Diary of a Diet

Today I am talking about that dreaded word, diet, and what lovely food I've been eating while on said diet. Skip on by if it's not your cup of tea, this is just a blip, I can assure you.

There are always times when I lose my cooking mojo, when the "What are we having for tea tonight..." question threatens to suck the very life blood out of me, but I have, however, never lost my eating mojo. I've been doing a lot of eating over these last few months and the long and short of it is that I could no longer do up my trousers and six weeks ago I joined Slimming World*. Oh, and my running buddy moved to Australia so it's not all my fault.

Now, a better person than me would simply cut back and make some sensible choices, but I lack the motivation and will power. I know from past experience that I need the threat of the "weigh in" every Tuesday morning, I need to hand over £5 each week, to kick me up the bum and help me lose a bit of weight. Now, I'll be clear - I was not overweight as such (my BMI was within the healthy range although it was very much at the top end) and my height means that I can carry some extra weight more comfortably than others might - but I refuse to go out and buy new clothes when I've got lots of perfectly good ones in the wardrobe.

And - I guess it comes as no surprise - I found that changing the way I eat reinvigorated my enthusiasm for cooking. Particularly for breakfast and lunch, when I can please myself and not worry about meeting everyone's preferences (impossible at the best of times). I've been keeping a food diary and today I thought I'd share some of the meals I've been eating over the last few weeks. To give you a rough idea, with Slimming World you can eat as much fruit, veg, pulses, eggs, pasta, rice, potato, lean meat and fish as you like. You can eat a limited amount of dairy and grains (bread, cereal etc) and everything else must be weighed, counted and limited. It is essentially a very low fat diet. These meals below all (pretty much) count as "free" which means no weighing or counting, just working on common sense portion control and making sure there is a good amount of fresh fruit or vegetables on the plate.

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Lighter breakfasts:

1. Muesli with skimmed milk, chopped fruit and fat free yogurt. Quick and easy, this has become my usual breakfast on most school mornings. I have to remember to weigh the muesli as it counts as a grain.

2. Scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and wilted spinach. Very good. The natural fish oils in the salmon gave the eggs a velvety texture.

3. Porridge (weighed) with chopped peach and a teaspoon of honey. This is my other school day staple. Any other soft fruits work well too.

4. Poached eggs with spinach and smoked salmon. Amazing, even with one of the eggs a bit overdone.

5. Pancakes topped with fat free vanilla yogurt, pureed strawberries and sliced banana. This is really nice once I got used to two things: the pancakes are heavier than my usual American style ones, and the whole meal is less sweet than my usual kind of pancake breakfast, which I like to eat swimming in maple syrup.

6. Tomato and basil omelette. That was good. It was just the right amount of runny in the middle and I got it to flip over neatly - that never usually happens. My omelettes usually look like scrambled eggs. 

Thoughts:

Planning is everything for nice breakfasts. My default choices were usually cereal or toast, and that was because they are quick, convenient, filling and tasty. If I want to make an omelette on a school morning, and eat it without rushing, then I must get up ten minutes earlier. But then the upside of that is that I sit down at the table and eat in a more mindful way, rather than eating standing up while emptying the dishwasher, checking my phone and making packed lunches, and that is no bad thing.

Shopping habits change. We are getting through twice as many eggs and lots more fruit and vegetables, and I found that to do this properly I need to have the right food in the fridge. I think I'd really struggle to do Slimming World if I didn't like eggs as much as I do.

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Lighter lunches:**

1. Baked potato with cottage cheese and chives. My number one favourite lunch, a baked potato - quick, easy, filling and versatile. 

2. Chicken (marinated in yogurt and harrissa paste and grilled, leftover from dinner) and couscous salad with coriander, avocado, pomegranate seeds and salad leaves.

3. Pea, potato and spring onion frittata.

4. Pasta salad with tuna, anchovies, green beans, cherry tomatoes, cannellini beans and parsley.

5. Nearly-nicoise salad: new potatoes, smoked salmon, eggs and salad leaves.

6. Salmon (baked with ginger, garlic, soy sauce and lime, leftover from dinner) with salad leaves, cucumber and sugar snap peas.

7.  Jacket potato with tinned mackerel in tomato sauce and a green salad.

8. Salad of watercress, roasted butternut squash, butter beans and pumpkin seeds.

Thoughts:

Again, planning. I have to remember to put the potato in the oven an hour before I want to eat it. I have to remember to cook meals with leftovers in mind, but I always do that anyway. 

It's easy to eat like this when I'm based at home. If I was out at work, I'd have to prepare all this the night before so that it was ready to go in a tuppaware box first thing. Not impossible, but more of a chore than buying a sandwich.

It's very salad heavy, but that's fine with me, I love salad. If it was winter it would all be soups. Some fat free salad dressings I like are: soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, lemon or lime juice, fat free yogurt mixed with mint. I'm sure there are more.

I could have bread here, if I counted it, but if I had bread I'd want butter, and cheese or peanut butter, and lots of other nice things that are higher in fat. So salads or jacket potatoes work for me. Also, it's hard to over-eat carbs when they aren't covered in butter or oil.

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Lighter dinners:

Again, these meals are largely "free" with any extra bread measured and counted as one of my two "healthy choices". 

1. Smoked mackerel and sweet potato fishcakes with some veg and plain fat free yogurt for dipping, recipe from here. Very good leftover and reheated in the oven for lunch, too.

2. Spanish-style fish stew: cod, prawns and red peppers cooked with onions, chopped tomatoes and paprika, with couscous.

3. Veggie burgers with coriander relish in a wholemeal bun, with coleslaw, corn on the cob, and sweet potato fries. All very tasty apart from the coleslaw which was made with fat free yogurt and was horrible, frankly.

4. Chicken and pepper stir-fried with lime, garlic and chilli, with rice and sweet chilli sauce. (I found some of those packets of flavoured rice that you stick in the microwave on offer and thought I'd try them - this one was lime and sweet chilli flavour, and very nice it was too.) This was a meal when I was cooking just for myself and couldn't really be arsed.

5. Steak with homemade chips, corn on the cob and asparagus.

6. Salmon baked in lime, garlic, ginger and soy sauce, with noodles, spring onions, red pepper and sugar snap peas. Delicious. I'd eat salmon every night if I could but John doesn't like it as much as me.

Thoughts:

You have to cook from scratch. I usually do, but the odd time when I've used a ready-made jar of curry or chinese-style sauce, because I was in a rush or whatever, you pay for it. I've found them to be much less healthy than cooking a curry sauce yourself.

Eating this way can be more expensive. All that extra meat and fish, and the huge amount of fruit and veg I am buying, does add up. Lately I am shopping at Aldi three weeks out of four, and going to my usual supermarket on the other week for everything Aldi doesn't stock. I'm also using my local greengrocer a lot, buying lots of lovely seasonal fruits that are temptingly displayed outside under the awning.

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So, there we have it. It's gone well overall, and I really like all the extra energy I have and that fact that my clothes fit again. Mainly I've enjoyed eating so much extra fruit. I've lost on average about 2 pounds a week, over six weeks. I would definitely have lost more if I drank less wine...

I really thought I'd miss cake. But I don't, and that's been surprising to me. My times of day when I want sugar are mid morning, after lunch and late afternoon, with the post-school run cup of tea. Mid-morning, I have a banana with my coffee. After lunch I have some fruit and yogurt, with a teaspoon of jam or honey mixed in I want extra sweetness. In the afternoon I just stand over the sink, eating dripping peaches and nectarines until the craving for sweetness goes. But oh, I've missed butter! Butter on baked potatoes, on bread, on toast, in risottos...yes, I have missed butter. And cheese. My daily treat would always be a glass of wine over a chocolate bar (don't judge me) and that's what I use my "syns" points allowance for. I do not love everything about Slimming World (in particular their fondness for artificial sweeteners as a "healthier" choice) but overall I've found it very effective and much less painful than other diets that I've tried over the years.

Have you tried Slimming world? I'd love to hear any recipes you've found that are particularly tasty. 

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*This is not a sponsored post, I'm just sharing my experiences here.

** I can't type those words without thinking of Light Lunch, that brilliant daytime TV cooking /chat programme with Mel and Sue years ago, which I used to watch when I was a student. Does anyone else remember it?