The story of WeightPoints.plus begins back in January, 2012. I, Jeff Pohlmeyer, was 6'3" and ~305 pounds on my way to England for a 10-week study term. In the interest of saving money, I decided that I wouldn't buy tickets for public transit or anything like that and I would walk anywhere I needed to go. As a result of this, regardless of what I ate and due to the 4+ miles I walked every day, I ended up losing approximately 25 pounds over said term.
Cut back to my arrival home, feeling good about my weight loss, I wanted to keep it going. The problem is that suburban New Jersey doesn't provide for the same ability to walk everywhere I needed to go. At first my mentality was that I could eat whatever I wanted as long as I continued to be active. I tried bike riding, running (not good for someone of my weight) and any number of trendy fitness programs.
My Magic Formula
It was now July, 2012, and while I didn't gain any of the weight back, I was stuck. I then saw an ad for Weight Watchers featuring the very persuasive Charles Barkley. Considering they were having a deal for 3 months free after paying the joining fee (which was less than 3 months' of a membership), I figured I'd give it a shot.
The program that was active when I signed up was their PointsPlus program (the first evolution from their Points program, I gather). As a result of following this program diligently, weighing out everything that I ate and not actually cheating, as well as exercising using DDP Yoga, I went from 276 in July, 2012 all the way down to 196 in February, 2013.
I was able to go on Maintenance Mode and live a fairly successful life keeping the weight off until late 2015 when, without warning, my beloved PointsPlus program was replaced with another. Now, all of a sudden, my breakfast that took up 11 points out of my total of 42 now took up 15 of a reduced 35 points.
Suffice it to say, I canceled my membership and looked online for solutions. Now, I will not list them here, but there are many sites out there that have the formulas necessary to replicate the PointsPlus system on your own. Some of them even include their own spreadsheets you can download. I actually made my own spreadsheet and it worked for a bit, until I fell off the wagon.
Fast forward again to a global pandemic and I, like many others, put on a decent amount of weight over the course of the last two years. Thanks to my Peloton my weight gain wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been.
That said, I wanted to work on actually losing weight and I went back to my trusty spreadsheet only to realize that the macro I had programmed to calculate points wasn't actually working correctly. That, combined with a general difficulty to update a spreadsheet from my phone, led me to create this website.
More "about" info will be coming soon, including a video that describes a bit about how to use the site, but for now I'll have to leave this here.