Smart points review - the first weekend

Previously, on WW Foodie:

The review of my first day on Smart Points can be found here.

And now, the first weekend...

I am writing this on Sunday afternoon.  I am currently at my desk, in between bouts of studying international tax issues.  Plus, it is my special lady time and I have the crampiest stomach known to mankind.  I am not in the best of moods as you can imagine, so be sure and take all this with a pinch of salt.

No doubt that, come Thursday, if I have a really good first week's weight loss I shall be full of the joys of Smart Points but, for now, I have to say I am still very firmly on the fence.

Perhaps a lot of it comes down to whether or not you feel a "diet" (ugh, I hate that word) should be punitive.  If you read Peridot's blog, for example, she puts herself through the wringer on a weekly basis, interspersing fast days with restricted calorie days - the woman has willpower of IRON.  And Lesley is currently back on meal replacement packs and, by all accounts, rocking it.  Me bitching about the fact that I ate a bag of Minstrels after my tea and it took a rather large chunk out of my weekly points seems petty in the extreme.

But ProPoints always felt to me like it could be a viable lifestyle choice if you took a bit of care over planning your meals.  Smart Points, much less so.  Steph - as per your comment, joyless is often the word that springs to mind.

I think that the Minstrels are an interesting example.  The Smart Points calculation starts from the calories in an item.  A high percentage of saturated fat and sugar will then send the points up and a high percentage of protein will bring it back down.  So as you can imagine, an item that is basically all saturated fat and sugar (e.g. Minstrels) is going to end up pretty high.

Minstrels are 212 calories a bag.  If you're a woman on a fairly restricted daily calorie intake - say, 1200, which is pretty low - that represents one sixth of your daily calories.  Minstrels are 11 SP a bag.  If you're a woman on the lower end of the SP allowance - say, 31 (which is 29 dailies plus 2 out of your 14 weeklies) - then the Minstrels now represent a third of your intake.  It's obviously not quite as straightforward as that, what with fruit and vegetables being 0 SP, but it is a marked difference.

There will be many people out there who will say yes, but you shouldn't be eating a bag of Minstrels every day - I even said a similar thing myself a few posts ago.  To which I answer yes, I shouldn't.  But it shows a marked lack of understanding of the mentality of many dieters to tell them this.  Say to them - you could eat a bag of Minstrels every day, or you could use your points on slightly bigger portions at dinner and a good proportion of the time they'll go for the latter option.  Say to them - you shouldn't eat a bag of Minstrels everyday and we're going to make it bloody hard for you to do so and heels get dug in.

Or my heels do at least.

Anyway, I'm on day 4 of the first week and I'm still on track with, for all my griping, points to spare.  I just am feeling a bit Gollumesque over that weekly bank...



Still, onwards and (hopefully!) downwards chaps.