Start with the basics

8^th 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