I just started WW two days ago. I'm beginning day 3. Based on past experiences, I know myself in that if I make drastic changes to my diet, I will feel deprived and limited only to get discouraged and quit down the road. At least, that's what it's been like the last few times I've join WW. So, this time around, I decided to focus on "progress and not perfection". I really want to make the changes to my lifestyle and am so far from being "healthy" with my habits that I am finding my points value to be a major challenge right now. I know my daily points is 30 but based on "old eating habits" my first couple of days have been well beyond 30 (I've eaten up all my weekly points and then some). Yesterday, I did much better than the day before, but I did notice at different points through the day that I was yearning for certain foods and feeling deprived that I wasn't feeding myself with them. I'm sure each day will get better, but I'm interested in hearing other people's experiences with the first few days (particularly from those who have substantial weight to lose). tend to be a perfectionist in my life and I'm trying really hard not to focus on the fact that I'm not in my points range yet. Did you have similar experiences when you first started? How long did it take you to get within the points range? Does it get easier? Is it normal to start off and be well beyond the points. Do I have the right approach to focus on progress rather than expecting myself to immediately be in the points range?

Personally, I think any small step in the right direction is a wonderful thing. The weight isn't going to come off as fast, but if you ease yourself gently down to your points range and are still actively eating less than pre-WW and making healthier choices, I think you should feel nothing but pride at your accomplishments. It's a big deal to change anything. You are definitely headed in the right direction!

That being said, the program works best when followed properly (of course). So as long as you realize you probably won't see that first woosh of weight loss most people see when first starting out, you'll be okay. As long as your expectations are in alignment with your actions, you should be fine.

Can you add in some activity to your days, so you earn back points to eat? If you go for a long easy walk, or even just do some moderate intensity cardio, you can get back quite a handful of points. Between those, your FPs, and your base target points, you should be able to manage pretty well. But if it takes you a while to get there, that's ok too.

Remember that there are lots of foods that are low in points or even worth 0. If you are finding that you are hungry after eating your 30, take a look at the quality of the food you are eating. Perhaps you can clean up the nutritional quality in exchange for an increase in quantity - you know, like instead of going out for a burger and fries, you can stay home and have a baked potato, a home made burger patty, and veggies for fewer points. If you want help with looking at the quality of your foods, feel free to post a typical day's menu and we can look at it with you.

Good luck on your journey! Hope to see you around again!

I am on day 3 also and am focusing on the healthy eatting guidelines this time.
That is helping me make better deicisons rather than just playing the points game as I've done in the past.
The other thing I'm doing is planning my full day in advance. Once I've written it down and tallied all the points and checked all the boxes, I don't allow myself to vary from the plan (well unless a special invitation or something comes up.) HTH

I too count points, but I don't belong to WW.

When I started up again, I noticed that I was eating just to find the points value of everything I ate. And yes, I did go beyond my limit for a while, (took me about a week). But I ended up with a pretty good list to reffer to.

Yes Yes Yes!! Focus on progress! Focusing on perfection will make your head explode!

Good Luck!

It takes a while to get used to the whole concept of counting points, eating enough vegetables, and drinking enough water. Perhaps you could just consider this first week a 'dress rehearsal.'
That is not to say, go wild and eat anything, but try to transition from the old way to the new way by making some healthy decisions. You could plan a few meals and start to integrate the things you are learning into your daily choices. You can have a bit of fun with the menu with 30 points plus your flex points, while getting in your healthy foods. Good luck!

Each one of us approaches this with a different set of experiences and expectations. My experience with WW seems to be the opposite of what yours has been the first few days/weeks. At first I had a hard time eating all of my points and then spreading them out through out the day so I didn't have an over abundance of them to consume at the end of the day.

I drank A LOT of Mt. Dew. So much so that I wouldn't eat regular meals. So when I quit that, I didn't quite know what to eat. I struggled with breakfast and lunch - dinners weren't so bad as I would have normally eaten a large meal at night.

If you feel that a more easygoing approach to attaining your points for the day, then by all means do that! Like Suite said, you may not see the first big loss that most see, but you will be training yourself to eat properly and that is a very important thing.

However, I would like to say that staying in your points range when you start out is a good thing to do - you will eventually learn how to include what you like into your plan - it really isn't that difficult.

Thanks for all your feedback. Compared to day 1 (one of my foods was too high in fat and I have since thrown that item away) my points are lower but I am still not in my range. Part of my problem is that I've had too many distractions of invitations to eat out. I live alone and am single so being able to go out is really important to me and often times that involves food, which of course means higher point counts.

Suite, good point in checking the quality of the food. I definitely need to clean up the nutritional value of my food intake. I always considered myself to be a "healthy" eater because I don't really buy processed foods and most of the food I make is from scratch. This is definitely going to be a process. I realize that my eating habits have gotten sloppier over this past year which is why my point intake is so high. I need to break these habits of wanting to eat "sloppy" food.

Looking back over the week, one of my biggest challenges from eating out is calculating points accurately. I go to restaurants in the area and the area I live in isn't just chain restaurants but a lot of gourmet places where it's not easy to find the calorie counts for some of the things I might eat. I try to pick out something with more vegetables or what might be a "lighter meal".
Here's an example. My cousin recently took me out to dinner. We went to this really popular gourmet pizza place. They only serve one type of pizza per day. This type of place is a mom & pop restaurant and they concentrate on organic ingredients but that doesn't necessarily mean it's "healthy". The pizza they had the day I was there was Kale, Leek, and "some special cheese I can't remember the name of" pizza. Now that sounds like an odd pie but it was really interesting and quite good. Coming home and counting my points, I found it to be difficult because while there were some fabulous veggies on the pizza (no meat), I didn't know the exact ingredients they used (nor could they tell me their secrets) so it was a "guessing game" to figure out how many points it might be. What have you done, points wise, when you've encountered this type of challenge?

Sorry for yacking so much... I really want to succeed but the same questions I had the first couple times I did WW are still prevalent and I want to overcome them. Any thoughts would be great. Thanks!

I think that you are dealing with the biggest challenge one can face on WW: eating out at restaurants without posted nutritional information. It can be really tough to estimate, as you never know how things are cooked and what all is in each item you eat. Here are a couple of things I can think of:

Can you request that you eat at certain restaurants with your friends and family, ones where you know you can either request a modified dish or one where there is nutritional information available?

Don't feel shy about asking what is in a dish you are thinking of ordering. If you need a reason, tell them you are allergic to something - saying you're allergic to dairy is a good way to find out if they put butter on things like vegetables!

Ask for your dish to be modified. No butter/cheese on vegetables, no glaze on the meat, no croutons on the salad. After all, you are paying, you might as well get what you want. Often this is far easier to accomplish at those little non-chain gourmet type places, as the chefs have more creative control over the dishes and care about the food they make a little more than the short-order cook at Denny's.

Other than that, the best you can do is really scrutinize your food while you are eating and make a mental note of approximate amounts and stuff so you can either find a similar food item to base points on, or try to count points by looking at ingredients. For example, if you have some broccoli but it doesn't just taste like broccoli, you know you'll need to toss in a point or two for butter/oil. The pizza you had, was it thin crust or regular? Extra cheese, regular, or light? (Compared to regular fast food pizza) How big was the slice? A slice of veggie pizza is usually 6 or 7 points - if your pizza was similar to typical take-out, perhaps you would be fine with just using that as a guideline.

And finally, maybe your focus in social situations can shift from meals to drinks like coffees or even a glass of wine? It is way easier to figure out what's in a latte or glass of red wine than in a plate of food.

This is a tough issue, I hope you can start to find solutions.... Good luck.

Another trick to eatting out I try to do is bulk up my meal with a salad, especailly if it's a non dieter friendly place like Mexican or pizza. That makes it easier to have 1 or 2 slices or half of a serving of something rather than the whole thing.

I also try to look at the menu online before I go and decide what I'm going to have and try to research or estimate the points that way rather than be tempted by the special or high calorie item when I get there hungry. Example: Went out to a wings place with business the other night and thought i'd be doomed to salad and water, but low and behold they had shrimp skewers on the menu with broccoli side!

Of course when I doubt I always estimate high!