Weight Watchers is a diet program designed to help you lose weight by providing you with a daily allotment of food points that you can use at your discretion. Each type of food you eat is assigned a point value, which you count throughout the day to determine the total points you eat. While the point value of many foods is provided in the Weight Watchers manual, you may run across foods that have not been listed. When this occurs, you will need to calculate the point total on your own.
Step 1
Divide the number of the calories in the food by 50. For example, if a meal of medium French fries has 450 calories, this calculation would yield 9.
Step 2
Divide the number of fat grams by 12. Add that number to the number you calculated in Step 1. In the example above, the fat grams of the medium fries is 22. Dividing that number by 12 gets 1.83. When added to the calories calculation, you get a point total of 10.83.
Step 3
Divide by the number 5 either the number of total dietary fiber or the number 4, whichever is less. Subtract that from the total you have calculated thus far. This is because only the first four grams of fiber count toward the point total.
In the fries example, there are 5 grams of dietary fiber so you would divide 4 by 5 because four is the lesser of the numbers. This gives you .80. When you subtract .80 from 10.83, the total is 10.03, or simply 10 points.
Tips and Warnings
- Many restaurants are now publishing the nutritional content of their meals. You can use this data to calculate point values when you go out to eat. Check with your Weight Watchers literature for the point totals given by the program. When in doubt, use these point totals toward your goal.
Things You'll Need
- Calculator
- Calories of the food
- Fat grams of the food
- Dietary fiber
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