We’re thrilled to report that Weight Watchers has once again won the top spot in the U.S. News & World Report rankings for #1 best weight-loss diet as well as the new Easiest Diet to Follow category in its newest Best Diets 2012 review.

The news organization cited flexibility and the fact that no foods were off limits as main perks of the Weight Watchers program.

Weight Watchers can fit into the most active of lifestyles. You don’t need to count calories or eliminate the foods you love from your diet. Every food and drink is assigned a single number (a PointsPlus® value), which gets subtracted from a PointsPlus budget when you eat it. Activity can even earn you activity PointsPlus values, which you can swap for extra foodPointsPlus values if you like.

“We believe the PointsPlus program is easy to follow because it provides the balance of enough structure to produce weight loss at the recommended rate with enough flexibility to live your life,” says Karen Miller-Kovach, Chief Scientific Officer of Weight Watchers International.

Of course, our meetings members and Weight Watchers Online subscribers already know about these perks. Liz Josefsberg, director of brand advocacy for Weight Watchers and a Leader, says, “We’re about real food in the real world. It’s this overarching belief system about learning that managing real food in your life is always going to be the way to achieve long-term success.”

Weight Watchers is constantly working on ways to make following the plan easier and more convenient, such as the exciting recent advancements in our mobile apps for the iPhone, Android and iPad, as well as a new integrated barcode scanning app. Weight Watchers also allows meetings members with eTools and Weight Watchers Online subscribers to access a food database that lists the PointsPlus values for more than 40,000 items, as well as more than 3,500 recipes and meal ideas with the PointsPlus values already calculated for you. And of course, you can access these via any smartphone.

All of our Internet and mobile tools, and for meetings members, the support of our staff members in centers around the country, make it easy to make Weight Watchers a part of your everyday life, and we’re glad the experts agree.

With an ever-growing body of research supporting our approach to weight loss, we are proud to be doing our part to help prevent obesity, reduce healthcare costs and, most importantly, keep Americans healthy.

U.S. News & World Report determined its rankings by bringing together an independent panel of 22 nationally recognized experts in diet, nutrition, obesity, food psychology, diabetes, and heart disease. The experts conducted an in-depth assessment of 25 diets and diet programs, ranking them in seven categories: Short-term weight loss, long-term weight loss, ease of compliance, nutritional completeness, health risks, and ability to prevent or manage diabetes and heart disease. The experts rated each diet from 1 to 5 in each of the categories.