Tag Archive for 'delia'

Non-Scale Victories

Published
by
thetoad
on 4 April 2008
in Dieting, Excercise, Food and Losing Weight
. 1 Comment

In the business of losing weight I think that sometimes you don’t feel like you’re winning unless the scales show a reduction in number. All the effort you put in can feel, frustratingly, a waste of time and in finding out at your weigh in you have stayed the same or put on some weight everything good that you did that week disappears out of your mind and we only focus on the negative and bad things we did previous to the weigh in. I am guilty of this, but this week my BFF Gemma, pointed out to me something called “a non scale victory” and I just thought that was the most fantastic concept.

Basically a non scale victory could be resisting a pudding when you’re out for a meal and feeling good about it rather than deprived because it’s a non scale victory! Or going for run or walk when the weather conditions are adverse.

I have found that whilst I am still under the effects of the depo injection and every pound I manage to lose takes a large amount of effort, that it is important to focus on all the small changes that I am making each day rather than what the scales say. Then when the effects of the injection finally wear off, I won’t have to particularly change my dieting behaviour to lose weight as I will already have all my good habits and exercise routine established.

This week I am focusing on drinking lots of water. Even though there was an article in the newspaper and it was on the radio that a new study has found that drinking lots of water has no more benefits than just drinking lots of any liquid, surely water is better than drinking litres of caffeine containing coffee! They’ll probably change their minds next week and there will be another study out saying it is of benefit.

The stand in leader at Weight Watchers on Tuesday was very very slim – the difference in seeing her and her before picture was astounding, one of the most dramatic leader “before and after” pictures I have seen. Looking at her, you would have thought maybe she’d lost a stone or something to get to goal. So if someone so slim that has achieved such a good loss and maintained it for 18 years, as she had, tells me to drink more water I am going to listen! So a daily non scale victory is drinking all of my 2 litres of water that I filter and pour into a bottle each morning. I have already had a pint of water and have yet to have a coffee!

My non-scale victory last night was making THE DELIA CURRY! Yesterday morning my special spices arrived to much excitement and glee. I got the tandoori masala blend from www.seasonedpioneers.co.uk and was so very impressed with the speed at which my spices arrived – I only ordered them Tuesday morning! I needed a few other ingredients which I picked up at lunch time, but the curry is very simple in that you don’t need lots of things to create it. The magic lies in the special seasoned pioneers spices!
So basically you brown your chicken – I used fry light, not the specified groundnut oil, I don’t think you can tell the difference and it does have an impact on your points! Take the browned chicken out of the pan. Using a mini-chopper, or my case, the chopper attachment to my stick blender, chop up an onion, 2 cloves garlic and some ‘Very Lazy Ginger’ from EPC. Blitz the mixture then adding more spray oil, fry the onion mixture gently for five minutes. Then stir in 4 teaspoons of the tandoori masala spice into the onion mixture for a minute or so, return the chicken to the pan, stir around to combine, then add a 200ml tub of half fat crème fraiche. Simmer gently with the lid on – I kept stirring as I was slightly concerned it might stick as it made a very thick sauce – for 15 minutes and that is it! It works out at 7.5 points a portion and makes enough for two!

Think Delia and her hubby like hot curries as the resulting gorgeous curry was very warm – ok for me as I like hotter curries, but TuT doesn’t like things too hot, so next time I make it, I will use 3 teaspoons of the spiced masala instead of four. A great success and makes you feel quite proud when you produce an authentic tasting curry without having used a jar!

So I ended the day well within my points even though I’d had a curry for tea and that made me happy. Another non scale victory scored!

“Do you exercise Portion Caution?!”

Published
by
thetoad
on 1 April 2008
in Dieting, Food and Losing Weight
. 0 Comments

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.

Summer Time Saves The Toad

Published
by
thetoad
on 30 March 2008
in Dieting and Food
. 0 Comments

Hurah for Daylight Saving and welcome British Summer Time! I woke up at what I thought was 5:30am and was totally unable to get back to sleep. I decided to post a blog entry as I have been a bit quiet over the last couple of days and I am always at my most creative first thing in the morning. I turn on the computer at 5:45 and the PC tells me it is actually 6:45 which is what time I get up during the week anyway. So now I don’t feel like a total insomniac freak tapping away on the computer at an unearthly hour on a Sunday as the clocks have changed.

Well, as you can tell from the beautiful post TuT wrote about me sleeping, things haven’t been so brilliant over the last couple of days. I have just felt so depressed and fed up. Things like the depo provera injection and my weight gain and inability to shift the pounds after a valiant first week’s effort just gutted me more than words can say. It really fed into my Borderline thinking and I was pretty mentally unwell. I didn’t shower, the housework got put to one side – including the cooking and laundry and TuT had to put up with a lot.

Saturday dawned yesterday and I still felt the same and didn’t want to get out of bed. My energy levels are at all time low – I have some sort of coldy bug thing, only a slight snuffley nose, but enough of a bug to sap my energy levels. Eventually I was out of bed, showered for the first time in two days (disgusting of me I know) and going to do the weekly grocery shopping with TuT. TuT was wanting to do the shopping online, as you can see from his earlier post, but we haven’t got around to setting it up and I am not confident that I would manage to write a fully comprehensive shopping list that would include all we needed. So often in the supermarket I’ll see something that we need, but I would have neglected to put it on the shopping list. I am sure at some point we will trial an online shop, and thanks so much to Kate for her email giving advice and her experiences about Tesco and Sainsbury’s deliveries, it helped a lot.

We went around Asda, I am still avidly watching ‘Delia’ on Monday nights and wanted to get the Asda mushroom risotto. I’ve got her book so when she does the recipes on Monday night I can find out from the cookery book where to source the ingredients from. After much searching of the freezers we did find the said mushroom risotto – priced at practically £3! TuT with our trusty cardboard “points wheel” worked out each portion was four points. That seemed a lot for a relatively small portion, and Delia jazzed hers up with dried porcini mushrooms and some sort of wine, and I can’t imagine myself at lunch time going to such an effort of reducing dried and fresh mushrooms down with wine and adding them to the frozen risotto. TuT doesn’t like risotto really so if we’d bought it I would have to eat on week day lunches when TuT’s at work. I decided against it!

Delia’s use of frozen mashed potato is something we decided to use and I think it is brilliant. Mashed potato was the bane of my childhood eating as my mum adores the stuff and would eat it with every single meal. We didn’t have it with every single meal, but it wasn’t far off, there weren’t many meals she could fit mashed potato as the obligatory carbohydrate into. Her mash was lumpy and sometimes almost “grey”. I would try anything to disguise the taste and texture, once when we had gammon and pineapple I even poured juice off the tinned pineapple over it – anything to try and make it bearable to eat. Incidentally – don’t try the pineapple trick – it was disgusting! Into adulthood and cooking for myself and TuT, as you can imagine, mashed potato has not made many tea time appearances. When I have made it however I have found it a pain as I want it totally smooth – no lumps, and creamy – but keeping an eye on points from butter and milk. TuT was not overly impressed with the results when I used the stick hand blender on the boiled potatoes and made an almost potato puree – whoops! But frozen mash is ace – 5 minutes or so in the microwave, no peeling or boiling or mashing, and the resulting stuff is very nice. Creamy, no lumps, and if mash had tasted like that in my childhood I would have eaten it no problem!

Today we are going to a science show called ‘Brainiac’ in Brighton, so we decided to have Sunday dinner on Saturday night. I spoke to my younger brother on Friday afternoon and he was cooking a shoulder of lamb in red wine and shallots with his housemates and girlfriend on Friday night, as opposed to them all getting a bit too drunk and lairy at the beginning of the weekend, so doing a roast on Saturday night was inspired by my brother, and not being able to do one today as we are out for the afternoon. TuT wanted mash and roasted potatoes with his beef – no problem there with my trusty frozen mashed potato! And I am afraid, despite trying the Nigella tip of the use of semolina my homemade roasted potatoes are nothing to write home about, so I use the Asda healthy range frozen roast potatoes which are perfectly acceptable and take no time to cook whilst the meat is resting and I am doing everything else.

At 7.15pm we sat down to roast beef and all the trimmings, one thing I don’t cheat on is my Yorkshire Puddings – Toads! – I make them to the Nigella recipe, using four eggs per recipe, getting the tin as hot as possible and putting them into the hottest oven, they rise unbelievably into lots of sand castles. I am quite proud of them when I put them on the table!

The rest of the evening passed nicely. In my desperation to find out about when I could expect to start losing weight at a reasonable rate when I come off the injection I decided to post on the Weight Watchers forums if anyone else had experienced a big gain whilst being on the injection and how long it had taken to start to lose weight once its effects wore off. Thank you to all that posted a reply. It was so nice to find out that my gain of four stone is not unusual, others were reporting large gains, and that once you come off it, following Weight Watchers, a loss of 2 pounds or so a week is possible. Thank you so much to the lovely Gemma that posted a reply and wrote me a lovely email, it has made such a difference to hear from you! I’d like all of you reading this to feel free to mail me with any thoughts, questions, or advice; just follow the link on the top of the page.

Delia

Published
by
thetoad
on 17 March 2008
in Food
. 1 Comment

Welcome to my first blog entry; I am going to keep it short – ‘Delia’ is on soon and having stocked up on frozen mashed potato (buying two bags in case there is a Nigella-esque goose fat, frozen mash shortage) I am eager to see what she will be cooking this week.

I like my cookery programmes, I did go through a phase where the UKTV Food Channel was on pretty much permanently during the day and evening. Due to my mental health problems I am unable to work so I do have the luxury of being able to watch television during in the day if I choose. However that choice means that little else gets done, no reading, no cooking the recipes of the said cookery programmes, and now it could mean no updated entry on the blog! So it’s in all our interests just to keep the watching of television to the evenings.

On that note I will close for tonight, watch this space tomorrow for more!