Katherine's 6 Week Food Challenge - Week 2

Hey!

Katherine here, checking in 2 weeks into the challenge where I follow a meal plan prepared by my sister in a bid to lose weight. I set out on this experiment hoping to lose an average of 2lb a week. I did significantly better than that in week 1. If you haven’t read week 1, check it out by clicking here.

Last week I was shocked by how much food I ate while still losing weight. This week is no different. Again, I feel like I have eaten so many delicious and filling meals that I can’t possibly have lost any weight. But we will get to exactly how much I lost this week in a minute.

The shop

Last week I was horrified by the cost initial shop. As with any new diet, there are some items that you just don’t have in the house so it costs more to get in the basics. For me, that was mostly anything containing carbs or from the freezer aisles. But, as I pointed out, many things that I bought would last more than one week which it did. So, when I went to the supermarket this week, I had already crossed off the vast majority of the shopping list. This week the shop came in at just under £33. This is less than my usual weekly shop so I was pretty pleased about that.

Being Vegetarian

In the first week, I tried being vegetarian. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the Quorn products are really nice, but I missed meat. So this week, I substituted some (but not all) of the Quorn items for real meat.

Substitutions

There were quite a few substitutions this week. First of all, on Monday, I had Tesco reduced fat pork sausages instead of Quorn ones in my sausage and halloumi brunch. These were 2 syns each as opposed to 1.5 for each of the Quorn ones. Worth it in my opinion. This brought my total syns for the day to 13 instead of 12. This was similar on Thursday morning in my breakfast omelette wrap, taking Thursday’s syns from 7.5 to 8.5.

On Tuesday, I substituted Quorn bacon for bacon medallions, luckily these were still free so that was a guilt free substitution.

On Wednesday night, I was feeling pretty lazy and couldn’t be bothered to chop vegetables to make the scrambled veggies. Instead, I microwaved one of the steam packs of vegetables for 2 minutes instead of 3. Then, I popped it in the pan with a bit of vegetable stock to finish them off. It doesn’t really matter which vegetables you have, they are all good!

I was really looking forward to the chicken legend fakeaway on Thursday night but when I was in Tesco, I couldn’t find the Promise gluten free soft white roll. Instead of going to another supermarket, I remembered that I had some pitta breads left from the previous week and made the decision to have it in that instead. The Quorn nuggets are delicious so there was no way I was substituting them! However, I decided to use my mayo to make a garlic dip by mixing it with some garlic seasoning in the empty pot from my JD chips and wedges seasoning. Jess asked me if this made the pitta dry, which it did a little but I dipped the pitta in my garlic dip and still had some left over for my chips.

Finally, on Saturday, I swapped the Muller Light yoghurt in the fruity yoghurt crunch for an Activita 0% fat peach yoghurt, just because I particularly like these. Most of the 0% fat Activita yoghurts are 0.5 syns the same as most of the Muller Light however, if you are going to swap them, make sure you check as the wrong yoghurt can be detrimental to your daily syn balance. I also swapped blueberries and strawberries for grapes, again because I prefer these.

The best bits

Hands down without a doubt, my favourite meal this week was the Biscoff pancakes. Oh my goodness, they are to die for! How can I have pancakes on a diet?!?! I could happily eat these every day.

Last week, Jess was surprised to see me peeling potatoes before cutting them into chips and asked why I bothered. I said I would give them a try without peeling them this week. The verdict? Why on earth did I bother peeling them? They taste great with the skin on. My tip if you are making homemade chips is to save the time and just wash the potatoes instead of peeling them.

Cheating

I am not a saint. It’s confession time. I did a bit of cheating. I want to make it clear that this is not because I was hungry. In fact, I don’t think I have felt hungry all week. Instead, I just feed my greed and lack self-control when I am bored. So here we go…

Activita peach yoghurts come in packs of 4. I only needed 2 for the fruity yoghurt crunch. The other two seem to have magically disappeared from my fridge throughout the course of the week.

I learned in week 1 how delicious cheesy garlic bagels were. There may have been some with the carbonara on Tuesday, even though I had already eaten my Healthy Extra B for the day.

There is an empty jar of Biscoff spread decorating my recycling bin. I am not entirely sure how it got there but it may have involved a spoon.

After a very disappointed look from my sister when I confessed my sins, I have promised I will do better next week so watch this space.

The weigh in

This is the bit that I had been waiting for. After last week’s surprising success, I knew that the loss was partially down to the change in diet. And it has been my experience that the first week of a new diet tends to have the greatest weight loss. But could I continue to drop the pounds even though I had still eaten so much food AND cheated. I felt it was unlikely so I was pretty nervous when I stepped on the scales. I know that Jess’s food plans work because she has lost weight eating this food and I also lost weight last week so they definitely work for me. However, there was a strong possibility that I had messed up my weight loss with the extra food I had consumed, particularly the Biscoff spread.

To my great surprise, the scales informed me that I have lost another 1.5lb this week. Which is just under my 2lb a week goal. However, I can’t help thinking if that 1.5 would have been a 2 if I had applied some self-control.

As I head into week 3, I know that I have a meal out with some friends followed by drinks planned so I really can’t afford to be snacking on unnecessary food throughout the week. With the exception of this ‘cheat day’ I am really going to try hard to stick to the plan and cut the snacking.