Today I Joined Weight Watchers

SO, today I decided to join Weight Watchers OnlinePlus program. They were offering a free sign-up and had a promotion of “get paid to get healthy” where they will pay me $50 if I lose 10 pounds in 3 months, so I figured I had nothing to lose but more weight.

Greg’s first response was “What, so now you’re done with MyFitnessPal?” NOOOOO, actually just the opposite. I’m going to continue tracking my food intake with BOTH apps.

My reasoning is, so many of the low-calorie, healthy, recipes that I come across are calculated using the SmartPoints or PointsPlus system and it got me wondering… how is that different than the calorie amount that I’m allowed on MFP? So, I purchased a one-month membership and am now building all my recipes in both apps.

So far, I am finding that they are pretty much the same. In MFP, I’m allowed 1360 calories per day and on WW, I get 38 PP+ and on the first day I used up exactly all of both – all 1360 calories on MFP and all 38 PP+ on WW – with the exact same recipes and amounts consumed. Pretty cool.

The main difference I notice is that on MFP, EVERYTHING gets counted and on WW – fruits are NOT subtracted from your points. FRUITS ARE FREE! This is a big deal to me beacause I eat a TON of fruit. But, having it be “free” might also might be a bad thing, because I do eat so much of it. But, since I’m still tracking in MFP, I know that I’ll never go over because that app will always keep me accountable by counting every single thing.