Over the last twenty-odd years, I’ve followed just about every weight loss diet out there. From Weight Watchers to Atkins, Food Combining to Slimming World, the choices are vast and to be honest – they all work. It’s my belief that they all work by achieving the same thing, a calorie deficit, but choose clever and creative ways to achieve this. It’s also my opinion that the best ‘diet’ at achieving this whilst still making you feel like you’re not on a diet and giving wondrous variety, is slimming world.
But there are still traps and pitfalls to be aware of. If you’re a good member and listen to your group consultant, you can’t fail. Unfortunately, I was always a rebellious child and would test boundaries and need the odd telling off to bring me back in check… alas, I’ve not changed much. So, I’ve become a bit of a tweak ninja! Now, when I create my foods and do use what’s considered a tweak, I use no more than one portion of the free food that I would use for a balanced Slimming World meal. I also put a lot of speed in my ‘tweaked’ recipes, making it a good tweak. To explain this a bit better, I’ll give you an example of a good and bad tweak.
Bad Tweak Example
A pizza base using Mash Smash and raw egg is a bad tweak. If you add a raw egg to a pouch of mash smash and need it, it turns to a dough which you can roll out and use as a pizza base. But here is the problem – with Slimming World, they encourage 1/3 of your plate to be speed. If one pouch of Mash Smash is about four portions, that’s four meals just on the pizza base alone! You can quite easily see how this would be counterproductive to weight loss when you add on all the cheese and pizza toppings, too.
Good Tweak Example
My Cheese & Onion Pie is a good tweak. To make the crust of the pie I use ground pasta twists and mashed potatoes, which is considered a tweak. However, I weigh out both the pasta and potatoes so that each portion of pie contains one healthy portion of pasta and potatoes – this is to avoid overeating on free food. I also added way over 1/3 speed foods into the entire pie, so it’s jam-packed with speedy goodness.
Unfortunately, most people don’t use the same approach as me when ‘tweaking’, and unwittingly create a tweak which is threatening to your weight loss. I would never encourage anyone to go against their consultant, but I believe in this, and have lost a lot of weight eating these meals – I wouldn’t be posting this if I hadn’t!
Foods That Made Me Fat 