Home » Blog » Weight Management Education » Why People Gain Weight After Being Successful Losing Weight With a Program Like Weight Watchers.

What Is the Problem with Most Diets?

The problem with most diets is that you just follow the instructions of the diet on what exactly you should eat but you don't really learn anything during the process. When you "are finished" with the diet you won’t have learned anything but how to follow specific instructions, or numbers, or calories.

From the educational point of view, you didn’t learn anything, so you are in the same place you were before you started your diet.

The moment you go back to be on your own without a diet telling you what to eat every single meal, you’ll eat what you were used to eat before because that’s what you know to do. In the end, you'll gain the weight back.

If you were also following a diet low in calories your body will have learned how to work with less energy or calories, so once the diet is over and you go back to ingest more calories than before, your body will store them as fat to save them as a source of energy to have it available in the future just in case you decide to go on a low calorie diet again.

 That’s Yo-Yo Dieting: When you lose weight and gain it again over and over. 

How Does Weight Watchers Program Work?

The way Weight Watchers works is that they give you points depending on how many carbs you are eating and they don't let you have more than the amount they have calculated for you.

It doesn't matter if you are eating healthy food or fast food as long as you stay in the limits assigned to you. In a way they are restricting the carbs and calories you eat by assigning to those foods too many points for you to be able to have them or for you to think they are worth it the points consumed.

They also force you to eat better by assigning lesser points to weight management friendly products, so you have them more often because you don’t have points left or you don’t want to spend all your points.

But in the end you are not really learning what you are doing or why is the exact reason you are losing weight. You are just following a specific point system that is worthless the day you quit the program.

So you either never quit it or you gain the weight back once you are on your own having to make your own choices.

By the way, they make good money not only by having you hocked to their program but by selling you their own products and treats with all the points defined.

So, What Should You Do?

The best way to lose and maintain weight is to invest some time in learning how, what and when to eat and get special tips to help you lose and maintain your weight.

Learning about exercising and how to have a healthy lifestyle is also important. In the end, it is a journey. That knowledge will stay with you forever and won't go away when you stop dieting. That’s time and money well invested!

For example, did you know that learning about glycemic index (GI) and glycemic load of your food is more important than knowing the number of calories?