Kolakube is bBack on the MFW bandwagon!

KolaKube

Hiya everyone!

How was everyones xmas and new year? OH and I spent it lazing around, over-eating, spending too much on each other and watching DVDs

He went back to work today, booo! Our healthy diet / lifestyle also started today - we both need to lose a significant amount of weight (clearly for me I'll not be reducing cal intake until after mini-Kube is out, but I can certainly change the things I eat / support OH) this year.

Have a homemade no fat / no sugar banana loaf in the oven as we speak as a wee experiment fingers crossed its nice!

Any new years resolutions anyone?

Ours are to -
1) Lose the weight / healthy lifestyle
2) Make more of our time in the evenings together
3) Work to live rather than the other way about
4) Save save save towards the house deposit!

OH commutes 2 hours each way daily. It's a big drain on him, and having had a little time off over xmas he has finally admitted he's finding it difficult. As money isn't too tight we've talked about him maybe reducing to 4 days a week if possible to give him a little extra morale / family time. I can always go back to work early if we need it money wise

x

KolaKube

The sugar and fat free banana loaf is a disgusting sloppy mess lol and fit only for the bin... turns out the gods of diet did not mean for us to cheat with cakes! :rotfl: sugar free jelly it is lol

KolaKube

Evening all!

Successes of the past few days:

1) Trendy new haircut (this happens about once every 6 months so can justify the £20 spent!)
2) Day 4 of the diet and so far things are going very well indeed. Met up with some old friends today and only had a black coffee, and they all had scones with jam & cream. Feeling virtuous and also only spent £1.70! OH also went out for coffee with friends today and declined the goodies too, I'm very proud of him.
3) Also on the diet front, lovely pair of glass electronic scales reduced by half in the argos sale :rotfl:
4) Remembered about adpoints so currently working up this weeks 250. I had forgotten about it a bit over xmas week!
5) Have hidden a jam jar in my sock drawer. OH is always leaving loose change knocking about / in his laundry - normally I just put any bigger coins back in his wallet and keep the small coins as he's not a fan - have started putting all the bigger coins in the jam jar and will present it to him later in the year as lesson in not wasting coins, and to partly fund some new slimmer clothes :cool: £8 found in the laundry in a pair of suit trousers today, so that's a good start!
6) Have ordered OH a lovely engraved beer tankard for our 2nd anniversary this month. It was only £30 (I had been planning to replace his lost wedding ring, and had my eye on one at £400 <separate budget!>... but as he has a lot of weight to lose and it being a hard to resize metal I've decided to hold off on that one. He can continue with his titanium stop-gap ring until he reaches his target weight). So there's £370 not splurged... <does that count as a success!?>
7) OH has found out hes due some extra money this month - a small pay rise backdated to June when he started this job. Not sure how much it will be, but it'll be welcome!
8) OH taking healthy packed lunch every day this week, and we have had a healthy home cooked meal each evening (some serious meal adaptation going on at the mo!), so no extra food out spends.

Failures lol:

1) Car needed a new exhaust 'middle' as it started making a boy racer noise yesterday when I was accelerating... :cool: was only £49 and they fitted it in 10 minutes, but still, money I'd rather not have spent!
2) All healthy groceries costing a LOT more than the usual food shop :eek: No stodgy fillers etc
3) OH dropped and smashed the glass screen on his smartphone... £94 to repair <sigh> Got several quotes! At least they did a very good job and put a lovely new cover on it.


Going to be taking meal planning very seriously this week as the healthy diet is costing a LOT. I tend to adapt recipes to suit us, for example we had a lovely turkey and very curry for tea with rice and the portion was so big OH couldn't finish it, for approx 300 calories. Will post a meal plan for this week once I've worked it out

Sorry for the long post! xx

KolaKube

Woohoo, another success, 100 extra clubcard points for recycling an inkjet cartridge with MrT... every little helps eh!

KolaKube

Meal Plan:

Saturday
L: Don’t plan weekend lunches
Slimming world curry at SIL

Sunday
L: Don’t plan weekend lunches
Chicken breasts in tomato sauce, pasta and salad

Monday
L: Vege pasta
Cajun chicken, SW chips and veg

Tuesday
L: Cajun chicken salad bowl
Pork chop, SW chips and veg

Wednesday
L: Ham salad sandwich, potato and leek soup
Chilli & rice

Thursday
L: Crustless quiche and salad
Spaghetti Bolognese

Friday
L: Sandwich and soup
Sweet chilli sausages, root veg mash


Breakfasts are currently porridge / cereal with skimmed milk +/- toast

Lunches in the plan are generally for OH - I just have whatever needs using up in the fridge lol. He also takes several pieces of fruit, a sugar free jelly pot and a low calorie yoghurt. Plus 1 or 2 cans of own brand diet fizzy drink.

As he's so good during the day but evenings are our 'danger zone' for snacking, I do a relatively low cal pudding every evening after tea (something to look forward to!).

This week we'll be having (in no particular order!)
- HM banana & butterscotch frozen yoghurt
- Sponge with tinned peaches / pears & a little custard Will be using the value MrT mix to make 6x muffin type sponges to ensure portion control and freeze 4. Going to try putting pieces of tinned fruit at the bottom of each case.
- Berry 'trifle' (one trifle sponge crumbled in a little bowl, some frozen berries defrosted and pureed up with a little sweetner, topped with no added sugar strawberry dessert whip made with skimmed milk)
- 'Banoffee' (chopped banana covered with no added sugar butterscotch dessert whip. Sometimes a weightwatchers toffee biscuit gets crumbled into the bottom of this, sometimes not lol)
- Sugar free jelly, berries and yoghurt
- 'Eton mess' - 2x mini meringes crumbled into low calorie yoghurt and berries / tinned mandarins

Anybody any other relatively harmless little dessert recipes? It's our treat of the day, have been using it to keep OH focussed on the diet as these first few days / weeks we're most liable to slip up if he feels deprived... I know things like a 2 finger kitkat are lower in calories than the above, but they slip down too quick and I'm trying not to have instant access temptations like that in at the moment..:rotfl:

Kola x

KolaKube

Morning all

Todays triumphs:

- £5 mamas and papas giftcard e-mailed for joining their mailing list... ordered a pack of 3 bodysuits for mini-Kube which was reduced to £6 already in the sale for £1. OH will collect from store :j

- £4.80 for a bag of old clothes taken to the clothes weigh-in place and my wardrobe is all nicely sorted out

- £3 of this was in £1 coins, so will go into the change jar I'm saving up for OHs slimmer clothes

- Signed us up for life insurance through confu$ed.com as we needed it. £5 each a month, and we got 10,000 nectar points each, and as I 'referred' OH, we should also both get a £25 M&S gift voucher. So if I'm working it out right, thats £100 in nectar points and £50 for M&S, which makes the first year pretty much cash neutral.

- Finally found a bread machine recipe that works! Lovely fresh white bread made last night, and another loaf on the go this morning. As each loaf costs about 30p I'm chuffed!

- Spent ages putting my 1ps, 2ps (and other change under £1) into the self service at MrT this am to get the bacon, filo pastry, bag of bread flour and freezer bags I needed from MrT this morning (forgot these in my order, grr!)

- Double points coupon used yesterday at Boots. OH needed razor blades... but opted instead of buying his usual Mach3 blades at £14+ per pack of 8, he'd give a boots own brand razor a go as the blades are more like £6 a pack. Shaving seems to have gone well this morning, so that was good :rotfl:

- MrT order coming this afternoon. It's mostly F&V etc, we're doing very well on the new diet, but it's quite pricey! They sent through codes for 200 pts on 3x spends before the end of Feb and if you use all 3, you get a bonus 400 pts. Also had a few of the '25 extra points when you buy xxx' codes to use, so we got about 350 points on todays shop, which will all save up for xmas.

Hope everyone is having a good day. I'm off for a wee lurk about the other diaries :A

xx

KolaKube

Just a heads up - lots of ads on nectar adpoints today, just did my 250 for the week! :money:

HelenDaveKids

KolaKube wrote: »

Just a heads up - lots of ads on nectar adpoints today, just did my 250 for the week! :money:

Thanks KK, will head there now!

Hadn't thought of weighing in clothes, have out anything sellable on ebay but still have a large bag left. Do you google local places? Thanks

KolaKube

HelenDaveKids wrote: »

Thanks KK, will head there now!

Hadn't thought of weighing in clothes, have out anything sellable on ebay but still have a large bag left. Do you google local places? Thanks

Mm I would google it, there are two in our town. Handy for some of the more tatty bits that you'd be affronted to sell / give to charity. Not a huge earner at 60p per kilo but they take allsorts like old linen / shoes etc too?

KolaKube

Hello everyone Just popping in for a nosy about.

Mini-Kube is still hanging in there, he's due on the 6th so fingers crossed he gets a move on!

Not a huge amount of MFW activity to report - January feels like such a long month and we've had quite a few car costs / birthdays etc to contend with. It's our two year anniversary next Tues but it's also payday so that's ok

Nipped onto adpoints there, very few knocking about at the moment for some reason?!

MFW activity to report:

- Keeping up with adpoints

- Charity shop shopping for post baby clothes (we have a great one locally where theres loads for 50p at the mo! Lots of 'new to me' jeans in stock now for after mini-Kube arrives)

- Have requested a refund for an item we ordered from amazon that wasn't dispatched from before xmas (£48!), which was nearly forgotten about

- OH used up a few xmas vouchers to buy his latest DVDs etc

- Joined supersavvyme and did an 'extreme couponing' style shop at MrT... came away with over £50 'worth' of laundry stuff etc for £15 so we're well stocked up in that department.

- Have decided to shop around more this year to make the most of our housekeeping money, rather than sticking to MrT to get the points (they just aren't worth it!). I am waiting around today for a big 'monthly' shop from MrA, which came up a full £22 cheaper than MrT at only £33 inc delivery (for the sake of sacrificing about 40p worth of points lol!). £2.50 for an 8 hour delivery slot too if you don't mind waiting in. That, combined with freezer contents and going to the local farm shop for fresh stuff eg milk (2L 89p), FR eggs (79p for 6), maris pipers (5kg £2.75), marg (89p for 500g), fruit and veg should see us nicely through Feb. Our local shop has great offers too (eg 16 loo rolls for £2.99 at the moment)

Moral of the story; it pays to use vouchers and shop around! :rotfl: