Say goodbye to "dieting" and hello to "healthy living." That's the guiding sentiment of the new WW, formerly known as Weight Watchers.
When the company rebranded, it also changed its program to offer three variations on its points-based food-logging system.
When you join WW, you're assigned to the Green, Blue, or Purple plans, which shape how you go about managing your meals.
WW uses just as much branded insider language as ever, and as a result, it takes time to wrap your head around how the program really works.
The real star, however, is the supportive community, who cheer you on in this excellent weight loss app.
WW works best for people who are on a committed, long-term weight loss journey.
Doing the program for a month or two may not get you very far.
For quicker and more modest weight loss, apps such as Editors' Choice winners MyFitnessPal and Lifesum are better options.
If the highly branded WW experience doesn't sound appealing, Noom is another very good option for long-term weight loss.
It emphasizes psychology and self-reflection more than most other apps for health and fitness.
To test WW, I used the Digital plan in late 2019.
The bulk of this review reflects my experience at that time.
Since then, WW has changed its pricing and plans, and I updated that information in early January of 2021.
How Much Does WW Cost?
WW offers four plans.
Digital (about $20 per month), Digital 360 ($29.95 per month), Unlimited Workshop + Digital (roughly $45 per month; prices may vary by region), and 1-on-1 Coaching + Digital ($59.95 per month).
For all these plans, you can expect a lower per-month cost if you commit to a longer membership up front.
Additionally, there's a $20 signup fee for new members, but it's almost always waived.
Digital is an app-only experience with some limitations.
You get all the core features of the app, including your customized weight loss plan with SmartPoints tracking.
You also get access to community forums, recipes, and guided workouts and meditations, which are new.
You can only chat with coaches in the app at this level, and the coach isn't personalized to you.
Digital 360 includes everything in the Digital plan and adds live and on-demand content, such as videos and podcasts, as well as increased access to coaches via daily livestreams.
Unlimited Workshop + Digital includes everything that's in Digital 360 and adds unlimited group meetings.
These meetings can be virtual or in person where available.
Every meeting has a coach who helps you along, but it's always in a group environment.
The last tier, 1-on-1 Coaching + Digital, swaps out the unlimited group sessions for private and personalized one-on-one coaching.
WW offers a choice of three plans.
The simplest offer is called WW Digital, which is what I used for testing the service.
WW Digital is entirely online with no coaching or in-person interactions.
It costs $20.95 per month, though you can save if subscribe for longer.
There's a $20 starter fee, but it's often waved.
You get all the tools for following the WW program, including a daily and weekly SmartPoints allotment and an assignment into the Green, Blue, or Purple diet category.
You get everything in the app, including access to the online community and a support line via in-app messaging for any questions you have.
Don't confuse this support line with one-on-one coaching, however.
WW reserves a special type of membership for people who meet and then maintain their weight loss goal.
It's called Lifetime Membership, and it includes everything in Unlimited Workshop + Digital, but it's all free.
To qualify, you have to meet a bunch of criteria, including hitting a healthy goal weight and staying within two pounds of it for a number of weeks.
You also have to maintain that weight going forward or you get charged.
I suppose the idea is that if you're dedicated to WW enough to lose the weight and keep it off, you're probably a positive influence and natural brand ambassador.
How Do WW's Prices Compare?
At about $20 per month, WW Digital is reasonably priced, considering what you get from the program.
It's not a bargain, but it's not a rip-off either.
Noom is a good point of comparison.
It has a high list price of $59 per month, although when I tested the app, my actual cost for the first six weeks ended up being only $20 due to a promotional discount and a $1 two-week trial.
If you sign up for a year-long membership, the per-month price drops to about $17, though you pay it up front as a $159 lump sum.
Noom is different from WW Digital in that the app gives you a short checklist each day, encouraging you to not only weigh in and log all the food you eat, but also read about the psychology of weight loss and maintenance.
Like WW Digital, Noom also has an online support system in place among members.
In Noom, you are assigned to a group, whereas in WW Digital, you can join as many groups as you want and choose people who have similar interests or lifestyles.
There are groups for as nurses, LGBTQ+ people, or WW members over the age of 60, for example.
In Noom, the groups are random, and you only get assigned to one.
Like WW Digital, Noom also has an online support system in place among members.
In Noom, you are assigned to a group, whereas in WW Digital, you can join as many groups as you want and choose people who have similar interests or lifestyles, such as nurses, LGBTQ+ people, or WW members over the age of 60.
In Noom, the groups are random, and you only get assigned to one.
Another app, Lifesum ($49.99 for one year) costs less but doesn't have any community features.
It does have special plans for people who follow specific diets, however, such as gluten-free, keto, dairy-free, or vegan.
Lifesum shows you more nutritional information than WW Digital does, and it offers more flexibility in the type of changes you want to make to your eating habits, whether it's switching to a high-protein diet or fasting every few days.
MyFitnessPal ($9.99 per month or $49.99 per year for Premium) is a standard calorie-counting app rather than a complete health and weight-loss program the way WW is.
With a Premium membership, you can log everything you eat and drink, as well as all the activities you do.
You can also adjust the caloric daily goals to your exact preferences rather than follow the parameters that MyFitnessPal sets.
This app does have some community features, but they aren't as strong as WW Digital's.
The MayoClinic Diet costs $65 per quarter, which works out to about $20 per month.
With the MayoClinic Diet, the only membership type is quarterly—no month-to-month.
It's a decent option if you want detailed meal plans chosen for you, but a terrible option if you have any dietary requirements, such as being vegan or allergic to many foods.
There's no community or coaching, and it's web-only, with no mobile app.
If you're less concerned with losing weight specifically and more tuned into shaping your body, the Jillian Michaels App might be a better fit.
Michaels' app costs $119.99 per year, $34.99 per quarter, or $14.99 per month and contains guided workouts by her alongside meal suggestions and other weight-management tools.
Another app that's similar to Jillian Michaels in balancing workouts and strength training with diet is 8fit, which we also like a lot.
It's priced similarly at $24 per month, $39 per quarter, or $79 per year.
Is it Hard to Cancel or Change Your WW Plan?
You can sign up for WW online via the web app or through Apple or Google Play via the iOS or Android app.
I signed up using an iPhone and the iOS app, which means Apple handles the subscription.
In my experience, letting Apple be the middleman makes it extremely easy to cancel an app subscription or stop recurring payments at any time.
If you enrolled via the website, you can cancel by filling out an easily accessible online form.
You can also call a toll-free number to cancel.
Under a few conditions, you can request a refund, such as canceling for medical issues or pregnancy.
When it comes to changing your diet assignment (meaning, if you don't like the Green, Blue, or Purple plan and want to change), you can do that right in the app on your own.
Your SmartPoints change accordingly from that date forward only.
Getting Started With WW Digital
When you decide to plunge into WW, you fill out a few forms, make your payment, and answer some questions to get started.
This process takes only a couple of minutes, but there's still the long journey of learning all the inside lingo and SmartPoints systems that WW uses ahead of you.
As with any fitness app, you enter your birthday (to calculate age), sex, height, and current weight.
WW asks if you're breastfeeding, a validating question seeing as so many mothers have concerns about postpartum weight loss and need to be careful not to restrict their daily caloric intake too much.
The app also asks what you'd like to focus on in your program.
I selected "Weight loss and healthy habits."
The next step in setting up your account is to answer a bunch of questions about your eating habits.
"Are most of your meals home-cooked, ready-made, or fast food/restaurant meals?" "How often do you eat chicken or turkey breast?" Most of the questions are of the "how often do you eat…" variety, cycling through dairy, eggs, tofu, beans, legumes, vegetables, and so forth.
Based on your answers, you are assigned a color group and given an allotment of Daily and Weekly SmartPoints, also known as dailies and weeklies.
From this point, you begin your true indoctrination into the program.
How Does WW Digital Work?
Some decades ago, Weight Watchers (when it was still called that) invented a method of tracking food known as the SmartPoints system.
It is anti-calorie counting in so much as you never look at or think about calories.
Instead, you focus on SmartPoints.
Weight Watchers assigned every food a number of points.
Nutritious foods with a low-calorie density have a low number.
In fact, there's a whole category of ZeroPoints foods.
Foods that are calorically dense have a higher point value.
This system was/is especially convenient for Weight Watchers branded foods, where the SmartPoints per serving are clearly advertised on the packaging.
When you become a Weight Watchers member, one of the first things you learn is how many points are in your SmartPoints Budget.
You get a daily budget, which are your "dailies." In addition, you get a weekly budget that you can pull from whenever you want during the week—your "weeklies." It's basic budgeting, really.
In 2019, when Weight Watchers rebranded to WW, it changed the old Points system by creating three variations on it: Green, Blue, and Purple.
The Green group gets more SmartPoints to use than anyone else, but their list of Zero Points foods is smallest.
The Purple group gets the fewest SmartPoints, but their list of ZeroPoints foods is nearly three times as long.
Blue is somewhere in the middle and used to be called Freestyle SmartPoints.
Logging Food and Activity
When it's time to log food and activity, you can do so from the WW app or the website.
The app is slightly easier to use than the website, although neither is a stunning example of a well-designed user experience.
For example, you'd imagine that to log a meal, you might tap a button that says, "Log food" or "Add food" or "Log breakfast." Nope.
Rather, you start from a search bar that reads, "Search food" or, depending on the page, merely "Search." It's not clear that you're searching for food to log, seeing as you could be searching to look up a food's nutritional value or SmartPoints.
Part of the problem is the search bar sits high at the top of the screen, a good distance away from the area where you see your logged meals.
Separating them is a mini calendar and a dashboard showing your points.
Really, the tool you use to log food and the summary of foods you just logged should be next to one another.
In any event, the first few times you log food, you must use the search bar.
For any food item you look up, you can adjust the portion size to match what you had.
WW's database contains fresh foods, packaged foods, menu items from supported restaurants, plus recipes.
You can enter new recipes, as well as explore recipes that WW has created.
You can also use a barcode scanner to look up packaged foods.
I didn't have much luck with it.
When the scanner can't find your food, it asks if you're willing to add the nutritional information to the database manually.
When I did that, WW immediately assigned a SmartPoints value to the item.
After you have a few meals under your belt, logging becomes easier because the app lists foods and meals you ate recently as options for meals you can log.
Swipe any meal or item and you get options for logging it.
I like being able to add all the items from a previous meal in one go and then adjusting as necessary.
For example, if I put avocado on a sandwich yesterday, and today I eat the same sandwich but without avocado, I can log the same lunch as yesterday in one swipe and then delete just the avocado.
Once you log a meal, you can save it as a favorite, which also makes it easy to log it again another time.
There's also a Quick Add button where you can name what you ate and estimate the Smartpoints value if you don't have the time, patience, or desire to look up every ingredient from your meal.
If you have an iPhone, you can use Siri to search and track the foods you eat, too.
Logging activities is similar to logging food.
You look them up using a search bar and then specify the duration.
WW Digital also connects with a few fitness apps that log activities as well as daily steps automatically.
On iOS, you can connect with the Apple Health app.
Other options include Daily Burn, Fitbit, Garmin, MapMyRun, Misfit, and Withings.
When you're active, you earn FitPoints.
The whole concept of FitPoints and how you can use them is buried in the WW Digital app settings.
You have an option to keep FitPoints on hand as a sort of emergency budget in case you use all your dailies.
You have three choices:
Don't apply your FitPoints to your food budget.
When your daily point budget runs out, use your FitPoints first and save your weeklies.
Apply your FitPoints toward your food budget only after you run out of dailies and weeklies.
By default, the app chooses option 1.
In that scenario, it's pretty easy to forget about FitPoints entirely.
I certainly never felt motivated to look at them or try to earn more of...
