Tag Archive for 'points plan'

Soup of The Day

Published
by
thetoad
on 9 April 2008
in Dieting, Food and Losing Weight
. 0 Comments

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
. 0 Comments

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.

Losing My Routine and Weight Related Thoughts

Published
by
thetoad
on 26 March 2008
in Dieting and Losing Weight
. 0 Comments

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.