The nutritionists at Slimming World have created an eating plan that is supposed to take the hard work out of dieting and help re-educate you into eating a better and more balanced diet. The plan has evolved over the years, but the basic principal remains, eat lots of low calorie dense foods, minimise medium calorie dense foods and control the really yummy stuff with points.
Food is classified in three ways, free foods - which are most fruit and vegetables eaten whole. Purees and juice follow different rules and contain points. Healthy foods such as grains, pasta, protein and dairy and all the usually banned foods when dieting are rated with points they call Syns. There are two ways to food optimise,extra easy days and the older red and green days. The newer extra easy days were introduced to further simplify the plan and is simple to follow, 2/3 of your plate must be filled with the free food, and the remaining third can have any amount of the healthy food. The good part, is that as long as you follow the 2:1 ratio, you can go back for seconds, or even thirds, so you never go hungry. You are also allowed to have 5 -15 syns worth of the really nice stuff, which includes sweets, choccy, cake and booze.
The red and green days are slightly different as the free / healthy foods change depending what day you are on. Red days (the first eating plan - similar to Atkins diet) adds all lean meat to the free section, and the grains, pasta, potatoes and cereals are limited to 2 portions per day, along with 1 or 2 portions of dairy and your syns. The green day reverses this and puts the meat into the controlled group and allows you to fill up on carbohydrates as well as all the free foods.
There are some downsides to the plan, firstly, for me is I'm not a huge fan of fruit and veg, so I struggle with the extra easy days. Another problem with the extra easy days is the ability to still overeat. Whilst the large volumes of free fruit and veg fill you up and therefore limit your intake for the more calorie dense foods, it is still possible to eat after you start feeling full. You do need to police yourself with this and learn to listen to your body. Many of us with weight issues don't just eat the wrong food, but eat food wrong. Learn to listen to your body, eat slowly and only when you are actually hungry and stop a couple of mouthfuls before you feel stuffed.
I find it easier to use the veg as ingredients in meals, such as chilli, I add tomatoes, peppers, onion, courgette, carrot, celery and beans. When all cooked up with minced beef or Quorn mince and plenty of chilli, I get a good hit of veggies in a single meal. Fruit on the other hand can only be eaten whole and raw, as cooking it turns it from free food, to syns, as the fruit sugars are converted to nasty processed sugars. Juicing, pureeing and cooking also makes it easier to consume larger volumes of these high sugar foods. The example often used is that a glass of orange juice can contain 8 oranges. You could drink a glass of juice and then eat a large breakfast, you would struggle to eat the eight oranges. This basically is the whole Slimming World eating plan in a nutshell, fill up on low calorie foods and limit the high calorie foods.
The system is more than just the eating plan though, they also have body magic and image therapy, which I'll cover in later posts.
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