(It's obvious, but I only started photographing my food on Friday!)
MONDAY
I have no idea what I ate during the day, as I hadn't started the plan, but I did make Slimming World-friendly meatballs for dinner and they were VILE. I've never actually made my own meatballs before, preferring IKEA's superior succulent morsels of meat over any other (seriously, they're like meatball mecca). When I've watched people make meatballs on the TV or YouTube, they often add breadcrumbs soaked in milk to the meatball mixture to tenderise the meat. Well, I didn't (although, I could have used the ol' Healthy Extras had I known about them), and my meat was far from tender. It was like chewing leather. I won't be using that recipe again.
Recipe points: 1/5 (for the nice tomato sauce)
Daily syns: no idea, but there were none in the meatballs
TUESDAY
Breakfast was fruit salad of peach, pear, and banana (thrilling!).
I had classic Heinz Baked Beans on my HExB Hovis Nimble bread for lunch, with a bowl of speedy carrot, cucumber, and lettuce on the side.
For my mid-afternoon snack I had peaches with my all-time favourite Tims Dairy Greek Style Vanilla Yoghurt (a whopping 6.5 syns, but I had a whole tub to use up, and I wasn't about to let that scrumptious £2-per-tub creaminess go to waste).
Tuesday's dinner was one of the biggest triumphs of the week: Slimming World's Chicken, Sweet Potato and Squash Tagine. I didn't add the squash because I don't like it, so we just had extra sweet potato. It was delightful. I served it with Vegetable Bulgar Wheat Pilaf. We LOVE pilaf. We live round the corner from a great Turkish restaurant and a meal there isn't complete without a steaming side of it. I've never made it from scratch before, and I had to think on my feet when it quickly became clear that I had a different type of bulgar wheat - I adjusted the amounts by eye, but it came out beautifully. Tuesday night win.
Recipe points: 5/5
Daily syns: 6.5
WEDNESDAY
Another fruit salad for breakfast, this time of banana, raspberries, pear, strawberries, and nectarine, with a generous dollop of Tims Dairy Greek Style Vanilla Yoghurt (6.5 syns).
Now, on Wednesday we went to Highclere Castle (all very jolly). The tearooms there offer delicious looking cakes, sausage rolls, paninis etc. Everything had a syn value. I don't eat salads, but even if I did, I wouldn't have been able to have one because they weren't on offer. I settled for home made roasted tomato and garlic soup, assuming 2 syns for some olive oil. It was tasty enough but my heart yearned for a crusty roll and butter.
I had packed snacking raw veg (carrots and cucumber), and a little sandwich for us both using HExB Hovis Nimble bread, ham, cucumber, and lettuce. We ate this in the car on the 2 hour journey home, my boyfriend feeding me carrot sticks as I sped down the M4.
Ah, yes. Wednesday night dinner. Oops. I love me some pulled pork. And I love me some gammon. So imagine my delight when I found a Slimming World recipe for BBQ Pulled Gammon. Hurrah! Except, not. You'll note the recipe calls for boiling the gammon THREE TIMES with fresh water each time, to draw out some of the salt. Well, yours truly decided once would be enough. Take it from me: once isn't enough. It was like I was in the desert I needed so much water. The recipe also yields far too much sauce for the amount of meat. I shoved all the meat back in the slow cooker with all the sauce and it was swimming - I should have spooned out as much sauce as I needed. I am willing to try this recipe again, but I'll follow the instructions next time.
I served the gammon with syn-free chips, which were pretty tasty, and peas.
Recipe points: 2/5
Daily syns: 8.5
THURSDAY
Breakfast was (you guessed it!) a fruit salad of banana, apple, and nectarine. No Tims Dairy today, as I knew I was incorporating some syns into my dinner.
Lunch was my first ever Slimming World-friendly omelette. I eat omelettes a lot, but I'd never made one with 1 calorie cooking spray before. I'm not convinced, but I can handle it whilst I'm slimming. I filled it with ham and a chopped up roasted red pepper (Cooks & Co Roasted Red Peppers are free, because they are pickled in some kind of vinegar), and served it some speedy cucumber and lettuce. I did have a cheeky level tablespoon of Heinz Tommy K with my omelette (1 syn). For a sweet way to finish my lunch hour, I nibbled on half my HExB, an Alpen Light Jaffa Cake bar.
For dinner on Thursday I wasn't feeling fancy or adventurous, so I grilled some Tesco Healthy Living Cumberland Sausages (1 syn each) and cooked up some potatoes, which I mashed together with some milk from my HExA allowance (no butter, bleugh!). I squirted a conservative tablespoon of Heinz Tommy K on my plate (1 syn) and had my standard lettuce, carrots, and cucumber on the side to up the speed food intake. The Tesco sausages were actually fine. I have heard/read mixed reviews of the few free sausage options on the market - to be honest, they all sound pretty questionable and I'd rather not, thanks.
Recipe points: N/A, but I'll give the sausages a solid 4/5
Daily syns: 5
FRIDAY
Classic fruit salad breakfast of bananas, strawberries topped with the last of my Tims Dairy Greek Style Vanilla Yoghurt (*weeps*).
A glorious bacon sarnie for lunch (fat trimmed, of course) with a tablespoon of Heinz (1 syn) to wash it all down. Served with speedy cucumber and carrots. Oh, but not any cucumber. Mini cucumbers. Have you ever seen such madness? No. Thought not.
Friday night dinner was just upsetting. I worked so hard ALL DAY to prepare a so-called "fakeaway" Chicken Tikka Masala and it was simply horrible. It's such an involved recipe it was a little bit heart-breaking when it tasted like chewing mounds of earth. I marinated chicken for the entire day before grilling it (/charring it). There wasn't enough sauce for the amount of chicken (but my boyfriend was all too happy to step up to the challenge of eating all the chicken that didn't make the cut), and the sauce just tasted weird. Like earth. I can't think of another way to describe it. My boyfriend also found it unpleasant.
Pretty grim, all in all. But, still, it was Friday after all, so I treated myself to something sweet. I tried something I'd heard Tilly Cutler talk about on YouTube - adding Cadbury's Highlights or Options hot chocolate sachets to some quark. So I did exactly that, with an added bit of sweetener, and it was pretty good. Not incredible, but it was creamy and sweet with a hint of chocolate, so it satisfied my dessert cravings for only 2 syns.
Recipe points: 1/5
Daily syns: 8.5
SATURDAY
Lazy Saturday mornings mean one thing. Brunch. And so, I set about making my first ever Slimming World cooked breakfast. I had some melon to kick start the ol' metabolism (speedy speedy), and then grilled some more Tesco Healthy Living Cumberland Sausages (1 syn each), fried off some fat-trimmed bacon and plonked it in a 1-calorie spray omelette. Served with a squelch of Heinz as per (1 syn). Tasty. Filling. Satisfying.
I was very naughty and didn't eat proper lunch at all on Saturday. Instead, I had a mid-afternoon snack of more hot-choc quark with some clementines for speed food.
Saturday's dinner was an accidental victory. I made vegetable soup using whatever vegetables needed to be used up, and it was the yummiest scrummiest vegetable soup I ever did eat. And so simple to make! I roughly chopped one large red onion, one large sweet potato, one large parsnip, one red pepper, and around 4 carrots, softened them in a large soup pot sprayed with frylight, added some garlic and a vegetable stock cube at the last minute, covered with some chicken stock and simmered for around an hour. Then I whizzed it up with an immersion blender and - hey presto! - vegetable soup. I'll be making that again.
We then went out to a friend's house for drinks in the evening. I was very restrained and stuck to caffeine free diet coke all evening and didn't touch the nibbles. When I got home I needed a midnight snack though, so I grabbed an Alpen Light bar as my HExB.
Recipe points: 5/5
Daily syns: 4
SUNDAY
Sunday mornings can be busy in our house. We both sing at the local cathedral, and my boyfriend is NOT a morning person. Anyway, I still managed to force him to wake up early enough to wolf down some melon and strawberries before we had to leave. Double speed, yeah.
I was, as ever, starving when I made it back from church and I scoffed down a banana before I even opened a kitchen cupboard. I cooked the first thing that came to mind: pasta and pesto. Super simple. Green pesto has 3.5 syns per level tablespoon. I don't like too much pesto on my pasta anyway, so that was all I had. I served with cucumber for speed food.
For dinner, I was determined to cook a Slimming World roast and, by Jove, it was tasty! Seeing as it was just the two of us and, frankly, I had no idea how to roast a chicken without oil, I pan-fried some chicken breasts rather than roasting a whole bird. Served with roast potatoes and parsnips (cooked in 1-calorie cooking spray), carrots, peas, green beans (not my fave, but I did have two!!) and home made gravy (4 syns for the flour between 2, so 2 syns each), it was delightful.
Later in the evening I had a Müller Light Toffee yoghurt and some grapes in front of the TV. All in all, a pleasing Sunday.
Recipe points: 5/5
Daily syns: 5.5
MONDAY (WEIGH-IN DAY)
Monday was a busy day. My first real test of eating the Slimming World way on the go. I had my usual fruit salad and yoghurt at home. Today's offering was apple, pear, raspberries, and banana with a Müller Light Vanilla.
For lunch I popped into Waitrose and picked up an old favourite, Sweet Chilli Mini Fillets, for 0.5 syns per 100g. The packet is 175g so let's say 1 syn and be done with it. I paired that with some raw carrot batons, which I happily crunched on throughout the day. Like a rabbit.
I didn't eat anything else before weigh in (I had trapped wind from eating too many carrots), so when I got home from group at 9:30pm I was starving. I gobbled down an Alpen Light Cherry Bakewell double-quick, and then had my new favourite snack, hot-choc quark with some clementines. Healthy.
If you made it to the end of this post, you deserve a GOLD STAR. Stay tuned to find out if I lost any weight...
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