Calculating Activity Points

I recently signed up for Weight Watchers online.  I haven't been able to get my weight back to where I want it, and with our current travel schedule getting to meetings just wasn't going to work.  There are almost no meetings on Oahu!  I signed up for 3 months, so that gives me until Thanksgiving to get back to where I want to be.

When I did the old points systems, I knew that about 50 calories equaled 1 point.  I used that same number for activity points.  At some point, I switched to 100 calories burned.  With the Points Plus system, I've never been sure.  To add even more confusion, my Suunto watch shows significantly fewer calories burned than my Garmin did for similar outings (about 75 calories/mile vs. 100 calories/mile.)

This week I decided to calculate my activity points online to see what I would get versus calories burned.  Here are some examples:

Sunday rode 8.96 miles, burned 273 calories (divided by 50 = 5.5 AP), 6 AP online
Monday ran 6 miles, burned 363 calories (/50 = 7 AP), 11 AP online
Tuesday rode 9.39 miles, burned 299 calories (/50 = 6 AP), 10 AP online
Wednesday rest day
Thursday ran 9.21 miles, burned 742 calories (/50 = 15 AP), 15 AP online

That is about clear as mud!  Some are close, while others seem way off.  The good news is I haven't used all the points and on my rest day I used very few weekly points.  So hopefully I'll see a loss on the scale tomorrow.

While this method doesn't seem perfect, it's still a lot better than what I did when I joined WW in 1997.  No matter the activity, 1 point was earned for every 20 minutes.  So if I walked, ran, biked, hiked, or surfed for an hour, I earned 3 points!