After a few days of unsuccessfully following SW I have some Qs.

[rollerbird]

Hi Impossible, welcome!
I'm also a 3rd year student bogged down with tons of work / dissertation! I'm also a mum if 2 so I have no spare time at the moment but as the others say, it's all in the planning
I bought myself a lovely insulated lunch bag from the Range and I take tons of fruit and a curly wurly alongside my lunch to nibble on when working. I rarely eat sandwiches as I can't eat much bread, but so far my favourites are:
Chicken and bacon soup (really easy, get a ready chopped soup pack from Asda or Tesco , boil up with chicken stock, cubed chicken breadt, cubed smoked bacon medallions and lentils.) I have a thermos soup flask (from Amazon). Best thing ever, even has its own spoon and the lid doubles up as a bowl!
Couscous mixed with roasted peppers, courgettes, red onions and feta cheese (HEA).
Tuba pasta salad
Also I don't know what food is like in your uni but ours (I'm at Edge Hill) has an omelette bar and a stir fry bar, you can ask for less oil to be used.
It all depends on how badly you want to lose weight. Fir me at the moment, I have a picture of the dress I want for Grad ball stuck on my fridge!

Good luck !
xx

 

[Browsie]

Hi I have read this post with interest and wanted to echo some of what is already being said. You need to give SW a chance. If you only do a few days SW and then switch to calorie counting how do you know whether its worked for you. The planning ahead I would have thought you would need to do that with caloris counting anyway as you don't want to be left with no calories for your evening meal. Or do you just starve all day? Once you have been doing the plan for a few weeks you don't really need to plan as much. I just decide what we are having for tea and base the rest of the day around that. I takes 5 mins to jot things down then I know what I can and cant eat the following day without having to think about it.

If you want to lose weigh you have to change the way you eat there is no weight loss plan you can do that you dont. Calorie counting is by restricting the amount of food you eat. Personally I can't cope with this way and it restricts a lot more foods than SW does. For example a lamb rogan josh is only 6 1/2 syns. Pilau rice is low in syns but boiled rice if free - for the whole portion. How many calories would this be?

If you are happy with counting calaroies then stick to that, if not give SW a chance. Good luck in your weight loss whichever way you go.

 

[jen3]

Its hard when you're so used to a certain way of "dieting". Took me at least 6 months to get WW points out of my head and also to get used to the variation of free food you can have on SW

I love the fact that with SW I dont have to constantly work out how many calories/points I have left and "if I have this then I cant have this but if I have that I can have a bit of this". It meant that before i was always thinking of food and it made me hungry!

With SW you have to have stuff in and planning is important - once you get used to that its a walk in the park and the only plan I've ever done that I always do even when I'm not (if that makes sense)

I wish you luck and success with whatever you choose

 

[daydreamer25]

I struggled with it at the start as it was always calorie counting for me pre SW. Even now I would sometimes think of it in the back of my mind but have to just ignore it.

Slimming world has worked better for me than WW (I couldn't be bothered with the counting) and I know there is so much free food I can eat without counting a single number.

 

[ladybird23]

I've just come across this thread and read it through with interest. I'm into my 6th week with SW and whilst the first week was ok as I was enthusiastic and motivated, I really, really struggled for the next 2 - 3 weeks. My situation is nothing like yours in that I'm at home most of the time, but believe me, that doesn't make it any easier! I'm a very keen home cook and butter, cream, cheese and often cheaper, therefore fattier, cuts of meat were my staple ingredients. I only eat pork for the crackling, and what's the use of chicken or duck without the crispy skin? A jacket potato without butter? Forget it! To make life even more difficult, I can't eat anything with yoghurt, creme fraiche, fromage frais - as I'm allergic to the culture used in them. But hey ho - no allergy to the culture used to make high fat, creamy blue cheeses!

At the end of week 3 I realised that I either had to make some changes to my eating habits and put some effort in, or I could forget it all and go back to "normal" and just get fatter & fatter. If it was easy to lose weight then we wouldn't all be here. I've started using a lot of my syns for cooking, which means that I'm enjoying my meals now that they taste pretty much like they did before, with a bit of tweaking. As I can't use yoghurt, I'm using Elmlea cream in cooking when I absolutely have to - that's actually worked out at 3 tablespoons in a whole week. Because my meals are now tasting so much better so I'm eating them all instead of plodding through half and then chucking it away, I'm not reaching for the chocolate or crisps in between. Yes, I'd almost give up a limb for a large bar of chocolate or another glass of wine at times, and yes, I have given in at times, although the large bar of chocolate morphed into a two bar kitkat. 25 grams of gorgonzola (or a little less) in sauce for pasta or steak gives me my cheese "hit". A reduced fat mousse almost makes up for my normal puddings - not quite, but I can deal with it. When I do get those overwhelming hunger pangs, I'm afraid a bit of melon or a few carrot sticks just do not do it for me! So I nibble on a fruit shortcake biscuit and I get the crunch, the texture and the sugar (2 syns). One day I may be able to ditch those as well, but maybe not. I'm not stressing too much about them - a packet has lasted me 4 weeks so far!

So after that long ramble, what I'm saying is that I had the choice to continue being more and more obese (making me very very unhappy and very unhealthy) or I could put some effort into it and at least try and fight the demons - yes sometimes I'm a bit miserable that I can't eat a whole Terry's Chocolate Orange in one sitting or drink my way through a whole bottle of wine before I've even sat down for dinner, but the fact that I'm LOSING WEIGHT and FEELING BETTER both physically and mentally usually gets me over the hump. I refuse to beat myself up when things slide a bit, I've lost 10lbs so far and whilst it may not be as much as some people lose in the first few weeks, I'm still very pleased.

Until someone invents chocolate, cream, cheese, wine, biscuits and cakes that taste exactly the same as those I'm used to and allows me to eat unlimited amounts and still lose weight, (I'm not holding my breath here) then I'm putting the work in with SW.

 

[jogirl]

what I'm saying is that I had the choice to continue being more and more obese (making me very very unhappy and very unhealthy) or I could put some effort into it and at least try and fight the demons - yes sometimes I'm a bit miserable that I can't eat a whole Terry's Chocolate Orange in one sitting or drink my way through a whole bottle of wine before I've even sat down for dinner, but the fact that I'm LOSING WEIGHT and FEELING BETTER both physically and mentally usually gets me over the hump. I refuse to beat myself up when things slide a bit, I've lost 10lbs so far and whilst it may not be as much as some people lose in the first few weeks, I'm still very pleased.

Until someone invents chocolate, cream, cheese, wine, biscuits and cakes that taste exactly the same as those I'm used to and allows me to eat unlimited amounts and still lose weight, (I'm not holding my breath here) then I'm putting the work in with SW.

This is almost exactly what I was going to say! Are some of the SW "tweaks" exactly like the "real" thing? No. Are they better than me continuing to be miserable and unhappy? Absolutely yes.

 

[ladybird23]

It was the "tweaks" that I had a big problem with. I KNOW that whatever diet/eating plan I choose, I'm never going to be able to scoff a huge box of chocolates in one evening or have 3 large pieces of chocolate fudge cake when I wake up at 3am! What I do find slightly annoying about SW and all the recipes is that I feel they are trying to "trick" me and I just won't be tricked! It may work for some, but making a cake with dehydrated potato powder is close to the devil's food for me. When I first looked through the menus I was happy to find something with mayonnaise in the title - yippee!!!! I thought. But it was some dreadful concoction made with creme fraiche, Mayonnaise is egg yolks, olive oil and some seasoning - creme fraiche is not even on the radar of mayonnaise! Don't tell me I can have Eton Mess - because that's strawberries, meringue and whipped double cream - it's not yoghurt, or again, the dreaded creme fraiche. I also intensely loathe the spray oil stuff, apart from the fact that it doesn't react the same way as normal oil, all non-stick pan manufacturers say never, ever use spray oil, and I learned this to my cost, with a couple of ruined frying pans and a wok. Some of my group have recommended Fillipo Berrio spray oil so I'm giving that a try this week.

But having had that moan, I am making my own tweaks work for me and I get a lot of ideas from slimmingeats.com as the girl that writes this blog/website is a pretty neat cook and doesn't rely so heavily on yoghurt which unfortunately for me and anyone else who doesn't eat it, is a main feature of SW. But I still reckon that once I've got my head completely around the plan - which does take a bit of time - and made it work to suit me, it will do the trick. I've changed the old saying to from "No pain, no gain" to "No pain - lots of gain and a little pain means weight down the drain".