Are you a Weight Watchers success story?

Just left a comment on the Dispatches website under the WW story. My comment is being reviewed for publication. Be interesting to see if they publish it.
I shall watch this programme with interest. It’s about time the balance is redressed and the truth is highlighted.

I will be watching this with interest. Never done WW but many others of a similar ilk.
Thankfully there are now some negative WW comments on there (Karen’s has been approved and is on the page) but interestingly each negative comment has a couple of replies which seem suspiciously like the PR machine in action.

I am one of those women for whom Weight Watchers didn’t work, neither did Slimming World or Rosemary Conley, or Atkins, or Slim Fast or anything else. I lost weight using similar principles to the Beyond Chocolate ones, which I only found after I lost the weight and the guilt and developed my relaxed relationship with my body and food. We need to stand up and challenge these giants who are still taking advantage of women when they are low and vulnerable. I have lost count of the number of my friends who have told me, “I’m going back to [large diet company] because it worked last time.” But of course it didn’t work, because if it had, they wouldn’t need to go back!

I became a gold member of WW in 2003. I lost 8 and half stone. I changed jobs, moved house and stopped going to meetings and slowly the weight started to come back on.

I returned 4 and half stone heavier in 2009. See what stopping does. With the support of my leader and a great meeting with lots of support from fellow members I got back to goal. Now maintened agian for more than 2 years.

I realised meetings and support was the key to success ! Wow..

I also find it easier to mainten with ProPoints than I ever did with the old points system. Eat more nuts now and lots more protien in my food. I find low fat food the ProPoints are high cause they add lots of Sugary carbs in them so I eat less “diet” food now .

Sorry if that is not the sort of comment you were wanting. But its the truth.

Can’t wait for this to air. Dieting has ruined my body. I’ve lost and gained 4 stone plus another 2 on top of that. Dieting has made me hate my body and treat it with little care. I started dieting in 2006 and since then I have been diagnosed with depression, an eating disorder and diabetes. I will never diet again and I hope Dispatches will open the eyes of millions of women who are conned in to paying money to organisations like WW.

I bet you are rubbing your hands with glee and already counting your coffers! Just because you failed doesn’t mean it doesn’t work

It’ll be interesting to see the show as you say, Audrey. I’ve been to WW more times than I care to count. On one memorable occasion, when I told the leader about crying for an hour because all I could have for dinner was some broccoli, I was told it was worth it because I had lost a full pound that week!!!

I remember eating my entire days worth of points, and sometimes the day befores points as well on a Thursday night after being weighed.

I remember being told to hand over my food diary for inspection and then told I’d obviously missed stuff off it because there was no way I’d eaten that little and not lost more weight.

I remember feeling so useless at time, but so elated at others…

I no longer see myself as a ‘failed dieter’. Life is better this way – I enjoy food again and don’t panic when the shop doesn’t have exactly the right yoghurt/cheese/milk/bread/whatever that I’d worked out points/cals for….

I just had to respond to the talk on WW… I have tried every diet known to mankind….and yes…they have all worked….mometarily..I have lost weight with them all and then regained it twofold. Why? Because diets like WW, Slimming World, Rosemary Conley, Lighterlife all work because they restrict the amounts you eat, everyone knows that less food and more exercise will ensure you loose weight.

What they don’t tell you, and no it’s not even in the small print, is that dieting also teaches you to feel guilty if you don’t stick to the rules such as denial of wants, weighing food, weighing self, comparing yourself to others, judging yourself against external sources, all of which all aid anxiety and feelings of failure – it sets up the cycle of being ‘the perfect dieter’ and then ‘the perfect failure’ because a life of not accepting and understanding your relationship with yourself and (dare I say it) food, is simply not sustainable. We are pleasure seeking creatures…..who wants to pass up the doughnuts as they do the office rounds…..I don’t…. but I don’t want to feel bad about it either.

With guilt comes recrimmnations, remonstrations, feeling bad about yourself, judging yourself to be less than, What a rollercoaster, where’s the level ground, up and down, up and down, much the same as my weight was for years. It was an absolute miracle for me to discover Beyond Chocolate, after regaining 3 stone after doing Lighterlife (my last ditch attempt to be a perfect 10). I just knew I couldn’t do another ‘diet’. You could say I ‘ate’ everything thing BC taught me, and you know what in two years I have not dieted once, I have listened to myself (tuned in), I have eaten what I want, and really enjoyed my food and my relationship with myself has improved beyond measure. I no longer constantly check the mirror to see if ‘my bum looks big in this’. Who cares….I’m in front of it ……no seriously…..my body hangups are gone, I enjoy my food and after years of living off ‘diet food’ I am eating real food that tastes divine.

The results are that my chlolestrol levels have dropped dramatically, I have lost weight, but I don’t know how much as I no longer weight myself – how I got rid of my scales is another story – my skin has improved, my depression has gone and I can honestly say that I am the happiest I have ever been.

Just wanting to leave you with a thought…WW also stands for World War….mmmmmmmm….food for thought, if you’ll pardon the pun.

The word diet should be banned. I’ve done em all. Ww, sw n rc. Yeah I’ve lost, put it on, plus more. I’m slowly taking on the beyond chocolate approach, but its a slow one. I’ve had an eating disorder, n have a negative body image. I have good days n bad days. But the million pound industry is not worth it. It can lead to obsessive behavior n negative thoughts of feeling a failure. Search for answers within not externally.

So the likes of you with your non scienticically proven diet, jump on the band wagon trashing a companies good reputation and wait for it TRYING TO CASH IN off the ‘failures’ you have been talking about. You really ought to be ashamed of yourself if that is the only way you can get business. Seems like a vulture type scenario with you ready to peck out the sheeps eyes! Deary me, build up your own reputation without slating others!

The best piece of advice that has ever resonated with me about diets is during a conversation with Audrey and she said something along the lines of ‘it’s not the people who fail, it’s the diets.’ And it is so true. They are just not sustainable. And it’s really opened my eyes to all the fads out there that are literally feeding off people’s hope and insecurities and charging ridiculous amounts of money and making people feel miserable.

Thank you for posting this.

It’s interesting that those who have obviously trotted over here from the Dispatches comments page that are PRO WW find it hard to be civil. Mind you my attitude was like that when I spent my days writing down everything I ate, counted points, obsessively exercised, it doesn’t make for a good temper!

My gripe with the likes of WW is that for the majority of people they DON’T WORK. That’s not MY opinion, it’s a fact, as the programme on Monday will show us.
If it worked you would only do it ONCE.

I read Beyond Chocolate when it was first published and I love what you do at Beyond Chocolate. I met you briefly Audrey at what is now the Vitality Show some years ago. What always shines through Beyond Chocolate is your genuine wish to help people. I am also inspired by your blogs and other output and know that over the years (scientifically proven or not) you have helped many people to feel better about themselves and set them on a surer footing to improved self-esteem. After working for almost 10 years for one of the companies you mention above, as a Consultant, then employed by the Company as a Team Manager (seeing what went on in 30 groups across a city), I ultimately left because I was so disheartened to see the “rejoin rate” and so few people shed the weight and keep it off. For four years now, I have had a hypnotherapy practice in London and so much of what I do has echoes of the Beyond Chocolate principles. Hypnotherapy is not for everyone either, just as slimming clubs or Beyond Chocolate isn’t for everyone, but thank goodness there is a choice and more people are becoming aware of the alternatives due to the internet etc. What I have discovered over the years is that there is no single right or wrong, or “better” way to achieve and maintain a healthy body. I too will be very interested in the Dispatches programme….I wish you all success in your endeavours. They do say that the most successful people in the world, in all areas of life, have “failed” more than anyone else. Their determination to succeed brings them ultimate success. Let’s keep going. After all, the quest to achieve and maintain a healthy body is a lifetimes work. Keep doing what you do Audrey and team!

The thing about diets is that they set up a cycle of deprivation. I have definitely been there, done that and got the diet t-shirt. In my experience, every diet cycle correlates with an opposite (but unequal) binge cycle. The trouble with diets is that they address the symptoms – excess weight, rather than the CAUSE (using food for needs other than physical hunger). Diets don’t teach you to honour your hunger; or how to meet your other needs without food. It’s like a smoker with a smoker’s cough, taking cough medicine. It doesn’t handle the underlying cause of the cough, so the cough medicine won’t solve the problem. I have found that since I’ve stopped dieting, I’ve learned more about myself than I thought possible. My relationship with food is the gateway to the deepest part of me, and no diet would have brought me that much satisfaction, inspiration, insight or joy. My internal work on my relationship with food has positively impacted on many other parts of my life, which just isn’t available by dieting.

I developed clinical anorexia as an adult!! after following Dean Ornish’s Eat More Weigh Less diet http://www.webmd.com/diet/ornish-diet-what-it-is
I was under severe work stress at the time as well as having issues stemming from an abusive long term relationship I had left a few years before.
I think once you have had anorexia you can never truly get rid of it but I found that following the Beyond Chocolate / Intuitive Eating approach helped me to improve my relationship with food and be a lot more relaxed about it. I aim to eat when hungry, eat what I think will hit the spot, and stop when satisfied. I don’t like feeling “full”. It is true that you will automatically “sigh” when the body has had just enough, and this is before you get to “full”.
I still cannot weigh myself as it sends me into a torment so I have not had a scale in the house for about three or four years. As long as I don’t use a scale I am fine. I have stayed the same size for a few years now without going on a scale. The only time I am in contact with a scale is at the doctor’s once a year and I never ask to know the figure, also I don’t look at the dial.
I think if you are vulnerable and under stress then a diet can be the dangerous touchpaper that lights the fire of a very nasty illness. Dieting is obsessive and not natural!
Please stay away from diets if you are vulnerable. I would hate other women to go through this.

I am surprised at the aggressivity of some of the comments. The dieting industry is exactly what it says, an industry, whose objective is to make as much money as possible. I don’t believe that Sophie and Audrey’s primary aim in setting up Beyond Chocolate was to make as much money as possible, but rather to share their experiences and innovative way of looking things and just by the by, find that they can make some money with it too. So what’s wrong with that? It’s about turning a passion into a business and I take my hat off to them. I doubt whether you will find anyone working in BC who doesn’t believe whole-heartedly in the BC way of thinking. I would bet my unread Dukan Diet book that those working in the DIET INDUSTRY don’t necessarily believe in what they do or sell. BC is not a product to ‘sell’, it’s a set of beliefs and a way of changing one’s mentality to a way that suits you. The Diet Industry doesn’t do that. It’s either stick to it or fail. I was put in my first diet at four years old. My mother put me on a series of diets continuously until I was old enough to diet myself which I did continously until two years ago. The psychological repercussions on the way that I have lived my life have made me miserable. I did WW five times. My first memory was when I was 13 and my recollection was of complete humiliation. However, I chose to go back every time I put on weight because, according to the statistics, it worked while you were ‘on it’. Most times I lost weight but put it all back in. The final time I didn’t lose any at all. And I think that’s the fundamental difference between the Diet Industry and BC. The former provides you with rules to follow that others decide for you. The latter teaches you a series of psychological dynamics that help you to decide for yourself. Deciding for yourself is empowering. Not living with guilt is empowering. Not feeling continuous self-hatred and self-disgust is empowering. Starting to respect my body is empowering. I am saying a MASSIVE thank-you to BC and Sophie, in particular, for helping me on this journey that is helping me to change myself inside and outside. When did WW ever do that for me?

Wonderful post Helena.
I’ve tried every diet too. WW, slimming world, rosemary conley, slim fast, calorie counting and not just once each, I tried each one many many times over the years.
Occasionally I find pieces of paper in my chest of drawers with sums on them, my calorie tracking. Also on the same pieces of paper are my measurements that I took religiously. Waist, hips, left thigh, right thigh. I feel incredibly sad when I come across these reminders of how I used to live my life. Each time I regained weight the sense of failure was overwhelming. I thought it was ME that was at fault, that it was ME that was the failure when all the time it was the DIET that was the failure not me. This has been proved time and time again and I do hope this is something that the Dispatches programme makes clear.
When I think of the madness of slimming club meetings, the humiliating clapping of weight losses, the tables groaning with products that bear no resemblance to real food being sold at great expense, the scales to buy, the measuring spoons, the special calculators, why can no one see that this isn’t how human beings are meant to eat. We aren’t failures. Our bodies are highly sophisticated and are more than able to work out what we need and when we need it. If we need outside help with anything it’s with showing us how to get to know and trust ourselves again and I strongly believe Beyond Chocolate shows us that.

i went to weight watchers but soon dropped it as i was constantly hungry. i also tried slimming world, lighterlife, slimfast, calorie-counting, you name it, i did it. it never worked for me long term but i was always looking for the miracle diet which would allow me to lose weight without feeling hungry or deprived. but the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. beyond choclate is just what we need. i tell people about what i’ve learned and encourage them to jump off of the diet wagon and embrace a more satisfying, pleasurable approach to making peace with their bodies. i no longer count calories or feel guilty if i’ve just eaten 3 or 4 of the cakes that have just come out of the oven. life is too short to go without simple pleasures or to constantly beat ourselves up for being not good enough. stop dieting and start living i say! keep up the good work.

hi, i ve been to weight watchers for many years ( approx since 1998/99) . ive joined and failed many times, in fact it would of been cheaper having all over body liposuction!!! (joke!). i now way 2 and a half stone heavier and feel a failure as i couldnt succeed. but then again , my friend who also joined year after year after year, also failed and weighs 2 to 3 stone heavier! its almost as if my mind refused to follow the diet sub conciously ! i would also crave the naughty things and spend the whole week trying to catch up with my points shortfull! On the other hand , for some people it really does help, i have seen people get to goal many times! and i have also noticed many returning at a later date to lose the weight they had regained!! i have decided this year that instead of dieting, i am going to respect my body , and try to eat without stress or pressure. since christmas i havent lost weight with this method, but neither have i gained! and after eating lots of less healthy foods, i am now beginning to crave more natural healthy foods (unprocessed foods). i too will be watching monday. :o)

I am a WW ‘success’ I suppose – I’ve reached target weight in at least 4 occasions which says it all! But my eating was not ‘ normal’. Porridge with water is vile, skimmed milk looks like dishwashing water and tastes worse ( no I don’t often drink washing up water but did once by mistake
thinking the cup held skimmed milk! ) and I lost count of the amount of point free soup I consumed. Sooner or later the lost 8 kg was regained and the sorry cycle would restart. I would like WW to be open on their stats and publish just what % of joiners get to target and maintain it in any defined time period. Since jettisoning diets and following BC I am slimmer than ever and eating is fun again

I’m not surprised some pro-dieters have left negative comments. When you are invested in traditional weight loss methods like Weightwatchers, it’s really hard to hear the Beyond Chocolate message. I think a lot of people are under the impression there can be only one true path to happiness and that it lies in losing weight by dieting. Most often the dieting message is also quite punitive, and it involves a life-long commitment of time to attending support meetings, as well as often money in paying for that support.

I’ve never found the Beyond Chocolate approach to be targeted at making money. It’s genuinely about having a healthy relationship with food, with your own body and with yourself. One of the most important BC messages is about being your own guru and not letting anyone tell you what’s right for YOUR body and YOUR wellbeing. I think in an age when the buzzwords are all ‘no pain no gain’ and ‘being bad’ and the word ‘sin’ is used to describe breaking a diet – well, that’s fine if you respond to angry, punitive messages, but a lot of us don’t. I’m not a child. I don’t want to be told what to do and what to eat. I’d rather trust myself. It was dieting that made me LOSE that trust in my own instincts around food, a long time ago, and it’s taken me many years to get the confidence to find them again.

My relationship with food will be a life long problem – BECAUSE my mother put me on a diet when I was a child, and I developed an unrealistic and unnatural relationship with food as a result. I lost five stone on Weightwatchers when I was in my early twenties…but used to burst into tears when someone ate the last weetabix, or when I was walking down the street and smelled food from street vendors and couldn’t have any of it because I followed the WW points plan so strictly. I was slim but desperately unhappy, and it’s taken years for me to learn a healthier relationship with food. I dread the thought of going back to Weightwatchers. After becoming a lifetime member, and being feted for my weight loss, I found it an ongoing struggle, and my relationship with food was a battleground. I put that five stone back on, and some, as is so often the case with those who lose weight on Weightwatchers plans. I started out a size 18, went down to a size 12, but ultimately ended up a size 24 until a few years ago. Now I’m a size 18/20 again, but that’s just my dress size – not my whole being or sense of self-esteem and self-worth.

I would never go back to Weightwatchers. I am much happier since embarking on a journey to discover a healthier relationship with food and my own body since finding Beyond Chocolate. It might be a slower journey, and a more personal one, and one devoid of quick fixes and buzzwords and punitive rhetoric, but it is more sustainable and more satisfying, and it doesn’t require me to shell out a lot of money every week to be weighed and given a diet plan that won’t work for me in the long-term.

I’ve been to WW twice, lost weight twice and regained it (plus more) twice. Weight I’ve lost on any other ‘diet’ has also been regained. I’ve binged and judged and monitored and weighed and ‘started tomorrow’ for years and years. It simply is a horrible way to live. I discovered Beyond Chocolate many years ago and although I still struggle with ‘diet mentality’, my relationship with food and my body is very different now.

And in response to the comment by ‘Lee’ that Beyond Chocolate is another money-making machine – in the five years I’ve been aware of Beyond Chocolate the only money I’ve spent is on the book, which I’m sure is a similar price to ONE WW meeting – hardly a money-grabbing scheme! And if I didn’t want to buy the book, I could get it for free at my local library. That’s the beauty of Beyond Chocolate, it costs nothing to follow the principles or read the blogs and website. You don’t have to pay to go to workshops or ‘meetings’ before you’re given a ‘program’ to follow.

‘Lee’ and ‘size 10’ I feel very sad for you that you can’t see how the diet industry dupes people. The fact that you’re even on a Beyond Chocolate forum suggests that you’re searching for something other than whatever diet it is your following. Do yourselves a favour, go to your library, get Sophie and Audrey’s book and try something different – it won’t cost you a penny.

I think what I find most fascinating is the number of people who will say ‘WW/SW/RC work for me- that’s my best diet’ – when what they mean is that they’ve been on it a number of times, lost and regained weight – but that still seems to count as ‘working’.

I’ve lost weight with SlimFast, the F Plan, WW, Slimming World. However I’m probably nearly double the weight I was when I first started dieting. Define ‘work’…

I love the journey that Beyond Chocolate has set me on – about 4 years ago now I think – and have remained the same weight all that time. I don’t have ‘good’ food or ‘bad’ food now. I eat when I’m hungry and I eat what I want to eat. I’m kind to myself when I realise I’m eating out of emotional need. I’ve found an exercise I enjoy – and I do it every week because I want to.

I can’t wait to see Monday’s programme!

I have been a member of WW more than once, Scottish Slimmers several times, Slimming World and a couple of others. The most I lost at WW was 50lbs (the first time) and at Scottish Slimmers I lost nearly 6 stone over a 9 month period. Of course these weight losses did not last and any subsequent attempts were not as successful. The deprivation is awful, I remember feeling hungry, stuffing myself with vegetables in order to fill myself up, making SS corned beef hash – basically limited potatoes, limited corned beef, and onion all mashed together. It was not a big portion so we were advised to add swede and carrot. This was cheap and easy so I ate it a lot.

How can WW members say that they can eat anything they like and still lose weight? What about full fat mayo (the reduced fat stuff is full of chemicals), butter, olive oil on your pasta, cream?

The Beyond Chocolate approach is not easy but it is so much less damaging to your morale and your nutrition than a diet. Yes, you get a huge high when you lose weight, but unless you continue to deprive yourself constantly that weight will go back on extremely quickly and will be much harder to lose the next time.

Not sure if I am a ww success I have done ww a couple of times and then stopped when the going got tough and put the wieght back on. Have also done slimming world, been to inital meetings for lighter life, bought hypnosis tapes, calorie counted done the GI diet and worked through a book, the no diet diet (which is very like your approach the primary aim is to improve your life not lose weight!) however it was my wieght that was having a negative effect on my life so that was what I needed so sort so 2 years ago I went back to weight watchers. I have slowly over that time lost 4 stone, but more importantly I have discovered how to really enjoy my food, in a sensible way so I can go out socially as often as I want and eat normal food at the same time as I am reducing my weight and the pain in my joints – I have just read your blog about peppermint creams and think I might make a batch myself this afternoon. I will work out the points and I will take my time eating them over a number of days so I do not go over my ‘budget’ because this is the way I live my life now. I have no doubt I will carry on til I get to goal and I will stay there. I posted on the dispatches post and I know a number of others from my meeting did as well, not because we are leaders and paid by them but becuase we do not want one overweight and miserbale person put off off going to a weight watchers meeting. If I thoought the dispatches program was going to do a fair comparrison with methods of weight loss and the cost of each that would be brilliant – but I bet it wont. Not that they could compare your method as you don’t even pretend it is efficient at weight loss, just improvign your relationship with food which is very difficult to measure you must agree!

It’s funny how the above has become polarised into a debate between “beyond chocolate” and the diet industry, as if you have to belong to one camp or the other. I’m a big fan of the beyond chocolate mind set, though I’ve attended nothing, read little, and simply dipped in and out of blogs and FB pages when I feel like it.
I realised before I even heard of BC that for me, dieting, whether under the auspices of WW and the like or independently, is tantamount to self harm: a repeating cycle of physical damage followed by self-loathing.
It has taken nearly as much willpower to stay away from diets at times when I’ve felt bad about my appearance as it did to stick to them! But once it became clear to me that no diet could “fix” me, and that I was using them to perpetuate feeling bad about myself, I viewed never to diet again.
The key difference since then has been impact: I no longer obsess about my weight or food. I have more self confidence. The effort of not dieting has mostly passed, and best of all my weight is steady (I don’t weigh, my clothes tell me). On occasion, I may put on a few pounds. I notice. I keep listening to my body’s advice, what it tells me it wants or its tired of. The pounds fall away. There’s no angst, blame or effort, and it costs me nothing. There is no “doing it right” or “wrong” or being “good”. Just me in my bod. Yes, I’m overweight, but I’m also relentlessly healthy, and comfortable in my skin in a way no diet ever delivered.
I recommend beyond chocolate because they describe and support beautifully what I’ve found for myself to be true, and one day when I have the resources to train I’d like to become a chocolate fairy.
I do know people for whom the big diet regimes have seemed to work – but more for whom they have not.
What’s important is to be honest with yourself about what’s good for you, for the whole of you, and stick to that rather than any sense of obligation based on what other people say or, God forbid, brand loyalty.

I lost 3 stone about 12 years ago on WW. Was delighted, but only managed to fit into my size 10 for a couple of weeks! Since then it’s all gone back on. I have been back to WW and slimming world countless times since, they always left me feeling hungry and guilty all the time. I was delighted when I discovered an alternative to traditional dieting. It started with Paul McKenna, and from that I found beyond chocolate, Thin Within, weight loss Gods way – all ask an initial very small financial outlay ie you need to buy the book, but they don’t suck hundreds and thousands of pounds making more and more money every time
you fail. I wish I’d kept all the weekly fees I paid, and the money spent on calculators and chocolate bars and bonus buddies. I could get myself a hOliday with all that wasted money. I have spent very little on Beyond chocolate and hope to go to a £10 workshop if it comes to Manchester and is not on a Saturday. I am not in a good place right now in terms of health, and I do not have the energy for anything right now, but I HAVE lost half a stone eating what I like and following the BC principles and I have far more faith In that than in the multi million pound dieting industry.

I felt compelled to reply to this.

It is a fact that diets don’t work for the majority, the statistics back that up and no-one can deny it. There are a few for who it can work, and live their lives religiously tracking everything. That’s fine for them, but I wonder how many of them are binge-eaters on the quiet?

I have been to WW many times (it must be in double figures) and have got to goal a couple of times but the rest I have failed at. This has definitely made me bigger than if I had never gone at all! Their dieting/health/nutrition advise is wrong in many cases, and when you look at the science of it not much of it makes sense. I will not be going again. My mum started (again) in her early sixties and the weight loss was very slow, and she was told it was her age. The amount she could eat was pitiful; is it any wonder we lose sight of what our body needs?

My biggest regret with all the dieting damage I have done to myself is that I have lost the ability to eat instinctively; I no longer know what I want to eat, only what I “should”. I am really trying to get to grips with this, but still have a lot more binge-days than good ones. This is the diet industries’ fault, not mine.

For those knocking the Beyond Chocolate way of thinking; read the books one day and I guarantee you will see yourself in their examples. All the pro-WW “success stories” posting on here; please come back to us in 10 years and tell us if you are still at goal. Once upon a time man thought the earth was flat and the sun orbited the earth, are you really so confident that these “diets” work?

Is WW Gold Memberhip when you hit target you get free lifelong membership? -erm does this mean they expect you may be back?

Because of diets I have developed the most screwed up relationship with food and my body. Over the past couple of years I have gone to a size 14-16 to a size 8-10 and now back to size 10-12. I have joined a gym gone on diets obsessed over calories, obsessed over what I ate, what I looked like and how much I weighed. Even when I was at my thinnest I still wasn’t happy with the way I looked. I’m only just starting to realise what poor body image I have and how mirrors can really screw with your head.

I also tend to binge eat and because of my medication I am usually hungry all the time so in order to maintain a “healthy” weight I have to eat extremely healthy and or exercise excessively. I also have a naturally curvy body which I need to come to terms with and learn to love my curves instead of trying to squeeze back into a size 8 in which i once fit into for a very brief period in my life.

I hope people can read this and know how I have felt….I think I need to take another read of beyond chocolate (I read it almost 2 years ago) to screw my head back on and get rid of these negative thoughts.

Anyway sorry for my ranting just needed to let off a bit of steam…

This makes me feel so sad. Not sure if I can watch this programme as WW brings up some difficult issues for me…mostly the time and energy I’ve in the last 25 years of my life worrying about my weight, realising that I was a long way from my goal weight. Would I ever be an acceptable size in society or by the WW community..?
I feel very angry that I was ever introduced to dieting or taken along to a WW meeting.
Thank you Sophie & Audrey for giving me my life back and making me realise I have a choice. A choice to make my own decisions on what I eat and when. I am no longer a slave to the scales or the latest WWers plan and eat whatever I like without guilt. I don’t remember anyone ever dying from eating cake.

‘Slimmer than I was’ makes a very important comment in her second post above and it has been ignored.

Above a certain weight life can be miserable. Not because of vanity/peer pressure/fashion-consciousness/the media etc etc. Above a certain weight life can be miserable (indeed can seem like no life at all) because carrying that much weight is physically painful, constantly. Every step is agony. Your life shrinks as you get heavier, until you are merely existing because you are – literally – disabled by your weight.

It’s all very well to say “health has nothing to do with weight” and that’s probably true for people with BMIs up to say the very low 30s. But above that mobility, joint pain, back pain, foot pain will all take a severe hammering, leading to immobility (and concomitant reduced fitness and health) and – in many cases – depression from chronic pain and no “living”.

I absolutely agree that people who are say a size 16 instead of a size 10 should stop worrying and start living instead. But people who are say more than 5 stone overweight are often DESPERATE to lose weight – for reasons that are entirely related to physical pain and lack of mobility. I have never seen that fact acknowledged, much less addressed, on the BC website on or the BC book.

Hello Sophie
Have you ever attended a WW Meeting ?

Yesterday I spent the day in the company of 8 amazing women who came to the one day ‘The Principles’ workshop I lead in London.

Between us we counted 219 years spent dieting – that’s three lifetimes of 70 years (although hopefully we will all live longer than that!). Each of those women had tried well known commercial diet after diet without sustainable success as well as a good few ‘home-made’ ones over that time. They were at the workshop to find a way forward – a way to get back in touch with themselves and their hungers and to learn to trust that they can find a relationship with food which is calm and comfortable rather than about stuffing emotion down and deprivation/binging.

Diets do not teach us how to manage our emotions without using food unsustainably. I have been working with the Beyond Chocolate approach since 2005 and I now recognise often my urge to eat for emotional reasons and sometimes I still choose to do just that because it seems easier in the moment. Emotions can be painful – emotionally and physically painful – and we have learnt to use food to numb the pain because at some stage we needed to do just that to survive what was happening to us – it was a functional and sense-making response at the time that no longer serves us well.

It take open and curious attention, self-care, motivation and time to gain awareness of and change our old, self-protective patterns. Dieting is an external solution to an internal situation – as so many of us know it offers only a short-term and ultimately damaging fix for many people.

I agree with Aggy. Love the book and the work you do but there is a huge difference between being a size 16 and a size 26 with a lifetime of disordered eating which has contribute to extreme weight gain which can severly restrict your mobility and can impact on your health.

I am over 5 stone over weight. And yes, it does affect how you feel, how you move, and yes it is literally crushing. But self hating, self berating, telling myself how fat and unhealthy I am hasn’t helped me to shed the weight. What it has done is lead to me comfort eating more because I felt a failure and “What’s the point?!”
5 years of trying to lose weight and it’s seen me arrive here. A stone a year. A year of trying hard to follow some plan, then feeling dismal because I gained or maintained, or occasionally lost only half a pound.
Now I’m not saying, and I have not said that WW or SW does not work for anyone. There are many happy people who’ve changed their eating and stuck there. There are others though, like me, who feel more and more the failure when instead of losing and staying there, we gain or maintain. We’re failing the diet. We have no will power. We’re lazy.
It’s great if something in you clicks when at 5 or 6 stone overweight you can achieve all you want through one of the diet clubs. Kudos to you! You’ve got it.
But does that mean that those of us who haven’t clicked in the same way as you should feel shamed or humiliated, because our fat and our discomfort isn’t enough to get our big asses into the gym 4 times a week, and drinking point or syn free soup 3 times a day?
What I DO know, is that by taking that self loathing away from myself, by being loving to myself and by avoiding all the self berating diet talk I am starting to treat my body with the respect I deserve. I am training for the moonwalk in May, me and my big old body that has had enough of dieting. I am walking 6 miles a day on a fairly regular basis, not because some gym bunny or class consultant is telling me I need to move, but because I feel good doing it, or at least after I’ve done it.
I am so delighted, honestly, truthfully, for those of you who don’t have issues around food and have lost weight and kept it off. I am glad that you don’t have to go through the mental anguish, and self learning and understanding that I seem to have spent the last five years going through. Exploring why I have such food issues has been emotionally challenging at the very least, and is an ongoing learning curve. But by the end of my journey, I will be at a HEALTHY weight, with a healthy relationship with food.

Hello all,

I thought the dispatches program was terrible and it is such a shame if it puts people off of joining weight watchers and for many, losing weight.

After attending weight watchers for almost a year I have lost 2 stone. I never expected to make friends and I love that I have. For me, it is the support and the meetings that I feel happy to pay for. I also eat some weight watchers food products, but not all of them.

It just doesn’t feel like a diet to me, it feels like a lifestyle change. I love the activity points idea and I do more exercise nowadays. It gives me the feeling that I understand the recipe to success in terms of weight loss. Whether a customer decides to use that recipe or not is down to them, and I do not think weight watchers is to be blamed at all if people do not stick to the plan.

There could be a more CBT approach included in the plan, and it would be great if the leaders could be more emotionally supportive, but I already see my leader and my old leader doing as much as they can, as they have very large groups of people. This is something that the company might consider looking into the future as I think it would boost the rates of people keeping the weight off.

I have been overweight since a child and have been to the doctors asking for help since I was a teenager. Unfortunately I never found the support I needed. I also attended slimming world in my teens, however I found that the nutritional basis didn’t sit well with me, plus, I thought the idea of ‘sins’ was extremely strange.

I have never felt more in control when it comes to my weight and I really do thank weight watchers from the bottom of my heart. The program was upsetting for me as I know how well so many people have done and how hard we all work to get where we get to. It cast the leaders in an evil light where they are people who have come a long way themselves and this should be celebrated.

I believe that nutritional education, encouragement to exercise, support and consistency are the key ingredients to healthy and long term weight loss and I genuinely believe that weight watchers offers these things to their customers. The way that they wish to use it or not is up to them.

Thank you, reading the posts above had been very interesting.

All the best to everyone and I hope we all find happiness within our skins.

Daisy x