PLUS BBC BREAKFAST STAR PENNY HASLAM’S GUILT-FREE TREATS IN OUR EXCLUSIVE WEIGHT WATCHERS SERIES

If BBC Breakfast star Penny Haslam can drop two stone to a size 10 and still eat like this – so can you!

TV presenter and journalist Penny Haslam never thought she could be slim. But with the help of Weight Watchers, she’s managed to lose almost two stone – so now, at the age of 40, she finds herself a size 10 for the first time in her adult life.

This amazing transformation is down to small but significant changes in Penny’s daily routine. Having tried and failed to keep her weight down on strict diets with their confusing lists of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods, it’s the flexibility of the New Approach Weight Watchers ProPoints plan that appeals to her. With ProPoints, food is evaluated according to its nutritional value and effect on weight loss, rather than simply the calories it contains, which means that as long as you stay within your allotted ProPoints limit, you can eat exactly what you want, guilt-free. Penny’s favourite treats include raspberry muffins, mushroom and thyme quiche and French toast – all of which would be off the menu on a conventional weight-loss regime.

The Weight Watchers smartphone app has also helped Penny change her eating habits. It’s been proved that tracking exactly what you eat and how much you exercise has a significant effect on weight loss, because without this tracking we tend to believe we’ve moved more and eaten less than we have. So Penny uses the Weight Watchers app to track the ProPoints in everything she eats during the day.

‘I probably check the app 50 times a day,’ she admits. ‘It means that instead of mindlessly consuming food, I’m focusing on it.’ It has also encouraged her to change her routine to incorporate exercise for the first time in years.

‘We spend far too much time and energy worrying about what we look like, and I don’t want to be too preachy,’ she explains, ‘but sometimes, when it comes to all the food choices we have to make in a day, we just need a helping hand to make our choices a little bit easier.’