My friend wasn't thrilled with her points being lowered either, especially since she likes to indulge in alcohol regularly, and even a single glass of chianti would cost her 5 points.

I think the big problem with WW is that despite all the hype that you can eat anything you want on WW, the points each food costs are not allotted based purely on calorie content. Anything with fat or alcohol content has much higher points than the same number of calories for non-fat foods, and it costs more points to eat anything that's considered to be less healthy. That's why the olive oil points per Tbsp are lower than the butter points per Tbsp. Olive oil may have the exact same number of calories per Tbsp as butter, but the points are still lower, because they consider olive oil to be healthier for you than butter. Even with the difference in points between butter and olive oil, as my friend told me, the point allocation is still punitive for using fats of any kind. And yet, if you chose to eat ten times as many calories worth of food from the free list, it wouldn't cost you a single point.

The points in the last incarnation of WW were also punitive for foods combined into a recipe, since say for instance steamed broccoli and carrots would cost more points than the two separate steamed vegetables, even if you were eating the exact same total amount, and the exact same number of calories. When all fruit was free, you could eat as many individual pieces of fruit as you wanted without using any of your points, but combine those exact same pieces of fruit into a fruit-only smoothie, and it would cost points. Likewise, if you used a recipe from WW, the points would be higher for the ingredients when combined into a recipe, than if you added up the points per serving for the individual ingredients used in their own recipe. I don't know why - I'm assuming they were trying to steer people towards eating simple, plain, individual ingredient foods, rather than any kind taste bud titillating combined foods. My guess is that the points are probably still punitive for eating recipe combinations, and they're trying to enforce this with the extensive list of free foods.

Here's what my friend said about the WW foods (Smart Ones meals and dessert items) that they're still pushing:


Sadly, calling the desserts "snack size" implies that these are snacks to be indulged in between meals, not a sweet to have at the end of a meal, so WWers who are used to being able to fit dessert into their point allotment are going to expend even more points on what they'd consider to be a fitting dessert, not on some tiny snack size treat.

There's nothing wrong with most of the foods on the free list though:



As you can see, many of them are LC foods, and if you avoided the higher sugar fruit and the starchy veggies on that list, and stuck to only low carb foods on that list (without going overboard on the LC veggies), then used every single one of your points for added fats, you could do a LC version of WW these days. (somehow, I missed seeing the whole eggs when I first read the list - since those are free, that makes this version even more doable on LC) That was not the case a couple of years ago, when the only free food was fruit, and by the time you used a bunch of your points for LC friendly veggies and meats, any added fats cost far too many points to eat an adequate amount to do LC. I remember one LCer saying a while back that she did LC on WW for years, but finally had to quit WW when they basically starved her out by reallocating points on foods in such a way that she couldn't get enough LC food to continue.

One thing that really bothers me about WW is that they change it every year - what's free, what requires you spend your points, and reallocate how many points you're allotted, or how many points any individual food is worth. That's the furthest I can imagine from a lifetime way of eating, if you have to completely revamp your eating pattern every year, or at least figure out how to accommodate whatever changes they've instituted into your eating pattern. That's also one of the things I like most about LC - Even with all the different versions of LC out there, the principle stays the same - find your carb/protein/fat level, and stick to that unless you're not happy with the result, then (and only then) adjust as needed, not because some weight loss corporation told you that you had to do it their way.