Weight Watchers was thought up by Jean Nidetch who founded Weight Watchers in the mid 1960s. Her goal was to offer services and assistance to people who were looking to lose weight. She offered different products that helped in dieting and losing weight, and has turned her early success into a world wide company that operates in 30+ countries and goes by the trademark name of Weight Watchers, but normally translated into the local language of a given country.

Weight Watchers is split up into two different programs that a dieter could follow the POINTS program and the Core program. Each program is followed alongside a support group that helps with a backbone to help when needed most in group discussions and accountability to make sure the target weight loss goal is reached.

The Point System is a simple way to put a numerical value on a persons burning of energy and caloric intake. Each serving of food is given a number of points, and conversely different types of exercise are given negative points. So, overall a person has a certain number of points per week to try and hit according to their overall goal of weight loss and current weight.

This is where Weight Watchers is drastically different than the South Beach Diet and the Atkins Diet, because a person is not limited to what foods they eat, but how much of that given food they are allowed to eat. If a person wants to splurge on a food that has a high point value, they must then do the appropriate amount of exercise and also watch what other foods they eat throughout the rest of the week to counterbalance their overindulgence. Overall, the amount of exercise in the Weight Watchers plan is directly correlated to how much exercise a person wants to do. If they dont want to exercise then they cant eat as many points compared to someone who exercises a lot, can eat more foods with higher point values.

This diet is not for everyone because it makes a person accountable and doesnt give any room for cheating. If a person wishes to cheat, they are only hurting themselves and their overall goal of losing weight. The record-keeping part of Weight Watchers is annoying and cumbersome to some people because they have to make sure that they record every single food item they eat throughout the whole day and make sure that they give a point value to that food, if not then they wont necessarily succeed in their overall goal of shaking off the extra pounds.

The POINTS formula The formula for calculating the POINTS content of a specific food serving uses a formula described in US Patent 6,040,531:

p = {c}/ {50} + {f}/ {12} - {min(r, 4)}/ {5}

Where p is the number of points, c is the number of calories, f is the grams of fat, and r is the grams of dietary fiber (if the dietary fiber is greater than four, use four). The POINTS value is always an integer, with fractional values rounded to the nearest point. (An alternative format, mentioned in the patent and used on some websites, rounds values to the nearest half-point.)

This formula can be confusing and so can the POINTS system in general, so I will certainly try to make this explanation of the POINTS system a little more understandable in the next article that I submit so bear with me while I try to make sense of the point system and can better explain it to my readers. You can also log on to http://www.eweightlossblog.com for other helpful ideas and weight loss articles and blog entries.