8th January 2018
It’s the body you sleep with
but the mind you have to live with.
Monday morning again, that’s
the first week of January done and dusted, I’m spending January how I like to,
all busy with work and quiet with life, yesterday was my quiet day, I walked
Alfie a couple of times, put a load of washing in, did the dishes, crocheted,
watched tv, went to bed early – perfect.
What I did realise is some
people starting Weight Watchers at the moment, doing Flex for the first time
may be feeling a bit overwhelmed, this losing weight lark can be testing. It’s good to get to grips with the basics,
learn to use the app, decide what you like to eat and work out how to fit that
in.
Smart Points are worked out
with calories, saturated fat, sugars and protein. That’s the info needed to work out the Smart Points
in anything. You get both a daily and a
weekly allowance, plus you can roll over up to 4SP a day and add them to your
weeklies.
If it’s a Zero food, it doesn’t
need scanning or need the points working out.
- Most vegetables
- Most fruits
- Eggs
- Skinless chicken breast
- Skinless turkey breast
- Plan-based proteins like beans, peas, tofu, lentils and corn
- Fat-free plain yogurt
- All unsmoked fish and shellfish
If you scan a food and it’s
not on the app, you can input the information yourself, or if you have bought a
calculator from the shop at your meeting, you can work it out with that.
The Eat & Shop Book is a
great place to look for food ideas, you can’t search for something on the app
if you don’t know it exists in the first place!
You’ll find them on the shop in your meeting too, they’ll give you
something to read when you’re bored at night and your hands are itching to
visit the fridge.
Take a permanent marker pen shopping
with you, when you point something in the shop, if you’re buying it, write the
points on there and then so you don’t have to do it again when you get home –
saves time.
Nutritional labels can be
very misleading, things like pot noodles, they say “Made up as directed” which
means you work out the Smart Points for the weight of the food after you’ve
added the hot water. A simple way of
guestimating this is to add the weight of the pot to the weight of the water,
ml’s are roughly the same weight as grams.
A great rule of thumb with
Smart Points when you scan it is if the points total looks too good to be true –
it probably is! Sometimes the
information on the barcode scanner on the app is crowd sourced, if that
information has been inputted incorrectly, then the points will be wrong, you
can report this as wrong and WWers will take it off.
Use your common sense, it’s
okay to guestimate points if you’re out and about or at someone else’s house
and they feed you. If you’re cooking a
meal for 4, to work your total out, you do the total for the entire meal, then
divide it by 4, it doesn’t have to be exact.
None of us got overweight by having a bit more of a healthy meal, it’s
more likely to do with something beginning with C and I don’t mean
carrots. Chocolate, cheese, crisps,
chips, cakes, chardonnay, chianti – yep those C things are dangerous!
If you know you’re likely to
go off the rails at weekends, plan for that, save those weekly Smart Points,
rollover those dailies, that’s going to help you a lot more than getting to
Saturday and pretending you didn’t expect to fall head first into that
takeaway.
Write it down, whether you
use a journal like me (I want to be able to look back on meal ideas when I’m
not in the mood to think), a tracker from meeting or your app, knowing what you’ve
spent helps you stay on track.
Get moving, find something
that you’ll enjoy, I enjoy taking Alfie for a walk, I’ll enjoy getting out in
the garden when it warms up a little, painting the shed and all those fence
panels will definitely burn some calories.
Finally start working on your
mind, work out your why, why do you want to lose weight, accept there isn’t a
quick fix and any changes you make need to be lifelong ones. Eating chicken salads and eggs for a month
might help you lose weight but you’re not going to want to do that
forever.
I enjoyed a bacon and egg
sarnie yesterday morning, it was worth the Smart Points for the bacon and
tomato sauce, it also kept me full for a good, long time, which meant I didn’t
really need to eat again. I also saved a few points by only using the bacon medallions. I didn’t fancy
a proper dinner, so I didn’t have one, I wasn’t up for cooking either, so I had
a slice of bread and a bit of cheese at teatime. Just because there are zero foods, if you’re
not hungry – you don’t need to eat for the sake of it.
Right I’ve just finished my
glass of water, now for a mug of tea – see it’s all about balance.
Getting healthy sometimes
means doing things we don’t always like – we’re not supposed to ‘like’
everything in life, I’m sure no one enjoys cleaning the toilet – but it has to
be done. You may not ‘love’ water but it’s
good for you, same with a lot of other stuff, if you can’t learn to love some
foods, learn to tolerate them and eat them anyway.
Ask yourself do you like what
you see when you look in the mirror? If the answer is no, then you need to make
some changes, work on liking things that will help you to like what you see,
even better if you can learn to love what you see when you look in the mirror
regardless of what you weigh BeYOUtiful.
Your weight does not define you – never forget that.
Happy Monday x
No comments:
Post a Comment