Registration for the No BS Weightloss Challenge is OPEN.

Don’t miss your chance to work with Corinne for a full week packed with daily Q+As, weightloss motivation, and simple ways to lose weight.

Episode 298: My WW "PersonalPoints Plan" Review | No BS Weightloss
December 16, 2022

Episode 298: My WW “PersonalPoints Plan” Review

Share this post
Podcast_ThumbnailFinal

I spent a whole Saturday researching the new WeightWatchers PersonalPoints Plan so I can give you the lowdown.

Why?

My personal mission is to help you successfully lose weight (whether it’s with me, WeightWatchers or some other program).

I was excited to see ways they may have improved, but there are things that they’ve absolutely missed the mark on.

I don’t want these to stall your weightloss. Or, cause further setbacks in your relationship with food and your ability to lose weightloss.

That’s why I recorded a podcast dedicated to helping you discover the missing pieces that can help you lose weight (regardless of the program you use).

Listen to Podcast 298: My WW “PersonalPoints Plan” Review today.

Transcript

Hello, everybody. Welcome back. So today I want to give my official review of the Weight Watchers, the points plan. Before you listen to me on this, here’s a couple things you need to know. I haven’t been a huge fan of Weight Watchers most of my life. I started off doing Weight Watchers when I was a kid. So if you’re here hoping to just get the skinny on what Weight Watchers are doing and maybe you’re an ultra fan of them, probably not going to love my review because I’m going to give it what I honestly think is broken in the entire diet industry.

As much as I love Oprah, one of the things is I continue to question some of the things that Weight Watchers still does in order to help us all lose weight. So this is just an honest review of it. I have researched a lot of articles. So what I did do to come up with like here’s my thoughts and opinions about it is I went out on the internet. I went to the Googles and I read about 10 articles of people who adore Weight Watchers, who have lost all of their weight and are ready to sing the praises and talk about the program and stuff.

So I didn’t want to just read more anti Weight Watchers stuff, I wanted to open my mind up to, “All right, they might be doing something new. They might be doing something that’s worth talking about and looking into.” And not to say that Weight Watchers is all bad. With everything, there’s good and harm done in anything that we do, but as someone who has coached thousands and thousands of women who have been on the Weight Watchers merry go round, most of their life. I wanted to talk about it today. I just think that we need more discussions around the diets that all of us are getting advertised to, told to do and promoted. I invite people to constantly to question things, to look at stuff. Does this align with the kind of life I want to live? Does this make sense? So we’re going to talk about it today.

The other thing that I did is I went into a few of the bigger Weight Watcher groups on Facebook, and as the changes were being announced and handed down, I read a lot of the comments from the users. Here’s another thing that I really think that most of the weight loss industry screws up. Your people who use your program are the most important thing you have. You should take care of them like you love them. That’s how I take care of my No BS Weightloss women.

I’m constantly trying to figure out how can I make their weight loss journey easier? How can I provide more support for them? I just sometimes think some of these bigger weight loss companies, I know they are businesses, but so much of their stuff comes across like they’re only thinking about business implications. They’re not really listening to the people.

So if you ever do decide you want to work with me because it’s like, “Wow, this sounds different,” or whatever, you’re just curious, I just want to tell you, you have a real human who will spend her entire Saturday reading articles and looking at groups and user comments for a company that she doesn’t even promote or work for just to figure out what women really need When it comes to weight loss. I’m a real person. Everyone in my company, there’s 25 of us. Every one of us has battled weight most of our life.

Every one of us has a passion to help women finally lose their weight for the last damn time, but also to feel amazing. Not only amazing after they’ve lost the weight and confident they can keep it off, but we want you to feel good from the get-go. We want to teach you how to love the process so that you can make true lasting change.

So I researched the articles and I went into some of the groups, took a lot of the feedback in, and I just want to talk about my honest opinion. So here are the points plan that I had read. This is some of the things, and I just kind of came up with notes underneath each one in terms of my thoughts and opinions.

So the first thing that they said is the points plan. It will be simplified. The new plan will be the same for everyone except for diabetics. I do appreciate that they are doing that. I think that is a feather in their hat is that they are doing the research and they are coming up with something very tailored for diabetics. I think that’s amazing. But I don’t like this part. The new plan will be the same for everyone.

I just believe in order for us to lose weight, we have got to tailor what we do to ourselves. Every person is unique, and this is where my program is very different than others. There are certain things that we have to start considering when we’re going to teach women how to lose weight. And that’s not like… Number one, you’ve got to be able to figure out what your body’s needs are. And you have to be taught how to listen to your body’s needs at different times of the month during different situations in life.

What your body needs, one day you may be super hungry. This is what I don’t like about points, and y’all can correct me if I’m wrong, but you may be super hungry one day, but you run out of points, but your body is telling you it needs food.

The way that I teach weight loss that points miss out on is you need to teach your body that it is cared for, it is listened to and it is safe to release weight. We can’t teach our body those three components if we are denying it. It’s basic human needs on the days that it’s asking for food. The same thing happens with on the days that your body doesn’t need much food. It’s like tapping into your own fat stores.

It’s trying to utilize the calories that you have. Metabolism is trying to function and rev up and do the things, and yet you got extra points. What the points do is it teaches you to don’t listen to your body. Give your body food when it’s not asking for it. I just believe calorie counting and points and stuff, one of the biggest disservices that it does is it teaches you to disregard your body’s functions and it says there’s an algorithm somewhere that knows more than your brain’s algorithm as it listens to your own bodily functions, as it listens to what’s going on.

The other thing is that when a plan is made for everyone, that means that a lot of us who have very… Maybe you have certain foods and certain holidays and certain cultural gatherings and stuff that mean a lot to you, those things don’t fit into the typical diet world. It doesn’t fit into what a scientist has said in a lab. I think about one of my own weight loss coaches in my own company, Dina. She’s Latina and she’s got Hawaiian culture. She’s got a lot of cultural food loves.

She struggled with her weight all of her life until she heard me talk. And she was like, “So wait a minute. Are you telling me that I can still celebrate the important cultural holidays I have? I can still be a foodie and I can lose weight?” That’s when she joined because for someone like Dina, she did not want to be on a diet that said how your culture celebrates your religious holidays, foods that are important to your heritage? Well, they don’t matter. You’re going to like… Those are bad.

We don’t want to poop on that shit. What we do want to do though is learn how to eat those foods when we’re hungry. We want to learn how to plan for them so that we’re truly enjoying them. We don’t want to be showing up and just eating all the food for fear that we’re never going to get it again. We want to unbreak all of that. So that’s why a lot of times these plans that are written for everybody, they really aren’t.

They’re written for all of us to have a cookie cutter lifestyle. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a cookie cutter lifestyle. I want a big bold life. I want to be out there enjoying the shit out of myself, and I want to end my emotional eating. That’s what I want. I want to a plan that addresses all of that. Help me with that. That’s what I do at No BS. That’s what it did for myself when I was losing my a hundred pounds.

The other thing is that when the plan is for everyone. It doesn’t unwind past diet trauma. And I kind of talked about that in the beginning. Past diet trauma looks like restriction when it’s not. So very often when my clients first start with me, even though I tell them, “Hey, here’s what I want you to do each day. I want you to eat until you’ve had physically enough. When you feel like you’ve hit that point, whatever you think that is, now we’re going to get courageous and brave enough to stop eating and we’re going to learn how to trust that this is a brand new way of losing weight. We’re going to trust that if we get hungry, we are now allowed to eat. We don’t have to check our points.”

So having a plan for everyone doesn’t address those specific things. It doesn’t address rebel eating. A lot of us, we’ve done so many diets. This may be your 10th time trying to do Weight Watchers, and yet you feel like you’re being told what to do. Well, you are being told what to do when you do those types of diets, but you really… You don’t want to plan for everyone. You want to plan that you write out each day, that takes a look at your life. It takes a look at how busy you’re going to be. It takes a look at your needs and it addresses all of it.

All right, so the second thing that they said when it comes to the points plan is you will no longer earn extra points for eating non-starchy vegetables or for drinking your water. Well, I think that’s a good change. I’m going to say amen to that. Thank you Weight Watchers because here’s the deal. In the past, what they’ve taught is that your basic human needs should be met with treats, extra food instead of when you’re drinking water and you’re… Non-starchy vegetables are just like your greens, shit like that.

When they were giving you food as like attaboy or attagirl, what they weren’t teaching you is how do I start believing and promoting myself, to me? When food is given as the reward in exchange for good behavior, here’s what you don’t learn. You don’t learn how to celebrate yourself. You don’t learn how to acknowledge that you’re changing. You don’t change how you’re talking to yourself. You’re just right back to where you were, which is my biggest problem with losing weight is I eat when I feel down.

I eat when I feel happy. I eat when I make progress. I eat when I don’t make progress. Basically, I eat for any fucking reason. Give me a good one and I’m ready to eat. What we want to do is we want to start unwinding all these reasons that we give ourselves to eat when we don’t need to because what we really need is to learn how to cheerlead ourselves, acknowledge ourselves, be proud of ourselves, talk nice to ourselves throughout the day.

So one of the things that we want to do is we want to make sure that we aren’t tying food to reward. I tell my clients all the time inside No BS, you ain’t a jog, so you don’t deserve a treat. If you want to treat yourself, treat yourself in your mind, cut yourself some slack. Remind yourself that you’re doing things right. Remind yourself that like, “Hey, today you ate some greens. Good for you. Probably going to poop better tomorrow.”

You don’t get a skinny cow tonight because you ate a salad. We want to make sure that we watch out for that. Number three, the points plan will now… It will encourage fitness activity. You will still earn fitness points for being inactive. Okay. This is tricky. A lot of us are… Back in the day when I was losing weight, I had upped my activity level. I don’t think people should try to exercise for weight loss and I wasn’t exercising for weight loss.

When I first started, I really worked on how I talked to myself. I would get really aware of when I was saying to myself, if I went… Let’s say we went out to eat and I decided I’m going to have a burger without cheese and mayo today and I’m going to eat three quarters of the fries because I used to be a clean plate club like president. Let’s put it that way.

In those moments, I would tell myself automatically, “That’s probably not good enough. It’s going to take forever to lose weight doing that.” I realized how terrible that felt. So what I wanted to do was tell myself, “Hey, new Corrine says any change is better.” So when we start tying fitness into food and getting rewarded for it and making fitness super important to weight loss, here’s what ends up happening. We miss out on learning how to speak to ourselves. We miss out on mental fitness.

So I am not a fan of getting or winning points or calories because you exercised. I believe that if you are an exerciser that number one, it takes a lot of exercising in order for you to even increase the amount of food that you need to eat anyway. But number two, it bastardizes working out. I have watched too many people only work out to earn food. They’re not working out because they want to challenge themselves. They want longevity. It’s a good stressor for them.

For me, when I started working out, when I was losing my weight, I had always wanted to be an athlete. When I was a child, I didn’t play sports. I weighed 210. Teams didn’t want me. In PE, they’d put me on the bench. They wouldn’t even let me play because they said the kids didn’t like it because I was too slow. When I started wanting to lose my weight, I had two main motivators for exercise. I had a one-year-old who was active and I wanted to be the kind of mom that could play with her kids. I wanted to be the kind of mom that if my kid ran out in the road, I could catch them. And then I also always had these dreams of running and lifting weights, but I had always told myself I couldn’t because I was overweight.

So when I exercised while I was losing weight, I did it because it was who I wanted to be, not to earn food, not because it was the only way to lose weight, not to offset shitty emotional eating at night. That’s not who I wanted to be. It’s a dangerous line to walk when you are letting people earn food based on activity. I think it just unintentionally sometimes sends the wrong message. And this is the thing, your body, it will let you know.

The more intensity you work out with, the more you do, your body will ask for more food. And this is where we start building that trust again. You want to be the kind of person, if you exercise, if you choose that route, you want to be the kind of person who says, “I’m going to fuel myself. My body is asking for food. I might even change how I eat because I want better workouts. I want to treat my muscles to good recovery.”

Whatever it is, that’s empowering thinking. But when we just sit around and we tell ourselves, “Oh, I get more food because I worked out today, it is a slippery slope.” It creates a very distorted relationship with eating. The fourth thing that they said is with the change and the points is there is science behind it. Your daily point allowance will be determined in calculated based off gender, age, current weight and your height. Guess what’s not taken into consideration? Your body’s hunger and enough signals, your hormones.

I will tell you, if you’re anything like me, you probably got… Maybe you have a job or you take care of… I’ve got a lot of friends who homeschool like four kids. There are days in our life where we are thinking hard all day and we’re tackling things and we’re juggling a lot of life. Using your brain at a high capacity also, also has energy demands on your body.

This science that they’ve got behind it, that is some of the science, but it’s not all of the science. They’re leaving out important parts of the science, like our hormones, our moods. They’re leaving out critical things like energy levels based on different days. Your body is not meant to ask for the same amount of food every single day. It’s going to ebb and flow. And I guarantee you, people who learn how to work with the ebbs and flows in a way that feels empowering and trustful and confident are the people who not only lose their weight, but they have no problems keeping it off because they’ve learned how to listen to their body.

They’ve learned how to trust themselves. The people who end up regaining the weight are the people who do a diet just to get to the weight loss. And once they get there, they still don’t trust themselves around food. They’re always guarded. They’re overly looking at the scale and they have a lot of anxiety. And then over time, if… I want you to hear this, if you’ve built it up in your head that losing your weight is what will make you happy and confident and less anxious than when you get there if all you are is doubting, scared and full of anxiety, then your brain is like, “Well, if that didn’t work, what would make us feel better? Oh, let’s just have a little bit of this. Let’s just eat a little bit of that.”

Your brain wants you to feel good, and if you don’t learn how to change how you think with your weight loss, then after you’ve lost your weight, it’s still going to want you to feel good. It’s not going to want you to spit… I’ll just tell you. Everybody that loses weight, that first few weeks, you feel like fucking gangbusters. You’re like, “Look at me. This is amazing.” You’ll want to go shopping. You’re going to want to do all the things. But here’s the problem. Three or four months later, you normalize to that.

You done bought the clothes. Now you nitpicking your body every time you look in the [inaudible 00:21:45] like, “Well, I have lost a hundred pounds, but my ass sure don’t look the way I thought it would.” Every time you go out to eat, you’re like, “Ooh, I better be careful. I don’t don’t want to go backward.” You’re full of anxiety and shit, so your brain will start asking for food. Because if your weight loss didn’t give it to you, then food is that familial friend that will. That’s why it’s really important that we train ourselves to think differently as we lose weight or we hose ourselves if we even get to the finish line.

The fifth thing they said is… I love this one. Came out my chair when I read it, zero deprivation. You will be given a daily and weekly point allowance. Oh boy, I got my allowance for the week, I guess for being good. Who the fuck knows? Cook your favorite meals. You go to brunch happy hour and parties. Just like with this current program, nothing is off limits. And there are no restrictive rules, just balance. Simply track, live and lose the weight you want.

That sounds amazing. But here’s the deal. You can feel deprived at any time. I don’t give a fuck how many points they give you. If you are at happy hour and you’re like, “Ooh, I have enough points for a drink and a taco.” And then everybody else is on their third drink and they’re all eating chips and salsa, and now we’re going to go out afterward and we’re going to like a dessert bar, you going to feel restricted.

They’re missing the point. Deprivation is a feeling that comes from how you think in those situations. It is not based on what’s happening in your mouth. It is not based on how many points you got. At any time, you can feel deprived. You can be sitting there eating something that you want. You could be sitting there eating a chocolate sundae and think it’d be better with french fries.

This is the problem. They make it sound like as long as you get to eat these things, you won’t feel deprived. It’s like, “No, we have to learn how to change the conversation with ourselves in order to not feel deprived.” We also have to quit depriving ourselves of belief that we can do this. We have to quit depriving our body. We have to quit telling our body, “I’m not listening to you. I’m only listening to my app. I’m going to deprive you of what you need right now, whether that’s some food or not.”

So we want to make sure that we’re really paying attention because points, they actually are restrictive rules. Points are depriving because they’re telling you what your body wants and needs is not the thing here. We’re not addressing how you think and feel, so if you go out and you don’t have enough points, well, you’re screwed. Or maybe you go out and you have plenty of points, but you wish you had more, you’re screwed. Or maybe you go out and you’ve got plenty of points and you still want 10 times more. You got to learn how to have a conversation with yourself in those moments because this is the conversation I don’t want you having.

I don’t want to go out and you’re using your points like, “All right, I plan for my margarita and I plan for a taco.” Then I don’t want you sitting there the rest of the time wishing you had more points, feeling like you’re the only one that I only get to eat this. If I wasn’t on a diet, if I was just thin, if I was like everybody else, this wouldn’t be so hard. I want that removed from your life. I want to teach you how not to sit someplace and feel miserable, and that all… Points do not change how you think. You have to learn the process of that.

The next thing they said was, “We are going to focus on the inside out. Joining Weight Watchers, not just about eating better and moving more. Losing weight is about being in the right frame of mind. You’ll still develop skills and techniques that will help shift your mindset for weight loss and success.” Good. I’m glad they’re going to touch on this, but here’s the problem that I’ve heard from lots of people who are in… This is where a lot of the Facebook group people were commenting and my own members who have come to my program from a life lifetime of trying to lose weight on Weight Watchers, the coaches aren’t real humans.

Now, they may actually be humans, but they are a customer service department. They’re not an actual trained weight loss coach. They might be somebody who’s just lost some weight, but they have not been trained on mindset. They have not been taught how to listen, how to question and how to help.

Now, they know how to tell you what to eat. They know to be like, “Well, don’t do that anymore.” There’s a difference between responding to a question and then someone actually listening, supporting and helping you shift your perspectives so that you don’t have to hang on to disempowering perspectives for the rest of your life. So my coaches, the way that I built my company was like the best way to teach people how to lose weight is to find people who have also struggled so that we can have relatable stories, so we can put ourselves in your shoes so that we can ask the right questions.

Everybody on my team that works with our clients, they’ve gone to one of the best life coaching schools, the Harvard of life coaching school. I make sure that they’re certified. I make sure that they’re trained. They train underneath me. We do lots of self development. We’re constantly researching so that we’re always on the cutting edge of weight loss theory, both in habits, science and mindset because you need all three.

And then the last thing they said is the food algorithm. Got to love a good food algorithm, which is used to calculate points will stay the same. The algorithm factors in even more nutritional elements to guide you toward foods higher and unsaturated fats, fiber and protein, and lower and added sugars and saturated fats. All right. Here’s my honest opinion. I think it’s great to eat healthy. I am not poo-poo and eating healthy. I am just not.

I think eat healthy, but that doesn’t make anything, that makes it morally better, doesn’t make you a better person. There’s room for all the food in my opinion. But what we really need is we need more weight loss programs that quit factoring in the quality of the food all the time so that we can get back to factoring in our lifestyle, who we ultimately want to be, how we want to feel emotionally and energetically.

There’s just more to it. And the algorithms that just focus on food quality, they bastardize the whole process. They’re leaving out things in the algorithm that are more important. Like I said, I am not poo-pooing greens and proteins and all that stuff. I think it’s amazing. But I think first and foremost, what we have to do is we have to get our emotional eating factored in to the algorithm first.

We have to learn how to take care of our emotions. We have to learn how to give ourselves comfort instead of ding-dongs when we’ve had a bad day. We have to learn how to de-stress either with a walk, by crying it out, watching some Netflix instead of watching how many chips we can eat. It’s got to be more than just algorithms and apps, and points and unsaturated fats.

There’s just more to it. So my honest opinion is Weight Watchers keeps doing what they always do. They just keep mixing up the allowed amount of food you’re going to get to eat. They dress it up in a different way and they’re still missing the mark every single time. I applaud them for trying to put some of the mindset stuff in there, but I think that what we are seeing in the world is that we need some deep diving into our worth.

Most of the women that I work with, they come to me because they’ve got so many conflicting… Let’s just say Weight Watchers. They’ve been on so many different plans that they don’t trust the new one. “Why is it better than the other one? You said that one was going to be the best one. Look, it didn’t help.” And so often it’s not helping because they’re not really addressing, figuring out, “Why are you eating at night? What is the food doing for you? What’s missing in your life? How can we go about creating all of that for you?”

That’s what I want for all of you. So if you want, check us out, No BS. We will teach you everything you need that’s comprehensive. We don’t have algorithms. We take the human approach and we guide you through your weight loss so that you can lose your fucking weight for the last time and feel amazing. You can check it out at joinnobs.com. All right, talk to y’all next week.

Ready to lose weight for the last damn time?

Follow in the Footsteps of Women Just Like You

Share this post

I'm Corinne Crabtree

Corinne Crabtree, top-rated podcaster, has helped millions of women lose weight by blending common-sense methods with behavior-based psychology.

You might want to listen to these too

March 1, 2024

Let me set a scene for you. It’s 3 pm and you’re at work. You’re tired and can’t concentrate, so …

February 23, 2024

Do you ever say asshole things to yourself like: Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Women are hard on themselves, especially …

February 18, 2024

I’ve got a treat for you today — a full Q+A session with me. I tackle your burning weightloss questions …

TRIED EVERYTHING TO LOSE WEIGHT? I DID TOO!

"*" indicates required fields

Name*
Hidden
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

I'll never sell your email address.

Tried Everything to Lose Weight? I Did Too!

I'll never sell your email address.

"*" indicates required fields

Name*
Hidden
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.