Weekly Construction Update

Week Ending Monday, May 2
Despite struggling to stay within my points over the past few weeks (except for this past week) at my weight-in I was down 0.8 pounds, a decrease of 9.2 pounds overall, which puts me just over my 5% weight loss goal!  I think what helped me this week was that I only had one big night out, which helped keeping me within my points.  Also, I got sick towards the end of the week, so that put a damper on any extra eating which helped, though it also caused me to cut back my activity. One note: I weighed in earlier than usual on Tuesday (around lunch time rather than dinner time) so my weigh in next week might be higher in comparison.

Moments of awesomeness this week:

• I worked out one day and earned 6 activity points.  While that's pretty low (even for being sick) I'm still proud of that since before I got sick I was super busy at work, so it's good I managed to get any APs in at all last week.
• Even though I was sick, I did not use that as an excuse to pig out on unhealthy foods.  While it's true that I wasn't cooking or watching my food as closely as usual, I did not give myself a to eat whatever I want to "feel better", as I often do.  I had extra reason to cave this time too because I still had to drag myself to work for the early shift (5am!) for much of the week.  Instead of giving myself a food break, I gave myself a study break and vegged out on the couch rather than trying to study when I felt so bad.  It wasn't exactly the best thing for  my test preparation, but at least I didn't derail my weight loss.
• I wore a skirt to work that previously was one of my "tight" skirts, that now fits just fine and might even be considered a bit on the loose side for a pencil skirt.  Yet another reason to keep up my new shop-more-frequently habit.

That's it for the week.  I'm still working on getting over my illness (I'm a sniveling coughing disgusting mess), but I'm trying to not to get distracted from my weight loss as I've had a string of really good weeks recently.  Here's hoping next week is another good week.

Holy Jean Nidetch: Weight Watchers App Released for Android!

Before getting my Android a few months ago, I actively searched the Weight Watchers forums for information on an app for droid phones similar to the one that exists for the iPhone that everyone raves about.  I never really considered getting an iPhone - my fiance has one and thanks to his iPhone's stellar reception, he has to make all his phonecalls in the back yard.  Now, I don't know about you, but I personally require my phone to have phone call-making functionality.  Crazy, I know.

Anyway, I had pretty much decided to get a droid (I was one of the last living Palm users in the world at the time) but I wanted to make sure there would be some Weight Watchers functionality on the phone.  The mobile site on Android was pretty good and according to the forums, Weight Watchers had promised to release an app for droids in the spring.

Lo and behold, while fiddling with the Android market this weekend I found the new Weight Watchers app!  This is different from the calculator app released previously that just let you calculate the points plus values of food and activity.  This is a full fledged app.  It should be noted that the app is in beta so it is a bit buggy (it crashes on me every so often and has some ease-of-use issues I'll discuss below) but for the most part I'm loving it.

The app has a ton of features outside of the regular Weight Watchers mobile webiste, most of which you can see in the photos below:

Some of my favorite features include:

The PointsPlus Tracker (of course).  You can look at stuff you entered in over recent days to help you add in new items, and in general its faster than the weight watchers mobile site.  My one complaint is that when you search for food, it shows everything in one list instead of breaking out resteraunt food and regular food.  Since I very rarely eat at chain resteraunts, I usually prefer to look at the regular food list instead of having to scroll through a billion listings for Chili's.  Here's a peak at the PointsPlus tracker screen:

Another key feature the tracker has for us city folk is the option to enter food items into the tracker when you do not have reception (i.e. on the subway).  Those items then end up in the "Unsaved items" menu.  Once you get back within reception range, you can choose to add those items to the points tracker fairly easily.

Also helpful is the meeting finder.  You can type in a zip code or have your phone's GPS find your location and see all the meetings near you and their times.  Again, very helpful for city folk like me when  I can't go to my regular meeting but want to find something near where I happen to be that afternoon:

I am also a big fan of being able to read Weight Watchers articles on my phone while commuting and having the ability to whip out the portion estimator at any time.  I'm always trying to remember how much an ounce of cheese is, and now I'll only need to look at my phone to check.

My main gripe is that the app does not rotate horizontally, and since I have a slide out keyboard on my phone, whenever I'm typing something I have to look at the phone sideways:

I'm living with it for now but I hope they sort that out in the future.  There are a few other little bugs (crashing, having to click twice in a cell to type there, etc) but I'm sure they'll work those out over the coming months.  So, if you're an Android user, check out the new app!