Tag Archive for 'core plan'

Soup of The Day

Published
by
thetoad
on 9 April 2008
in Dieting, Food and Losing Weight
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I really enjoyed both eating and cooking the wonderful curried cauliflower soup I made yesterday. For the curry powder I used the Tandoori Masala blend that I bought from www.seasonedpioneers.co.uk to make my Delia Smith curry that I created last week. The story of that fantastic curry is in an earlier entry. I think the curry powder used makes all the difference to the finished recipe.

What I love about homemade soups is that they have far more flavour than the ones you get out of tin, and with all the veggies you pack into them, you know you are getting your five-a-day and I have to say, you do feel very virtuous tucking into a bowl of homemade soup, knowing you have taken the trouble to make it, and that it has zero points or free on the core plan.

I am just simmering today’s soup. Going off what vegetables I have and what needed using, I had a cabbage that was looking like it wouldn’t last much longer in the fridge. So here’s the recipe for the soup I will be eating today.

Cabbage and Tomato Soup

1 cabbage
1 handful of spinach
3 onions, finely chopped
2 fat cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 inch piece fresh ginger, chopped finely (I used 2 teaspoons EPC very lazy Ginger)
Vegetable stock made up with boiling water and 2 knorr vegetable stock cubes
2 tins chopped tomatoes
2 tablespoons tomato puree
Fry Light Oil Spray

Spray a large non stick pan with Fry Light and add the finely chopped onion, garlic and ginger. I used the chopper attachment of my stick hand blender and gave it a quick blitz – Delia would be proud! But if you don’t have a mini chopper or chopper attachment, finely chopping it all is fine. Sweat the onion mixture for one minute over a moderate heat.

Add the chopped cabbage and combine with the onion mixture, following with your handful of spinach. Cook for a further two minutes.

Add the tinned tomatoes, tomato puree and enough of the vegetable stock to cover the mixture.

Allow the soup to simmer for 30 minutes. It will reduce down slightly and go all thick and tomatoey/cabbagey.

After 30 minutes, blitz with your stick hand blender until it reaches a smooth, or chunkier if preferred consistency.
I must add a very STRONG WARNING. Once the soup is blended and smooth, take extra special care when re-heating. It will SPIT. When re-heating a tomato based soup a couple of weeks ago I lifted the lid off to stir it and got a huge splatter of scalding hot tomato soup on my ring finger. It blistered so badly I couldn’t wear my engagement ring for over a week. Re-heat with caution and when stirring it, take it off the heat entirely which immediately stops it spitting.

The resulting soup is thick and filling with a wonderful rich tomato flavour with the gentle heat of the ginger in the background. This recipe makes enough for four large portions – if you are eating a zero point soup I think “fill your boots!”. Although if you were having a sandwich or crisp breads with it, you prefer a little less depending on your appetite.

So I have three more boxes of soup cooling ready to go in the freezer to join the three curried cauliflower punnets I put in yesterday. My aim is to get enough homemade zero pointed soups into the freezer so I can have a different flavour each day of the week, without having to cook from scratch!

Breakfast Update

I ate some breakfast on Monday, but neglected to yesterday as I was at my weigh in and by the time I’d got home and faffed about a bit, it was basically lunch time. My breakfast today is going to be some rhubarb yoghurt with oats stirred through it, as recommended by my good friend Kate.

This breakfast has protein in the yoghurt and slow release carbohydrate in the oats, so I think it is the perfect thing to keep me going until my bowl of soup at lunch time, whilst being totally scrummy at the same time!

Tale From The Scale

Published
by
thetoad
on 8 April 2008
in Dieting, Food and Losing Weight
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So today was my Weight Watchers meeting. I had a mad moment about my slippers beforehand. At my meeting you can’t weigh in your socks, it has to be the shoes you have on or slippers or flip flops. It is too cold for the flip flops option so it’s slippers for me.

Today I weighed in my “Bear Head” slippers, they are more like socks in their fabric, and have a little strap going over the top of my foot and then a teddy bear head at the top of each slipper. I would say they are more like slipper socks than proper slippers and hence I chose them as they are the closest thing to socks I can get away with when getting weighed.

After last week’s gain I felt I needed all the help possible to get a good loss this week.

I have lost one pound. But with the 2.5 pound gain from last week, that actually still puts me at 1.5 pounds heavier than when I joined 3 weeks ago. I feel this has got to be the injection – who ends up 1.5 pounds heavier when following Weight Watchers?!

I posted about this on the Weight Watchers forum to see if anyone else had found the same, a few people were, I felt, a bit unkind in their replies, saying I am using the Depot Provera injection as an excuse and it’s down to me not following the Weight Watchers programme correctly. Feel a bit low in myself about this. My leader has asked me to fill in a tracker this week so she can see exactly what I am eating and if I am going wrong anywhere. I will fill out my tracker properly this week and see what the verdict is next week when my leader, Melanie, looks at what I have eaten.

Melanie also mentioned drinking lots of water again, like the stand-in leader from last week, so will continue getting my water down me. Currently I am managing about 3 litres of water a day, plus tea and coffee. It gets bugging going to the toilet all the time, but think it must be helping.

I have been to the farm shop today to stock up on lots of point free vegetables. I got lots of things from a fennel bulb, mange tout, apples and cauliflowers. The cauliflowers are huge and were on offer for “2 for a £1”. Our fridge now looks like a greengrocers stall and I couldn’t fit both the huge cauliflowers in! So I made some zero point and core friendly cauliflower soup; here’s the recipe in case you have some cauliflowers that you can’t fit in the fridge (!) or you just fancy a nice tasty zero point soup : -

Curried Cauliflower Soup (zero points and ‘core’ plan approved)

1 Large cauliflower, split into small florets
1 Large Leek, finely chopped
1 Tablespoon Curry powder (more or less depending on how hot/mild you like it)
Fry Light Oil Spray
1 Litre Vegetable stock made up with 2 knorr vegetable stock cubes and boiling water
Fresh coriander (optional)

Spray a non-stick pan with fry-light and add the leek and sweat over a moderate heat until slightly browned and softened. Stir in the curry powder and keep stirring the leek in the curry powder for about 30 seconds, to combine, but careful not to let the leek stick once the curry powder is added. Add in 1 litre vegetable stock and the cauliflower.

Simmer the mixture until the cauliflower is tender and starts to break up when you push a floret with a wooden spoon.
Using a stick hand blender whizz up until totally smooth, adding some fresh coriander, if using, before you whizz it up.
This makes enough for four large portions and is a very comforting and warming meal.

The Great Breakfast Debate

Published
by
thetoad
on 7 April 2008
in Dieting, Food and Losing Weight
. 1 Comment

Years ago, possibly ten or more, a magazine recommended a book that you could only get in America; it was called simply ‘The Skinny’ “What every skinny knows about dieting but won’t tell you”. I HAD to have it. I managed to get it from Amazon and when it arrived I could not put it down until I had read it.

To write the book the authors had conducted a series of “skinny lunches”, inviting skinny women to lunch to find out what exercise they did and what they generally ate to stay slim. Each chapter of the book, there are lots of them and all fairly short and includes funny topics such as “What to do if you accidentally drink a full fat coke instead of diet coke” how much weight you can expect to lose or gain depending on life events – moving house, a divorce etc. As well as comprehensive calorie lists for fast food restaurant foods. One chapter was entitled “Breakfast”.

I was brought up on breakfast before school. No matter if I couldn’t really face it or want it, I had to eat a bowl of cereal before school. We were never allowed the sugary fun cereals that were always on TV when I was watching kids television. The most exciting it got was rice krispies! I had some kind of belief that bad things would happen if I didn’t eat my breakfast.

Then I started my famous “breakfast/tea diet” which I have written about in an earlier post, and I always began my day of starvation with a large bowl of cereal. During this time cereal was a bit of an obsession. I’d spend ages wandering up and down the cereal aisles, checking the fat content of any that I hadn’t tried before and fancied. It was just about the only food I could eat without guilt, without measuring out, just enjoying it.

Then I read ‘The Skinny’ which explained that there are no proven benefits to eating breakfast. The people who think if they don’t eat breakfast they will faint by 10am have probably never skipped breakfast to see if this was true. That not eating breakfast saved loads of calories that you could spend later when you were actually hungry and on something more worthwhile than a bowl of cardboard tasting cereal. This seemed to sink in with me, so when I stopped the “breakfast/tea diet” and followed a more calorie controlled Weight Watchers style of diet, if I could get away with skipping breakfast then I did. Firmly believing what I’d read in the ‘The Skinny’; that I was saving calories, it was an unnecessary meal. I was rarely hungry first thing in the morning so it wasn’t hard.

I did lose some weight following this method of not eating breakfast. But I was being very careful of what I did eat during the day. And the summer of my Atkins style of eating I never ate breakfast, but then I was not eating very much during the day and for my evening meal either. So what impact not eating breakfast had on my diet and weight loss at that time can’t really be gauged.

But since reading the book and going through a long phase of not eating breakfast it is a meal that I always struggle to eat, thinking I am saving myself calories by not eating it.

However, more recently people like Ian Marber, The Food Doctor, sometimes seen on Richard and Judy, advocates eating breakfast as part of his “10 Principles” for losing weight. It’s just that I never really feel hungry in the morning, but then having read through the CORE Plan in my Weight Watchers book I am thinking that maybe I think feeling hungry is feeling absolutely RAVENOUS, starving hungry, which is not the correct hunger to feel. The hunger scale makes for interesting reading; and in fact the more I read about Core and seeing the results that you can get from people in my Weight Watchers meeting, I am wondering whether trying a week on core would be worth a trial?

So this week I am going to make sure, as much as possible, that I eat my breakfast within an hour of waking up and see if that has any effect on my metabolism and weight loss. Has anyone else noticed whether eating breakfast or not eating this “most important meal of the day” has had any effect on their weight?

“Do you exercise Portion Caution?!”

Published
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thetoad
on 1 April 2008
in Dieting, Food and Losing Weight
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Well, it’s Tuesday and this morning was Weight Watchers. I was really good yesterday fight-fighting-friends. I went out on the bike for 13km. It’s all relatively flat along the coast roads, but I could feel my legs working away as I cycled along and I was out for nearly an hour so I was pleased with my efforts.

Lunch was a homemade low pointed vegetable chillie-con-carne. Then I had a small bowl of point-free homemade celeriac soup to keep me going at 5pm as TuT and I went to the gym together. I love working out with TuT, although he does get a bit grumpy when he gets sweaty and does not like me saying anything like:

“It’s the last two minutes, lets make it COUNT!”

I said this to him once and he was not happy! I think I have just taken too many ‘Spinning’ cycle classes where they bark stuff like that at you the whole 45 minutes. It motivates me, but everyone is different.

Relaxing in the pool and spa bubble bath we both felt virtuous to be spending our Monday night being healthy gym bunnies. We made a healthy tea of more homemade soup and low fat cheese toasties for tea when we got home; then I flopped in front of ‘Delia’ that I’d recorded whilst I had been out at the gym.

Loving her curry recipe that she did last night, a quick consultation of the recipe book revealed where she’d sourced her special curry powder from, TuT was already on the tinter’net and bought up the web page, so I have ordered some Tandoori Masala from www.seasonedpioneers.co.uk. It cost under £5 including postage and packing and when you consider how much a decent jar of curry sauce can be to make your own at home I think it’s good value. Delia’s really did look tasty and appetising - curry is probably one of my most favourite things to eat.

So after all my exercise yesterday – cycling the tour de seafront, going to the gym with TuT, watching my points values and eating virtuous food like homemade point free celeriac soup I was not dreading the weigh in as much as I had been doing at the weekend.

But, wouldn’t you just know it, I haven’t got away with the meals out that I had last week, or the takeaway, or the lack of exercise. Did I deserve to gain 2.5 pounds though? I don’t think that’s fair at all!

My usual leader was away today, she didn’t tell us last week that it would be a different leader this week, I think she did that on purpose, knowing that if you didn’t have to check in with your usual leader you might have slackened off at the Weight Watchers coal face this last week. As I did really, but I have to say, it was a relief not to disappoint my usual leader, and it’s only my second week!

I mentioned being on the injection to the stand-in leader, a lady called Laura, and her resulting comments did make me think about water retention. She said that if I wasn’t drinking enough my body would retain water and hence a gain would be reflected on the scales. When I thought about it, I have been slackening off on drinking my two litre water bottle through the day. So I don’t know if there’s anything in this, but on my first week at Weight Watchers I was good about filling a 2 litre water bottle up in the morning and making sure it was all drunk by tea time.

The meeting was all about portion control. Laura the leader had the expensive Weight Watchers scales that tell you the exact points of what you are eating when you weigh it all out. We went on a whirlwind tour of points in different cereals and what the amounts looked like, pasta points when its dry – 20g dry weight is one point, whether it’s pasta, rice or cous cous. Laura the leader was full of punchy one liners on the subject of portion control:

“If your eyes light up, it’s too big” (?!!)

“Do you exercise portion caution?”

It certainly made me think, and me being an advertiser’s dream – if I was an Eskimo and you made a sales pitch, I probably would buy snow from you – started thinking I really needed the expensive Weight Watchers weighing points scales. Thinking that my lack of weight loss is because I don’t have the magical Weight Watchers weighing scales. I placated myself with the new magazine and a proper points calculator so that TuT and I no longer have to fiddle with the cardboard points wheel that isn’t so accurate when we go shopping.

My friend that joined the first week as me has now lost over half a stone! In two weeks, following the CORE plan. I had a really good chat with her afterwards and I am potentially thinking of doing the core plan this week. I excitedly mentioned had anyone watched ‘Delia’ and seen her fab curry recipe that I am sure is low in points. I was met with stony faced stares – not in the Weight Watchers cook book – NO! (Remember, if you eyes light up it’s too big, Delia!!)

Then I spoke to TuT and he said should we think about doing the Weight Watchers ‘Kickstart’ programme of having 18 points instead of my usual amount for a week. My head is buzzing with ‘core plan’, ‘points plan’, ‘kickstart’. Am I exercising portion caution without the magical scales? It all feels rather manic, I am going to have a coffee and play with my new points calculator and have a think about which direction I need to take on the Weight Watchers journey this week.

Losing My Routine and Weight Related Thoughts

Published
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thetoad
on 26 March 2008
in Dieting and Losing Weight
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It feels like Tuesday but I have to remind myself that it is Wednesday. This is a good thing in that it is only two more mornings to get up before the weekend, but bad in that I won’t feel like putting any sort of routine into place as come the weekend, everything changes again. I really hate the way that bank holidays stuff up my routine; it would be ok if I worked as I would just go back to work and everything would feel the same – except for some disorientation about what day of the week it is. However, being unable to partake in employment means my days whilst TuT is at work are up to me to fill productively.

As you can tell from lack of blog entry yesterday, after the Easter Break, I wasn’t so productive yesterday or managed to re-establish my weekday routine. The day started out with Weight Watchers. My first meeting after joining last week. At this meeting for some unknown reason, you are not allowed to be weighed without your shoes on. So you have to either weigh in your shoes (!!!!) or weigh in a pair of slippers or flip flops. Luckily last week, my first weigh in, I got away with weighing in my socks because the meeting had already begun as I was late, and the clerk that was helping with the weighing didn’t notice I’d taken my shoes off. This week however I took along my lightest pair of pink slippers and put those on, took all my jumpers off, and clambered on to the scales.

To reveal I’d lost a pound.

One Pound.

In my first week.

I must be happy about this I know; but I am not. There’s something on the Weight Watchers website that says it’s the equivalent to a box of butter but that doesn’t make me feel any better. In the past when I have been to slimming clubs my first week has always been something between 3 and 5 pounds which always made me feel spurred on and inspired. A lot of hard work to lose a pound just does not inspire. What made it worse was that a girl of a similar age to me joined last week at the same time as me. When we had our new members talk she was saying that she was Cabin Crew i.e. an air hostess. I didn’t think she even needed to lose any weight as she was very slim already, but I can imagine working in Cabin Crew you do need to be as light as possible. She comes back yesterday and had been weighed before me and she had lost SIX and a half pounds! Half a pound off losing half a stone! JEALOUS! I know that she followed the ‘Core’ plan, whilst I am on the ‘Points’ plan and it did make me tempted to try that plan this week, but I just don’t think that the ‘Core’ plan would work with what I cook for TuT and I. I do cook from scratch most nights, but sometimes I do use a jar of ready made curry sauce for example, which I could take off my weekly allowance of 21, but if that happened a couple of nights a week, using points on a ready made sauce, I’d have little left for wineage, a few crisps, or anything else that I would deem a proper treat. I’ll stick to the points plan for the time being.

I should be pleased as I did have four days off over the Easter weekend with TuT and could have quite easily have gained a pound, so to lose and not gain weight is a good thing – especially as I am still under the effects of the injection.

It has made me so angry and so upset the way it has not only destroyed my confidence in my appearance in having gained all this weight, but has taken my actual confidence in myself away. When I went on the injection I was losing a lot of weight fairly rapidly – it wasn’t healthy, but I loved wearing size 10 and 12 clothes and was happy in my appearance and confident. Looking back I stopped losing weight once I went on the injection, but around the same time I moved in with TuT and my eating habits improved from what they were when I lived on my own. I put the halt in weight loss down to this and continued to eat in a healthy way and exercise.

Over TuT and I’s first Christmas together I gained 5 pounds, I didn’t think too much of this – everyone gains weight at Christmas. But despite going back to being more strict with my eating and exercising, the weight didn’t come off, in fact by Easter I’d gained a stone.

I put this down to unhappiness and lack of exercise – I was spending a lot of my days as a “house cat” – not going out, except to walk to the local shop to buy a paper or something.

Then we moved to Northamptonshire to a tiny village in the middle of nowhere and TuT had to use my car as he’d lost his company car in changing jobs. So for two months or so I was an enforced housecat and although I managed to get out on my bike or go for a run, it wasn’t done with any consistency as last summer it continually rained for months on end.

When I eventually got my car back I joined Cannons Gym in Northampton. It was a bit of a drive, but aware of my increasing weight, I didn’t mind. I had a personal training session where upon I was weighed and by this point I’d gained 2 stone 6 pounds. I set about my new gym routine with vigour and tried to embrace carbs as the fuel I’d need for all the exercise I was doing.

The weight never shifted and when we moved to Milton Keynes I persuaded TuT to let me go to the local Weight Watchers meeting. By this point I was now near enough exactly three stone heavier than I had been the previous year. I put this down to eating more and being less strict with myself and not really following any sort of diet, along with a continued dip in my exercise levels. The months of having no car and being stuck inside with the pouring rain outside had established a bad routine of actually being content to stay in all day and do no exercise.

I started doing more exercise to earn bonus points and did manage to lose a couple of pounds, but I was once again eating very little as eating the full points allowance just seemed far far to much food from what I was used to eating normally and I wanted to lose weight, which meant to me, reducing the amount I was eating currently.

I wasn’t in the right frame of mind and the dark winter months were not really the right time to start drastically cutting down on my food intake – in fact, no time is the right time to do this! So I dropped out of Weight Watchers just before Christmas, treated myself to some new size 14 clothes and just decided that I was meant to be a size 14 and try to accept it.

In January we moved to the sea side and I thought finally I’d be able to tackle my weight – long walks and runs by the sea, attending the gym, fresh sea air and healthy food. So almost as soon as we moved here I embarked on a health kick and started doing loads of exercise and expected the weight to start falling off – except, it didn’t and hasn’t.

I know it is down to the injection but it has just made me so sad – the whole of last year I’ve always found someway of blaming myself for my increasing waist line; lack of exercise, eating more, eating more carbs – everything all related to me and having bad eating habits. I haven’t been able to go out for a meal and just order what I wanted without feeling guilty about the extra calories I was eating. In so many ways I have just been so unhappy in the last year all related to my weight and food intake and although in some way it is a relief to find out it wasn’t my fault I have gained all this weight, it is still here, it will take a lot of hard work once the injection does wear off to get rid of it and in the mean time I feel a fat frump with no confidence and rock bottom self esteem.