Food:  

Weight Watchers’ focus has always been food; eating better and staying full longer. They are traditionally known for the “point system.” Each food is assigned a point designation; your job is to only eat your allotted points.

The Weight Watchers Online program includes thousands of recipes, meal ideas, a meal tracker, dining out guide and more.

They offer two plan options; their original “Points Tracker”, also known as the “Flex Plan”, and the “Core Plan,” which is a traditional diet program that encourages you to eat healthy food without counting points. Weight Watchers’ main focus is on the food you eat. Since they avoid the calorie counting system, you can get away with having a few sweets here and there. The diet makes you feel in control.

Although Weight Watchers gives you the freedom to make your own nutritional choices we would like to see an option for them to customize a meal plan for you. To some dieters having something that tells you want to eat and when is easier.

Exercise:  

The Weight Watchers program highly encourages all members to exercise. The Fitness and Health section provides tips, stories and news about fitness and working out. It helps you understand the importance of fitness, but they do not help you create custom workout regiments like our higher ranked services.

Community:  

Weight Watchers has always been about support and community. The support you would get from going to weekly meetings has been carried over to their Internet program. The strongest aspects of Weight Watchers online are the message boards, which allow you to swap recipes and get to know other dieters in your area.

Although we would like to see a little more “online” community in the form of chat rooms, live chat and professional guidance, we suspect Weight Watchers is reserving that kind of interaction for their weekly meetings and would rather you participate there than online.

Additional Tools:  

One of the best tools offered by Weight Watchers Online is the ability to access account through your portable phone or PDA. WeightWatchers Online can be accessed through most Blackberrys, Windows Mobile devices and iPhone. It probably has the most comprehensive portable support we reviewed. However we were a little disappointed at the lack of additional tools.

Weight Watchers Online does include a weight tracker and BMI calculator, but we were surprised they didn’t include a daily journal or shopping lists. Although Weight Watchers emphasizes their point system we would have liked them to include some additional calculators like calorie, carb and protein.

Ease of Use/Support:  

We found this service friendly and easy to use. However, like many other online diet services, they do not provide you with much access to the website and features without signing up for a membership first.

WeightWatchers Online has two subscription plans; monthly and quarterly. Your billing cycle is every 4 weeks or every 13 weeks depending on which plan you choose.

The initial cost of Weight Watchers online is $16.95 a month, but there is a $29.95 start up fee. You can choose to follow the plan month by month or for a three–month program. The three–month program is $65.00 plus the start up fee.

After your first three months, if you sign up for the three month plan, you are automatically switched to a monthly plan with monthly billing. If you would like to continue your three month billing cycle you will have to manually change it in your settings. Weight Watchers Online does not have minimum membership requirement and you can cancel at anytime.

The Weight Watchers online service is not a bad program, but it seems they would rather you do the traditional program that includes meetings in your local area. The online program and meetings program are not interchangeable and payment for one does not constitute permission to use the other.

If you decide to sign up for the meetings program they do offer eTools similar to the online program.