It does, yes, but it simplifies it. Weight Watchers is needlessly complex as it is proprietary walled garden ecosystem. It also has a support and shaming element (for which you pay).

Weight Watchers assigns points based on ingredients and amounts. This just uses straight up calories. Difficulty with Weight Watchers is it takes time to do data entry, and you cannot always accurately put it in because of complexity or incomplete database. With this, you still won't know how much calories something from a restaurant contains but every time you make your own food you can see the package. Except on fresh food such as vegetables and fruits you prepare yourself.

> I was thinking – what if I assigned a particular number of points to each food I eat and try to keep points under certain threshold daily, and, which is more critical, weekly.

Yup, even the weekly total is very similar to the Weight Watchers system.

I think the insight is that you don’t really have to track down the points for everything you eat. you can guesstimate how many points something is and the measurement error will come out in the wash after you calibrate it to observes weight loss / gain. Pretty neat IMHO!

I've known several people try weight watchers - all of them lost weight... and then put it straight back on again.

These kind of weight loss programs can be useful, but only if you are also committing to change the way you eat for the long term.