Quote:
Originally Posted by archychick
Thanks, guys!
I guess I am thinking of WP in the wrong way. I tend to think of them as 'falling off' points more than 'damage control' and I feel like I have failed when I delve into the WP.
Weekly Points aren't falling off points and while they
can act as damage control, that isn't their sole purpose either.
Think of it this way. Your daily points are the
minimum you should eat. They are most assuredly not the maximum. The maximum is your daily points, plus over the course of the week, your weekly points and your activity points. I'm not saying you have to eat all those --- I don't usually eat my activity points for example --- but you certainly can do so.
You can see this clearly because your daily points are a single number - 26 in my case. Think about it. WW is not so inflexible that it would tell me that I must eat exactly 26 points each day. After all, 25 is too few and if we aren't supposed to eat weekly points then 27 would be too many. I think it really promotes a diet mentality to think that you have to eat exactly 26 points (or whatever one's daily points are) every day. That would drive me crazy trying to eat to an exact number of points and I would feel like I'm on a diet.
So, I vary it depending upon what is going on in my life and what I'm hungry for. But weekly points aren't just there to control damage. They are there because we are human beings and we don't always want to eat the same number of points each and every day.
Further if your daily points are 26, you can be eating under 1000 calories in a day. For me, on days that I eat 26 points, I usually eat about 950 or so calories, including zero points food (I know this because I also count calories).
That is fine to do sometimes, but I don't think it would be nutritionally good for me to be eating that few calories on a consistent basis.
I don't go out of my way to avoid eating weekly points or to try to eat all of them. I just go through my day and basically eat what I think is reasonable. Usually I end up averaging about 31 points a day so I eat about 35 of my 49 weekly points. This does vary from week to week. But, I often eat out and those tend to be higher point days. Or I have days when I'm just hungry. Or I have days that I eat higher point food.
The point is -- don't be afraid of eating weekly points. WW assumes in setting your points that you are, in fact, eating those points. You don't have to eat all of them but the program is designed for you to be able to eat them and still have a good loss.