FAQ – Weight Watchers 2022

Recently I did a poll on my Instagram page asking if anyone had any questions regarding the Weight Watchers 2022 Program.  So here are the FAQ – Weight Watchers 2022 answers to your questions!

Q.  When you’re done with weeklies do you stay at 25 points or do you still give yourself wiggle room?

Here is how I manage my points and weeklies.  I get 25 points in a day, and 25 points for the week.  If I divide my weekly points equally, I can eat 3.5 extra points a day, so that brings my total daily points to 28.5.  However, to be in a healthy range, you can eat 7 points below or 10 points above your allotted points – so for my 25 points a week, I can eat between 17 and 35 points a day.  If I were to eat at the high range of my points (35) and add in the 3.5 weekly points, I can eat up to 38.5 points and still be in range.  Most days I eat around 30 points, giving me wiggle room for a glass of wine, or maybe a burger out with friends.  I may also stockpile my 25 weeklies and blow them all on one meal, but in the end, I am eating my allotted points for the week.

Q.  WW in 2017 worked; 2020 new program didn’t work for me.  Suggestions to have success?

If you feel like you aren’t getting enough points, or you don’t eat your zero point foods EVERY SINGLE DAY, you need to retake the quiz.  You can opt for hardly any zero point foods and track as you go – most people get 30 points a day when they use that method.  As I mentioned above, you do get 7 points under or 10 points over every day and can still be in the healthy zone.  Just click on the present icon on the bottom of your app, scroll to the bottom and it will show your range.  I know tracking can be a pain, but it’s been a game changer this time around for me.  When I initially lost my 70 pounds back in 1999-2000, I tracked religiously.  For some reason these last few years I’ve kept trying to cheat the system, and see how much shit I can eat and still try to lose weight.  This is what I call the “hamster wheel” in that I was gaining and losing the same 5 pounds over and over again.

If you find yourself hungry between meals, you need to up your protein intake.  My friend Jessie on Instagram does a great job in explaining this – she literally meal plans around protein and builds her meals from there.  You can follow her IG journey here.

Q.  How do you set it up so you don’t use your activity points?

On the WW app, click your profile in the upper right hand corner.  Click settings.  Click activity/sleep settings.  It automatically puts inn steps for you in your activity target.  Put that number to 0.  Do not synchronize any device to your activity tracker, such as a fitbit or Apple Watch.

Q.  Where do you find the chart that shows all your tracked days?  I’ll start looking at that.

On your WW app, there is a present icon next to the calendar icon on the bottom.  Click that and scroll to the bottom.  I track every day, so the days that don’t have blue dots I went over 35 points for the day, which is the high range for my healthy range.

Q.  How do I access all your items on WW?  And where do I access them?

I am going to assume that this means your individual zero point foods?  If so, hit the hamburger icon on the top left hand side.  In the middle of the menu, you’ll see a section for Food.  Click Zero Point Foods.  You’ll see two tabs:  one for non-starchy vegetables and one for proteins.

Q.  How do I track my activity points so you don’t eat them? Right now I have 85 weeklies!

I usually divide my 25 points of weeklies by 7 days, so that gives me 3.5 extra points a day.  So if my daily points are 25, I can at 28.5 to account for the weeklies that I eat.  That being said, I can look at my week ahead (my week starts on Monday) and I may see that I am going out to eat and decide to eat all my weeklies at once – I will put that in my tracker on Monday, and then don’t pay attention to the activity points that go up eat day.  I never eat my water or vegetable points earned either.  I don’t count my activity points because I don’t do strenuous workouts, like CrossFit or stuff like that.  If you feel that you are working out a lot, and the scale isn’t moving, to maybe add 1/3 of your activity points earned in a particular week and see how that works.  This is a never ending game of figure out what works for YOU which is why you can’t copy exactly what another WW member does.  It’s like comparing apples to oranges. 😁

Q.  How can you tell you’re not getting exercise and water points?

At the end of the day when you are done tracking, you can see that by each meal you’ll see a (+3) or some number like that.  That means I’ve had 3 one cup servings of vegetables, and that ADDS 3 points to my daily total.  So my 25 daily points would jump to 28 points.  You have to drink a minimum of 63 ounces of water a day to get the (+1) for water intake, which would then take my daily total to 29 points.  You can only “eat” these earned points on the day you earn them.  They do not roll over to your weeklies.  I see some people earn 4 points of veggies and water and then treat themselves with an ice cream cone.  Totally on plan, but it’s my personal preference not to eat those “earned” points.  If for some reason your entered food doesn’t pick up that you ate a cup of vegetables, you can manually enter it above the water icon.

Q.  Favorite low point snack item?

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you see I don’t eat many snacks.  My meals are big and full enough that I don’t find myself looking for something in between meals.  If you only eat a 2 point breakfast of like an english muffin with sugar free jelly, you may find yourself starving by 10:30 in the morning.  Add protein!  Add a scrambled egg, or cottage cheese, to round out the meal.  That being said one of my favorite snacks is Wasa Crisps!  I love this snack – it costs me 7 points because I have to count the banana, but it’s two sourdough wasa crisps, spread with 2 teaspoons crunchy peanut butter, 1/2 a banana,1 teaspoon of Mike’s hot honey and 1 tablespoon granola.  So good!

Q.  Having a hard time motivating myself to get serious with Weight Watchers.  Suggestions?

The first thing I did this year was take off the time limit of how long it was going to take me to lose 50 pounds.  Every.single.January I would declare “I am going to lose 20 pounds by my birthday in March!”  Well, if I lost 10 pounds, I would consider myself a failure and then give up and eat like shit for days, weeks, or months and then get “back on track.”  I also ditched the back on track way of thinking or all or nothing.  Some days I may have higher point foods, some days I won’t.  But it all evens out at the end.

Another thing I did was switch my weigh in day to Monday.  My weigh ins in studio used to be Saturdays and after weigh in I would eat like an asshole the whole weekend, only to pump the brakes Sunday night.  In order for this to become my lifestyle, I have to treat every weekend like the weekdays.  I go to bed the same time (okay, maybe I’ll stay up 30 minutes later on the weekend and sleep in an extra 30 minutes), I don’t look at the weekends as a free for all, because usually I don’t have huge plans.  That being said, I will splurge when the occasion rises, but those events are few and far between.  That helped me get off the hamster wheel of gaining and losing the same five pounds month after month.

Ditch that you are on a diet, and see how that changes your mindset.  You will be surprised!

Q.  Not a WW question, just wondering if you keep losing weight, can you get off insulin?

Great question!  And the answer to that is . . . no.  I am Type 1 diabetic, meaning that I will never not be off insulin.  I was on oral medication for the first 15 years I had diabetes (type 2) but after a while those stopped working.  The oral meds help squeeze out any remaining insulin I have in my pancreas.  You can get blood work done, but basically my pancreas has 0.1 amount of insulin left, which is why I have to take insulin every time I eat.  I am on a 1:4 ratio of insulin, meaning I take 1 unit of insulin for every 4 grams of carbs I eat.  So if I eat 40 grams of carbs, I take 10 units of insulin.

Q.  Besides Mariano’s where else do you shop?

My love affair with Mariano’s is strong and deep, but I do like to go to Aldi every once in a while (usually for wine – ha!) and when I go in the direction of Trader Joe’s I like to pick up stuff there too, like their frozen orange chicken.  If there was a Whole Foods close to me I’d probably go there a couple times a month too, but the closest one is 35 minutes away and not worth the drive.

Q.  Favourite WW friendly items at Trader Joe’s?

I don’t frequent TJ’s enough to have favorites, but check out this YouTube video that shows a recent TJ haul.  And you have to follow my friend Nikki’s YouTube Channel – she has TONS of grocery hauls from Trader Joe’s, Aldi, Target and Sam’s Club to name a few.

Q.  I’m thinking of joining WW, what is 1 thing you would and 1 think you wouldn’t looking back?

I am not sure I understand this question, but the one thing that I suggest is that you track consistently.  If you don’t, how do you know if you are around the points you should be eating, or way over?  And looking back, I wish I would have stopped trying to cheat the system.  Let’s say one week I went out for dinner three times, had drinks and that week I was down 3 pounds – whoop!  Well, my brain would say, well, I’d be happy to lose 1 pound so I’ll go out twice and only lose 1-2 pounds.  But what would end up happening is I would GAIN 2 pounds.  What you do the previous 7 days doesn’t miraculously show up (good or bad!) on that 7th day.  It’s over time.  So being consistent, not looking to have cheat days (which used to be all day Saturday’s last year!) and just taking each day as it comes and making the best decisions in that day, and then moving on.  

Q.  No question…I love your stories!  You make my day regarding how my day is going.

Yes!  That makes me so happy.  I hope you know that how I represent myself on Instagram stories is how I am in real life.  In fact when I meet IG friends in person for the first time, that’s one of the first things they say is “you are exactly like you are online!”  You have to choose to be happy and each and every day I wake up, I know what a gift each day is.  It took me a while to get my groove back after my husband died, but I have to think he’d be proud of how far I’ve come the last 7 years.

Q.  Why don’t you count those other things?  Weeklies are enough?

For me, the answer to that is yes.  Let’s say I am at 28 points for the day, and I “earned” 4 points in veggies and water.  I have to use those points IN THAT DAY (they don’t roll over) so in the beginning I was like “I can eat 4 more points today!”  But then I was eating a cookie, or maybe a 4 point ice cream bar, when I really wasn’t hungry, so I thought “why bother!”  However, if I saw that the scale wasn’t moving, I was working out more, I would adjust my points accordingly, but typically my daily and weekly points are enough.

Q.  How much of my zero point foods can I have, i.e. potato?

This is a tricky question, because Weight Watchers expects you to eat your zero point foods “until satisfied.”  Could I eat a 12 ounce potato made into air fries?!  Probably!  But 12 ounces of potatoes are 312 calories.  In case you didn’t know, when you track a food, if you scroll down, it will show you the calories of that food.  So I would look at that and think, I could be satisfied eating 6 ounces for 156 calories, and build my meal around that.

Eating 5 cups of watermelon is 60 grams of carbs and almost 250 calories.  Yes, that’s zero points, but you still have to consider the overall calorie intake.  The rule of thumb is if you are losing weight while eating your zero point foods, you are probably eating “until satisfied.”  But if you are at a standstill, or gaining, then you need to reevaluate.  While I would love to eat three bananas a day, that just doesn’t work for me.

Q.  Is the 10 points a day for everyone no matter your total daily points?

Yep!  Whatever the point value is for your day (for me as an example it’s 25) you can eat 7 points BELOW or 10 points ABOVE your daily point range, and still get a blue dot for the day.  I have so many people complain to me that they “only” get 20 points and they are starving.  Well, they aren’t eating their zero point foods every day if they are still hungry.  But once I tell them that they can be 10 over – all of a sudden it’s new life!  People will say “I lost the most weight when I was on the plan that gave me 30 points a day!”  Making this a lifestyle, not a diet is the way this will be sustainable.  Sadly we can’t drink a bottle of wine every night on the weekends and eat deep dish pizza (at least like I did!) and expect to keep the weight off long term.  I still have wine and pizza, but in moderation, and I track it all.

Q.  I am confused about adding vegetables and it automatically adds the points?

Let’s take my journal from yesterday.  I had a salad that had 3 cups of veggies, so you will see my salad was 7 +3.  It adds those 3 points to my daily points FOR THAT DAY ONLY.  There are no rollovers for water or veggies earned if you don’t “spend” them the day you use them.  If for some reason the app doesn’t catch that, you can manually add your vegetable intake.  But I don’t eat those added points because I found myself looking for stuff to eat to spend those points when I wasn’t actually even hungry.

Q.  Cost? Do you do all virtual?

I have the full plan, which allows me to do in person studio meetings and ANY and as many virtual meetings that I want each week.  That costs me $44 a month.  For $22.95 you can do digital only.  The only time you’d be allowed in studio is when you are close to goal and you need to weigh in for 6 weeks straight and stay within your 2 pound goal to earn lifetime.  Once you reach lifetime, you are free as long as you are within 5 pounds of your goal weight and only have to weigh in studio once a month.

Q.  No question – but thanks to you I’m tracking again.  Which helps.  Back on that WW!

Love to hear that!  That makes me so happy.

So this is PART 1 of the questions I received so far, but will do another post tomorrow.   I also have a discount code that gets you a free month (and me too!) if you sign up.  Click here if you are interested.