Battling the Bulge Part 2 - #Freestyling Food by Leah St. James

In my earlier post this month, I shared my favorite fitness routines for those who might be looking for some ideas on adding activity to their days. (Getting in shape is the No. 1 New Year’s resolution this year after all!) Now it’s time to talk about one of my favorite things: food.

I love to eat. I always have. I’m one of those people who thinks about what I’ll have for dinner while I’m eating lunch. Over the course of my life, much of which was spent overweight, I’ve come to realize that food is my drug of choice. I eat when I’m happy, when I’m bored, but most of all, when I’m stressed. (I keep a bag of raw veggies at my desk for obvious reasons.) 

When I finally lost weight back in 2008, it wasn’t so much beating that addiction, but learning to live with it to maintain a healthier weight. Then I got lazy and over time gained back about 15 pounds. So back on Weight Watchers I went in November, and I’d like to share my experiences with the program and its new “Freestyle” plan.

Disclaimer: I am not a nutritionist or in any way trained or expert in nutrition. These opinions and observations are mine alone, based only on my personal experiences.

Basics: Weight Watchers uses a system of points for accounting for the food you eat. Food points are a combination of calories, fat, proteins, carbohydrates and who knows what else. Certain foods (most fruits and vegetables, certain lean meats) are zero points, which encourage users to make those healthier food choices.

The program also counts activity points which, from what I can tell, are loosely based on the length of the activity and the intensity of the workout.

Each day you get x-number of points to spend/eat. You also get 35 extra points for the week which you can spend over the course of the week, or all in one day if you’d like. (Although I have to say, that would be one whopping day of eating.) Your activity points are factored in as well, so the more you work out, the more you can eat. (I like that part of it!) Also, Weight Watchers lets you count things like vacuuming and mopping floors as activity. (Not that I enjoy housework, but at least you get credit for it!)

Recently, Weight Watchers introduced its Freestyle plan, which increased the number of zero-point foods, including almost all fruits and vegetables (although alas no potatoes or sweet potatoes), chicken breast, turkey breast, eggs (yes, whole eggs), beans and more. At the same time, daily points limits were reduced to balance out the change.

I’ve been on the plan (pre-Freestyle and Freestyle) for about three months and have had some success. Here are my observations:

What I like:
I love the zero points on vegetables and chicken/turkey breast. That means if I eat a grilled chicken breast and some steamed veggies for dinner (no bread or potatoes), that’s ZERO POINTS. That means I can have a small dish of frozen yogurt for dessert and maybe a snack a bit later in the evening! And that makes me happy. 

I love the Weight Watchers website. I can create my own recipes and play around with the ingredients to make the per-serving points workable for me. The mobile app has a scanner that allows you to simply scan a bar code while you’re shopping to find out the points values of that food! Very cool. So if I’m looking at two brands of bread and want to buy the one that’s lower points, it’s quick and easy.

This was my dinner a few days ago -- homemade turkey meatballs (made with 98% lean ground turkey breast), a small scoop of spaghetti with sauce and steamed broccoli. It was pretty yummy, if I do say so! (Eating "healthy" can be a challenge when you're married to a meat-and-potatoes guy like I am. I just have to make it work for me.)

I like that I can track my food in advance to get the day’s total and figure out what changes I might want to make before I actually eat the food. It’s a huge help with social events or dinners out. And you don’t have to count zero-point foods, so the new Freestyle plan means spending less time tracking food.

I like the points system. I have tried My Fitness Pal in the past, which is a really good option if you prefer a free site, but you have to watch calories, carbs, fats, etc., for each food. It’s too much for me. Weight Watchers does the calculations for me. (I don’t need added stress while I’m trying to lose weight!)             

What I’m cautionary about:
"Free" fruits. As much as I love that I can eat fruit all day “for free,” I have a son who’s diabetic, and I know how much sugars are in fruits. I also so know that sugars are not great for us. They serve a purpose in overall nutrition, but too much is...too much. I love fruit, but I limit myself to one or two pieces of fruit a day. (When I first went on Weight Watchers back in 2008, fruits were not free.)

Tips to make it work for you:
One word: Planning.
Seriously, you can eat anything you want on Weight Watchers, but you have to plan for it and account for it. It does take effort, but for me that’s a good thing. Mindless eating is a perfect path to weight gain for me, especially because I use food as an emotional crutch. Weight Watchers forces me to pay attention to what I’m eating and to be purposeful about my choices. I won’t stay on the program forever – mostly because I’m cheap and don’t want to pay forever – but I hope by then I’ll have retrained myself to make better choices.

If you’re battling your bulges and are considering Weight Watchers, I hope this helps give you an idea about the program and whether it might work for you. 

If you have a favorite program or system to track what you eat, we'd love to hear about it! I'm always looking for new ideas.


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Leah writes stories of mystery and romance, good and evil and the power of love. As you might guess, her food addiction finds its way into much of her writing, and she often eats vicariously through her characters, many of whom don’t have to Battle the Bulge. Lucky stiffs. 

Learn more at leahstjames.com. Her days to blog here are the 6th and 22nd each month.

Tipping the scales...again ~ by Leah St. James

When we first decided on January’s theme of forward and back, I swore to myself there was one topic I would NOT write about. I swore. I said to myself, “You’re a woman of a certain age. There have been plenty of forward-and-back moments in your life to choose from. Just not THAT topic.”

Yet here I am, writing my blog for this month, compelled to address the one subject I wanted to avoid: weight loss and weight gain.

Sigh. I find it’s inescapable, so here I go.

Hello, my name is Leah, and I’m a foodaholic.

I truly am. I can place my surrender to foodaholism to my early childhood when my mom—whose husband (my father) dumped her with two little girls—would offer food as comfort for my many tearful episodes.

Me: “Mommy, I miss Daddy.”

Mom:  “I know, honey. Have a cookie.”

I don’t blame my mom. She had more than enough to deal with outside of my whining about an absent father. In truth, she gave more than enough love for both parents, and I often think my older sister and I did better without him.

But the point is, I (subconsciously) replaced my father’s attention with food, and I paid tribute to that relationship with all my energy for many years. When I was sad, I ate. Happy – I ate. Scared – I ate. Frustrated and overworked – I ate, often and mindlessly with a manic sort of attention to stuffing as much into my mouth as I could … You get the picture. 

I started out plump as a preteen, grew to be large in my adolescence, then much larger in high school. By the time I went to college, I was obese, at least 50 pounds overweight. 

There were periods when I slimmed down—like after giving birth to my first son, amazingly. I was working full-time with a 45-minute commute each way. I think I was too busy to eat.  Then I got pneumonia and dropped about 20 pounds. (I would not recommend that as a method of weight loss, by the way.)

When son number two came along, my stress level—and reactionary eating—spiked, and the weight packed on. Did I take a good, hard look at myself, try to rein in my habits? No. I blamed the dryer for shrinking my clothes. I told myself the scale lied so stopped using it.

By the time my children were grown and our nest emptied, I was a hefty size 18W, and my weight had ballooned into the morbidly obese category. My knees hurt so much I had to pull myself up stairs, and I was taking expensive blood pressure medications to stem the possibility of stroke and heart disease.

Oddly, it wasn’t the physical problems that woke me up, it was a job application.  I saw a posting for a position with the local police department and went for it, only to realize, with sheer horror, that I was required to state my height and WEIGHT on the application.

The thought of admitting that number in public paralyzed me. I’d become so adept at lying about my weight over the years, to myself and others, I almost did again. Then I pictured myself in an interview. The hiring manager would look from me to the application, me to the application. I’d be fired before I was hired.

So I finally took that good, hard look. I joined Weight Watchers and learned to choose healthy alternatives. I weighed in faithfully and, in faith, prayed for help with my food obsession.

Eighteen months later, I had dropped 85 pounds. I took up Kate Moss’s mantra: “Nothing taste as good as skinny feels.” Not that I was skinny by any standard, but skinniER. More important, my health improved. I could climb stairs without huffing and puffing, without pain. My medications reduced to much more manageable amounts. I felt physically like the person I’d felt mentally my whole life.

I’ll bet you can guess what happened, though. After a couple years, I grew complacent…cocky even. Five pounds slipped on, then another five. I went back on Weight Watchers. It didn’t help. No matter what I did, I kept losing and gaining the same three pounds. I told myself it was muscle weight because my clothes were fitting fine. 

When another five slipped on, I ramped up my exercise routine from three days a week to five. I lost five pounds and took a small breath of relief. 

That was right before Thanksgiving this past year. Over the holidays I cooked and baked and enjoyed our favorite family recipes. I haven’t stepped on the evil scale since, but my clothes aren’t feeling quite as loose as they were.

So here I am, taking a good, hard look again, hoping I can stop the backward motion. Hoping I can once again find that place where nothing tastes as good as healthy feels. Because believe me, these ten-or-so pounds feel just as insurmountable to me right now as the 85 did a few years back.

Wish me luck, would you? I need it! :-)

Leah writes stories of mystery and romance, good
and evil, and the redeeming power of love.
Visit her at LeahStJames.com.