How Does Weight Watchers Work?

The Right Foods

Choosing the right foods for weight loss is the central idea of Weight Watchers. Weight Watchers provides its members with tools and tips to ensure they are meeting the basic nutritional requirements while still restricting calories to encourage or maintain weight loss. They accomplish this by assigning point values to foods and suggesting the number of points a member should accumulate per day based on her weight loss or maintenance goals.

Group Support

Another key element in the Weight Watchers program is group support. Members can attend local meetings supervised by a trained Weight Watchers leader. Members can opt to be weighed at each meeting to track weight loss and then participate in the group discussions covering the issues and challenges the members face while trying to lose weight. Weighing in is not a meeting requirement, so shy or private people can still attend meetings for the other benefits. Members can also participate in online forums or chat rooms and find many tips and articles online to support them while they try to lose weight.

Encourage Activity

Weight Watchers encourages members to increase their activity based on their fitness level. They suggest easy ways to incorporate exercise into daily life and educate their members on the weight loss and health benefits they can receive from these activities. Activities such as housecleaning, gardening or playing with kids count as exercise. Members seeking more focused fitness such as walking, dancing, running and weight-lifting are also supported in the Weight Watchers program.

Bringing It All Together

All three essential elements of the Weight Watchers program--eating right, group support and exercise--are tied together in their literature and support materials. This encourages members to participate in all three aspects to get the maximum benefit of the Weight Watchers program. The program is designed to keep members working toward their weight loss goals regardless of their current successes or failures.