Weight Watchers Maintenance

Weight Watchers is a weight loss program that has helped numerous people. It focuses on maintaining a balanced low-fat diet, providing group counseling and promoting exercise. It helps teach you how to maintain your weight through measuring what you eat. Once you have achieved your goal weight, you have hit your maintenance level.

Diet

• Dieters using Weight Watchers have the freedom to choose whatever they want to eat. There are no off-limit foods for the dieter. Every food item has a points value placed on it according to the food's nutritional content and value for the body. The points depend on the serving size of the food, number of calories in the food per serving size, amount of fiber per serving size and amount of fat grams in the food per serving size. If there is a high content of fat grams, the higher the points are. If the food has high fiber, then the points value is lower because fiber helps burn fat as and digest the food you eat.

  Maintenance does not mean you can quit counting points. It simply means that you have learned how to count what you eat and have effectively learned how to eat appropriate amounts. There is no specific amount of time for a person to achieve maintenance; however, the general rule for getting to maintenance is one year. Once you have reached maintenance, you still must continue to count points or you will gain the weight back that you lost.

Counseling

• Throughout your weight loss, there are counseling sessions to attend. The counseling assists you with learning how to proportion your food correctly as well as count the points appropriately. Counseling helps you stay motivated to reach maintenance. Once you have reached maintenance, you can slow down on counseling, but you never want to stop going. You worked so hard to get to maintenance, you don't want to forfeit all the hard work and regress.

Exercise

• Exercise is the most important part of maintenance. It keeps you healthy and allows your body to burn more calories. It helps you maintain the weight you have achieved. Before you get to maintenance, exercise is what helps you lose the weight so that you achieve your maintenance goal. Exercise is a great way to get healthy and reach your maintenance.