When people say that they prefer an exchange program to the WW points someone always points out that you can combine the two and that the week 6 booklet gives you the guidelines for doing this. The only problem I find with doing this is that there's no booklet to break down the points for the foods I eat. For example, if I eat a slice of pizza, I can go to my exchange book and know how many breads, protein, fat, etc I had but I can't go to my points book and figure out how may points I used for bread, protein, fat, etc in that slice of pizza. I might know the total number of points for that slice of pizza but I don't have any kind of breakdown. So how do you break down points in a food to make this work?

Well, the 2 protein exchanges are cheese so I count the points in 2 oz. of cheese, the 2 bread servings are equivalent to 2 slices of bread in points, etc. So I slice of pizza is 6 points, 2 points starches, 2 points protein, 2 points fat and 1 veggie of 0 points.

Thanks, I 'll give that a try and see if it works for me.

There is a complicated formula for figuring out this too. I could look it up again and post it but in general you can do it as a good guess (and on the frozen meals there are diabetic exchanges listed which are pretty close to the old W/W selections)

carbs/protiens = 4 cal per gram
fats = 9 cal per gram

1 point = 50 cal

A carb exchange consists of 15 grams of carbohydrate 3 grams of protien and 1 gram or less fat and 80 calories. There are several books out for the food exchange counts that can be purchased. One very good one is called Nutrition in the Fast Lane. I don't follow the Points program because of the nutrition part of it. I tend to overdo carbs so I went back to the exchanges which works great for me, I lose faster and more consistently. Depending on what kind of pizza you had and where it was from there are several differnet ways to break this pizza down. This book has 51 popular restaurtants and I use it whenever I eat out. It's a very good book. Another little tip I can give you is that Fruit, Milk and Veggies, are also carbohydrates. Which means alot of your diet is carbs. Alot of people fail to realize how many carbs are being eaten on top of this. This is why I had such a hard time witht the points. I had to learn more about the nutrition side of eating before I could actually make the points work for me. I figured if I was going to have to learn this anyway I might as well just count exchanges. So that's what I do.


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