't know, I can't seem to get it out of my head about the "Sunday roast"!) and then I can use the leftovers throughout the week, too. The freezer is always stocked. Before our son got married (and even afterward a few times), he would come up to the house to go grocery shopping.....meaning he cleaned out the basement freezer on me. He still does it, but not as often as he used to.

Rick does not take sandwiches in his lunch....well, sometimes he does, but it's rare now. He still likes a good peanut butter sandwich, though, from time to time (not reduced-fat, though, as he just doesn't like it). He will take leftover soup or stew that he can nuke in the microwave. If we have spaghetti or lasagne, he'll take some of that....I swear he could eat spaghetti every day and be a happy man. He always takes a container of applesauce....he eats applesauce every single day. Sometimes, I'll make a low-fat dip and he'll take that with some sliced veggies for his morning break. He'll take a small container of low-fat cheese cubes; we both love cheese. (BTW, try Cabot's 50% reduced-fat cheeses.....very good and they melt beautifully. Not sure if they're OK with WW, but they should be.) A container of yogurt. Maybe some low-fat pudding that I've made. Things like that. His biggest weakness is sweets and he has to have something sweet. I still make cookies, although I haven't yet this month as we're pretty much cookied-out from Christmas.

It's easier for me because I'm not cooking just for myself. But even those times when Rick goes away for several days, I still cook.