WW old style

[nlbarber]

One of those posts I meant to make a while ago....

Back in December, Weight Watchers introduced another revision to their program. All new books and handouts, some changes to the actual mechanics of the program. For the changes to the mechanics of the flex program that I follow, the explanation my leader gave is that the new program takes into account sex, height, age, and general activity level, where the old program was purely based on your current weight. As a middle-aged short female with a desk job, my points target is lower than it had been.

But that's not what I found fascinating about the meeting. My leader lost her weight 25 years ago, and told us about the program back then. Some of the oddities: it was a rigid diet plan at one point, with no substitutions allowed. You had to eat liver once a week (not a problem for me, I love it--but all the old hands said "I never ate the liver"), you had to drink milk but it had to be reconstituted powdered milk, ketchup was on the fixed diet but you had to make your own, tuna had to be eaten with mustard, not mayo, you had to eat bread, but only white bread and during daylight hours, and there were what they called "peanuts", which were mushrooms baked hard.

Oh how far WW, and dietary knowledge in general, has come!

Comments

[idiotgrrl.livejournal.com]

I was on that program. And I ate the liver. I steamed it in a bit of onion broth. I made my tuna salad with chopped canned green chile which meant no mayo required. It is, BTW, delicious. The white bread was plain old one-ounce slices of Wonder Bread.

Barnes & Noble has a 1920s Girl Scout Manual which suggests that eating bread full of bran is not a good idea because it's so much harder to digest. I do have a vague memory of that being a concern even into my youth in the 1950s.