the ice cream diet

Lydia has given me the go-ahead to tell the world (well, the world that reads our blog anyway) that we've joined the Weight Watchers bandwagon. Judging from their tables of healthy weight, she's right on the nose for height/weight ratio and just wants to learn better eating habits. Me on the other hand... not so much on the target.

If you're not familiar with the Weight Watchers program, it's basically this:

• eat sensibly
• be a little more active
• be patient

...and then you lose weight at about a pound a week. Notice that the first part isn't "change your diet" or "cut things out." Weight Watchers gives you a point target and you have to stay below that number, but you can eat anything you want that adds up to those points. My current point target is 24, which means I could just eat three Krispy Kreme donuts a day. Of course then, I couldn't eat anything else (and I'd be pretty miserable... but hyper.)

In order to achieve the first goal of eating sensibly, you have to keep a diary of your food. Rather than total up calories and fat grams and other dietary information, they just boil it down to "points." The points formula is easy:

Okay, maybe not that easy, but once you use their tools (or create one of your own) it's pretty easy.

As you probably already know, when Lydia puts her mind to something, she does it 110%. As a result, our house is a low-point zone. Almost everything that we have laying around to eat is extremely low in "points." At the end of the day yesterday, despite trying desperately to add points to my dinner, I was left with six points. If you dip below your recommended points per day, you aren't getting the caloric content you need to sustain your metabolism (translation: it's not healthy.)

Six points just happens to be the number of points that is in a cup-and-a-half of ice cream with a tablespoon-and-a-half of chocolate syrup on it. I'm not talking about ice milk or vanilla sorbet... the real stuff. It was incredible, and it was "on my diet." And, the best part about it, at my last weigh-in, I was down 4.2 lbs. At this rate, I'll be at 0 by the end of the year!!