Slimming World and OS real food dilemma

thriftlady_2

seraphina wrote: »

4) I put on less weight if I drink gin and tonic than wine:rotfl:Wine is a real killer calorifically -we worked it out once that half a bottle of wine is about 2 mars bars.

This is the one I have real trouble with -love my wine and can't exchange it for G&T I'm afraid, but have succeeded recently in reducing the number of wine days to 3 a week instead of 5-6 -saving money too. Half a bottle of red is about 5 points isn't it -don't tell me it's more...

mrsmortenharket

I have tried SW.

Found it didn't agree with me. I hve to do green days as am veggie. But so many carbs upset my ibs. Plus I found I was eating lots of processed stuff like the batchelors pasta/rice.

Oh & I can't have awful muller lites cos they contain gelatine.

And I duslike quorn.

I am now trying my own way.

Basically, watching portion sizes, eating mostly what I want but stearing clear of obviously bad stuff & cooking from scratch.

Lisa

thriftlady_2

Another thing I got annoyed about with WWs was their insistence on using polyunsaturated margarine in their recipes. Sorry, but that is not food in my book and if you substitute butter you increase the points(but not calories) because WWs have this obsession with saturated fat (the evils of which I am unconvinced of).

ifonlyitwaseasier

well i'm going to defend WW, i've lost 2st4lbs since last april and i found the main change i had to make was cut out high fat foods and rethink how i cook things, ie instead of thinking i need lots of butter and fats, i can cut them down and use the recipe builder they have on the site to rework things like cakes and meals.

i don't work the points out in my head as i have a small encyclopedia of them up there now :cool:
and i have the little calculator that lives in my handbag.

and there is a very big list of 0pt food available on there, mainly fruit and veg but it's there and it means i can snack on carrots and cucumbers all day and not use up any points :j :j :j

seraphina

I did spend quite a bit of time working out points for my usual home cooked meals when I started WW, but now I have a rough idea of what's what. I did get cross with the whole instant food mentality, which I suppose works for 90% of people who do WW/SW - but at the time I was a student and I couldn't afford to live off prepared foods. Also, if you look at their points/ready meal serving, the portions were tiny. I knew that, for example, I could have a huge bowl of home cooked bean chilli, with a small sprinkling of cheese and some rice for the same points value as one of their small (nasty) ready meals. I still base my meal plans around vegetables - I try and cram as much of the "free" foods into my meals as possible. I did find this concept of zero point foods useful, if only when applied to fresh produce (not sugar free jellies etc!). It pointed me towards foods that were actively good to eat. It also reminded me that things like pasta, rice and carbohydrate foods, whilst essential for good nutrition, must be eaten in proportion to your needs for them. By assigning them a "points" value, it helps me to stop and think about how much of them I need to eat at any particular meal.

Thriftlady - agree completely about butter/polyunsaturated marge. I think your sig sums the whole thing up - but it's amazing how under 10 words can be so difficult to put into practice!

Cleosmum

Im doing SW and cooking from scratch OS, it can be done

I think Im lucky with my consultant, every week she will go through how bad it is to fill up on pasta & sauce packets, mugshots etc and reminds us they are not "free" foods but "zero" rated, if we eat them our weightloss will suffer. She also reminds us to steer clear of things with sweetners in as they are bad for us. We all go away with great recipes that are OS and cooked from scratch. I havent had a ready meal whilst on the plan. Breadwise we have a number of members that make their own bread and she worked out how many syns were in a HM wholemeal loaf and suggested that as a healthy extra is 6 syns that we could try knocking off 6 syns from the total (so if it was 8 syns for 2 slice, you are left with 2 syns) and giving it a trial for a week, if the weightloss stayed consistent then fine, if it suffered then look again at it, maybe going back to shop bought, or just eating HM but synning it. Cant recall how many syns the loaf worked out to, will ask next meeting. If you use the syns online and go to the basics section you should be able to work it all out. Dont forget you can use olive oil as a healthy extra.

Interesting seeing someone mention depression, if I include too many sweeteners then I find I dip back toward my depression, so now I concentrate on eating meals made from scratch.

ceridwen

Hi Cleosmum

Could be that you got a consultant who is a bit more clued-up on healthy eating than many of them are.

When you say H.M. bread at 8 Syns per 2 slices - what sort of slices are we talking about? To me I would take that as being 2 thick slices from a standard-size H.M. loaf (ie a large loaf). But I may not be right on that one.

I am also confused by a difference between "free" foods and "zero" foods Is this a new concept since I attended meetings 3/4? years ago? Not sure what is meant by that.

vivaladiva

It really is as simple as 'eat less, move more' BUT I just don't seem to be able to get my head round it:rolleyes:

I have the same problem. Surely if it was really this easy, we wouldn't be sitting here discussing weight loss. (Or is it the sitting here bit that's the problem?:rotfl:)
There has got to be another factor out there somewhere.

CRANKY40

I was slimmer of the week at my SW class about 3 weeks ago. In my "fruit basket" prize, there was a multitude of packets of instant noodle things, instant rice things, and instant pasta things.

Nothing in the world would induce me to eat any of it, so I have taken it to work. One of the ladies I work with, whose ex stopped paying her child maintenance this month was extremely grateful to be on the receiving end of the bagful.

I have always been a fussy eater, and prefer to cook from scratch. When dh is home he eats what I eat but with added bread and butter (real butter). I have lost a stone with slimming world since Christmas, mostly by giving up eating cakes, sweets and crisps if the truth be known.

I've had to stop going to SW as dh has gone back to sea, but the classes fixed my goal in my mind rather than changing my cooking habits, and helped me kick the sweet things and alcohol if you know what I mean.

I also gained a few cooking tips from the other ladies, most of us actually made our own food, especially soups and pasta based meals. The leader was always talking about how you could use packets of this and packets of that, but we mostly swapped proper cooking tips between the class members.

Cleosmum

ceridwen wrote: »

Hi Cleosmum

Could be that you got a consultant who is a bit more clued-up on healthy eating than many of them are.

When you say H.M. bread at 8 Syns per 2 slices - what sort of slices are we talking about? To me I would take that as being 2 thick slices from a standard-size H.M. loaf (ie a large loaf). But I may not be right on that one.

I am also confused by a difference between "free" foods and "zero" foods Is this a new concept since I attended meetings 3/4? years ago? Not sure what is meant by that.

Sorry, was just using the 8 syns as an example, have no idea how many syns they are, but SW use 57g wholemeal bread as a HE and that is 6 syns.

My consultant is very clued up on healthy things, green issues etc. The zero v free is something which I think my consultant has come up with, rather than SW, she just says its common sense that a pasta & sauce at 560 odd cals is going to do little for weightloss compared with doing a bowl of pasta and making your own sauce, better for you, more filling and far far less calories. SW head office really frown upon discussing calories, so its not come from them.