Sunday, 01-08-21

Morning.
New month so I thought I'd go over some strategies that I want to keep going this month to help me lose the weight I gained through comfort/emotional eating and drinking through June/early July.  It helps a lot to think them through.  Please feel free to skip to the next bit, if you like.  :-)

1.  Continuing with Slimming World.
Using its excellent structure and guidelines keeps me on track with what I consider a very healthy balance of foods.  Luckily, it is summer so there's loads of lovely, colourful Med veg around plus salads galore, not to mention what's coming up in garden and allotment..

2.  Counting calories
No, that's not a contradiction in terms.  I'm using this as a double check to ensure that I'm staying nicely within my calorie deficit.  Using Nutracheck to keep a calorie count really helps and shows when I need to adjust portions.

3.  Restricted eating.
This involves restricting the hours in which you eat so that all the meals are taken in a shorter window.  It's helped me to break my evening snacking habit and, as long as I set to each morning and prepare all my meals for the day, I then really don't start feeling hungry until ten thirty to eleven.  Meals are approximately eleven am, two pm and six thirty pm, to finish eating by seven, a window of eight hours.

4.  Planning and accountability
I put these two together in my mind.  Gone are the days when I plan the whole week but I still plan for each day either the day before or early morning.  And then I say what I'm going to have in here, as you know, but also in a few Facebook groups I help to admin as daily threads for everyone.  The days I fail to plan are a lot harder to stay on track.  So this, and you being there and reading, really helps.  Thank you.

5.  Recipes
As you've probably noticed, I love a new recipe.  Making different things keeps me interested and on that wagon.  OK, so many of them a variations on a familiar theme but that's not a problem, it means I have most ingredients to hand.

Yesterday's meals:

Good, old fashioned baked beans and toast,  filling and satisfying.  I didn't have the planned grated cheese in the end.
330 calories

Those mini quiches were so, so filling.  Two eggs was too much, one would have been fine - you can see I made two crustless ones as well as the lo dough crust ones.   I added a tbsp of nutritional yeast for one syn to add to the cheesiness.

By the time dinner came around, I was still very full so just had a nectarine and a kvarg.  I couldn't have managed any more.  The crispy chilli beef will have to wait for another time.

Added all up, the day came to 1124.  Sometimes we have hungry days and sometimes we have full days.  Yesterday was the latter and it doesn't make sense to eat just for the sake of eating, does it.

Today's plans:

B:  fruit salad and yogurt
I was going to go all Olde England and have the left over half steak with an egg and some tomatoes but with beef for lunch and beef for dinner, I thought that was a bit overkill and anyway, I am still feeling not particularly hungry.  Beef keeps fine in the fridge and I must remember to have it tomorrow. 

I have a nice selection of fruit to choose from to make a colourful plate.

SW:  speed and free

L:  roast beef dinner; fruit
This is a very beefy day!  Beth and Alex are over for dinner so I'm doing a roast beef dinner with Yorkshires and all the trimmings.
I've put the Yorkshire recipe into Nutracheck and the SW app and each pud comes out at one and a half syns or 50 calories which is perfectly reasonable.  It includes the oil to cook them in, just a quarter tsp in each hole.
The veg will be new potatoes (allotment), carrots, either broad beans or courgettes (the former from the allotment and the latter from Beth's garden) and roasted butternut squash which I will do in the actifry like the chips last week.
I rarely have gravy but I will want horseradish and that is one syn for a level tbsp 
SW:   the beef is protein and free, the vegetables are all speed or free, two Yorkshires will be three syns and one syn for the horseradish - very SW-happy

D:  cold roast beef and salad; yogurt or kvarg

Definitely a beefy day!
I want to make a spicy dressing by mixing some horseradish with some super light mayo to blob over the cold beef.

SW:  one and a half syns for the dressing and half a syn for the dessert

Summary:
No healthy extras today - sometimes it just works like that.  I suppose I could count the milk in the Yorkshires as part of a healthy extra but it's not enough really
six syns