grannydea wrote:
Try and write down everything you eat in a day including the stuff you drink,sodas, coffee(stuff put in it), sports drinks ect. and pay attention to serving sizes and the amount you eat. Weigh and measure everything. You would be surprised at how much a serving is compaired to what we eat.
That was the most effective part of Weight Watchers for me - I had to keep a journal of everything I ate each day. I belonged to WW Online (I didn't attend meetings). WW Online has a very nice online journal which helps calculate the point value of foods. Online journalling wasn't difficult and doing it for a few months really helped to ingrain good eating habits for me.

Dogmama is absolutely right- drink lots of water! At least 8 glasses a day. More if you're exercising, of course.

Also, Subway is great (with the exception of the atkins approved wrap, that sounds simply gross ). A six-inch turkey sub on a whole wheat roll, with extra lettuce and tomatoes and a bit of onion, and mustard ONLY (no mayo, no oil, no cheeze) is only about 5-6 points and is a filling and satisfying meal. [What are points, you may ask? At my weight I would shoot for about 22 points per day - points being a function of total calories, grams of fat, and grams of dietary fiber per serving, all which you can find from the food label or the nutrional info provided by many restaurants. All other things being equal, higher fiber works out to lower points, higher fat works out to higher points. WW has a nifty little slide-rule contraption I used to estimate points, but after a while I could pretty much figure them out im my head - and I still do, force of habit, LOL] Sometimes I'd combine the Subway sub with a bowl of Progresso soup, many of the chicken/turkey w. veg noodle varieties only have about 1-2 points per serving - a bit high on the salt but I don't tend to use salt much anyway. The only trick with Subway is you really have to keep on them to make it your way - the folks behind the counter are conditioned to smear on the mayo and oil and cheeze so I find I have to stop them as they reach out for the o-ffending ingredient. Hubby and I still often have Subways for dinner (w/o mayo, oil, cheese) when we don't feel like cooking.

And when I have a craving for a sweet and chewy snack, I really like Special K bars. They're about 90 cals, not much fat - they work out to about 2 points each.

Many veggies have 0 points (exept for the starchy vegs like corn and potatoes, but even those are minimal, if you lay off the butter, LOL). Fruits generally have 1-2 pts per serving. Salsas are great condiments and marinaades, and many of them are practically 0 points per serving.

WW really got my husband and I to eat more fresh vegetables, something we still do to this day. It really changed our eating habbits for the better. BTW, hubby lost about 50 lbs from a combination of "modified" WW (he didn't belong to WW and he didn't journal his food intake, but he basically ate what I did) and lots of biking. I can't begin to tell you how proud I am of him

- Jo.