Weight Watchers Diet and Heart Health: 7 Things You Should Know

The Weight Watchers diet is one of the most popular and well known diet plans of all time, but is it beneficial for heart health? As with so many things, the answer seems to be: It depends.

1. Weight Watchers works by assigning points to different foods, then giving participants a certain number of points per day. The points system is intended to make it easier to know if you’re sticking to the diet or not, without having to count calories or fat grams. Foods like vegetables have low points to encourage eating lots of them, and high-calorie, high-fat foods like cake and pie have a higher amount of points so they are more limited.

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2. The plan also includes weekly meetings for information, encouragement, and accountability. Participants are weighed to see if they lost or gained weight during the week.

3. Some meetings are now done in an online format for convenience.

4. Participants get to be members and attend meetings for life, which encourages them to maintain their weight loss.

5. The very name of the diet implies that its focus is on losing weight. Although Weight Watchers talks about heart health on its website and encourages its participants to make healthy choices, its structure can allow for foods unhealthy for the heart to be chosen, as long as the point totals are not exceeded. This is why U.S. News & World Report ranked the Weight Watchers diet plan No. 15 on their list of heart healthy diets, around the middle of the list.

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6. However, there are many aspects of the diet that can benefit heart health. Weight Watchers is ranked by U.S. News as the No. 1 easiest diet to follow, which means it is more likely to be successful for those who need to lose weight in order to be healthier.

7. It’s important to note that experts from the Washington University School of Medicine to the American Heart Association agree that losing weight reduces the risk of heart disease, so even though Weight Watchers allows participants to make some unhealthy food choices, their heart health will still benefit from losing weight on this plan.

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