SW ladies

Hi,

I have been doing SW since Jan 2012 and have lost 24lbs. Its quite easy to follow and I find preparing meals for a few days keeps me on track. A typical days meals would be:

B - 35G porridge ( made with water) and raspsberries, strawberries- you can have 250ml of milk through the day and could have some of that with your breakfast but I drink lots of tea so save it for that.

L - cous cous with roasted veg and mackerel

d - quorn fillet, lots of veg and a bit of pasta and a yoghurt.

On the extra easy plan , you can have 1 b choice ( cereal or bread) and 1 a choice ( milk or 30g ( i think) of cheese. You can have unlimited fruit throughout the day. I find my meals are abit samey, I tend to stick to the same things each day.

Other people will probably be able to give you other ideas for menu's ( and me!)

hth

Ok so the basic premise is that there are three food groups:

Free foods
Healthy extras
Syns

I'm basing this on Extra Easy as that's now the most common plan.

Your free foods are basically fruit, veg, lean meat, fish, rice, pasta plus some yogurts and packet foods. You can have as much as you like of these in any given day. (Lean meat is basically low fat mince or all visible fat removed from chicken, beef, pork etc)

Healthy Extras - you are allowed (and should have) two a day. One fibre based (so one normal slice of wholemeal bread, some cereal etc) and one calcium based (so a certain amount of milk, cheese etc).

Syns - you are allowed up to 15 a day. These can be reserved for things that aren't covered in your free foods or healthy extras e.g. chocolate and alcohol! You can also use them for more cheese etc...

How does the syns work? Sounds like you can eat 15 bars of chocolate. lol I've just started dieting again after putting 2 stone on over the winter so was thinking of doing sw or ww.

Goodness no! Ha!

A good rule of thumb is that 1 syn normally equates to about 20 calories.

So a chocolate bar that is 200 calories is likely to be about 10 syns.

A normal measure gin and slim line tonic is about 4 syns.

Ha! I was getting excited then. Looks like all my syns would be on alcohol!

I followed SW loosely before the wedding and lost a stone. H lost two. We didn't go to classes, but I borrowed the books from my sister and got some up to date syns lists from ebay. I'll definitely sign up to classes when I get to wanting to lose the baby weight.

When you first look into it, it's really complicated, but once you get the hang of the rules, it's simple. We mainly did red and green days, partly because they hadn't introduced Extra Easy when my sister got her books and partly because we felt we needed the extra Healthy B (you get two on red and green and just one on EE).

A typical green day for me would be:

Breakfast - toast (two pieces of brown from a small loaf = 1 HeB) with clover light (1 syn per tsp IIRC) and marmite (free) plus a fruit salad and/or a muller light for mid morning at work (free)

Lunch - in the summer, I'd do a pasta or couscous salad with veg and a SW friendly dressing (either made my own with natural yoghurt and a bit of extra low fat mayo or a shop bought low fat dressing). In the winter, tended to be beans or tinned spaghetti on toast (my 2nd HeB) with 45g low fat cheddar (HeA).

Dinner - all sorts of yummy things. Pasta with veg/quorn sausages (syns but only a couple) with SW chips and beans/veggie shepherd's pie. If I hadn't used my 2nd HeB during the day, I'd use it for some meat at dinner.

I didn't like red days so much as I'm a bit of a carb fiend, so I always wanted my pasta/potatoes. EE days mean you can mix the two, although they suggest 1/3 of your plate is made up of superfree foods (i.e. those which would be free on both red and green so veg or fruit). On the odd occasion we did EE, I took this to mean 1/3 of my day should be 1/3 fruit/veg, rather than 1/3 of every meal, so I made sure to snack on fruit (not missrae stylee!) or veg crudites throughout the day if I wasn't going to have so much veg with my meal.

Oh yes, get the magazine as it has fab recipes in it plus updates on branded items that are new on the market.

You'd be using both your HEA and HEB for breakfast but yes - all free food!

You can't have a sandwich for lunch if you've already used your HEB for breakfast (unless you use syns)

Do you make fajita spice mix from scratch? If not, you may need to syn that. You can't really have the actual tortillas but you could use lettuce instead - it's actually pretty nice! Any cheese you have on fajitas would have to be synned too.

ETA: Cheese on fajitas needs to be synned of you've already used your HEA on milk for breakfast. Otherwise you can have about 30g or something.

Yep Healthy extra A's are calcium based and healthy extra b's are fibre based.

You can have a wholemeal pitta as a HEB.

Nope, afraid not.

If I recall correctly, only certain brands of wholemeal pittas are qualifying, it was always Co-op or Asda, but that might have changed.

I think they also encourage you not to save up your syns for the weekend, but again, I never went to the classes so perhaps consultants have differing views on this.