To think slimming world is a mugs game?

[TheWorldIsMine]

Been doing sw for around 3 months. Yes I lost weight which is great but after a few weeks you start to realise how unsustainable the whole thing is. Constant pushing of "fat free" yogurts - full of god knows what sugars and crap to make up the taste? A breakfast of two sugar caked cereal bars which wouldn't fill a toddler up?
At one class a girl was asked what she saves her syns for. She replied "chocolate and alcohol" which was applauded - sorry but it what world is it seen as a good thing to substitute proper good with chocolate and alcohol???

Then there is the constant "ooo how many syns does each of these biscuits have in them? Ooo I could eat three Nice biscuits but only two ginger biscuits ... decisions!

I once took a fat Fred yogurt into work and a colleague looked sxpetrenrly concerned and told me I'd bought the wrong yogurts. I said "it's fat free" to which she replied "yeah but you're supposed to get muller lights ... " what a load of 'endorsed' bollocks!!!

It comes to something when a nutritious homemade fruit smoothie is classed as 20+ syns yet a chocolate cereal bar is encouraged as "healthy extra".

I can't understand the massive following they have! You may lose weight in the short term but I've never known anyone keep it off for more than a year unless they sack it off and switch to eating healthy instead.

What is the actual science behind Slimming World, I mean I know you can have either meat/poultry days or pasta/carb days but how does it actually make you lose weight in biological terms?

It's not like someone who joins SW has never eaten processed food before and suddenly starts then they join a group.

YANBU.

I've tried all those so-called "healthy eating plans" and they're all about making money, pushing products and women fawning over cheesecake flavoured yoghurts or how to make a sausage roll out of a skinless chicken leg and a quarter of a slice of wholemeal bread. I've probably been to 6 groups over the years and many of the leaders were bigger than me.

Once I stopped all that malarkey, I actually started losing weight and feeling happier and better about myself.

My experience was the same as the OP's
The class leader holding up two slices of bread and had a debate about which one was better. Not about health, about syns (they are called SYNS ffs).

All the food she held up in class was processed.

Women discussing ways of 'cheating' and tears about only losing 1lb.

It was horrible.

I am glad that other people have found it useful. I expect the structure is helpful for a lot of people but you need a good leader who understands nutrition. The one at my class clearly didn't have a clue.

The thing that puts me off most is the way that the women I know who swear by SW go back year after year.

Surely if it worked you would only need to go once?

Oh and when the leader asked me how much weight I needed to loss I told her 3 stn.
She didn't bat an eyelid.
I needed to lose half a stone at the most. I had just had a baby was 10st and I am 5.6.

Namechange why did you say 3 stone? To test her?

It's solely limiting calories squirrel. People eat a similar volume of food each day, so if as much of that as possible is low calorie density (veg, salad, lean meat) fewer calories are consumed.

The restrictions on pureed or juiced fruit will be because, it might be possible to eat the juice from 10 oranges, but people are very unlikely to eat 10 whole oranges.

Obvious junk is strictly limited because it is easy to binge on it and consume a lot of calories because it isn’t very satisfying.

That’s all. A lot of people seem to treat it as a magic spell, that you have to follow to the letter, or else it won’t work, hence the obsession from some on certain types of yogurt, where in reality, occasional or insignificant deviation is fine, so you can have any fat free yogurt, as long as the make up is broadly similar to muller light, or just limit dairy a bit – I eat moderate amounts of full fat cottage cheese instead of unlimited fat free stuff, because it’s nicer. You can even get away with white bread instead of wholemeal – if you are eating plenty of veg and pulses, I don’t see the need for a specific fibre portion. As long as you are roughly in line with the basic principles of calorie restriction, it works.

I haven't gone to SW but I know a couple of people who had. One has lost over 60lbs this year and the other went from 30 stone to around 16 over 2/3 years. What I find odd about SW is when people post pictures of their meals, showing huge platefuls of food (look at all this food in my SW breakfast!) and it's more food than I eat in a day. How can you eat like that and lose weight? Does your stomach ever learn to accept less?

My entire adult life has been diet/lose weight/gain weight back/and a little more than last time/diet...

Agree with OP, that is exactly my experience of SW. Plus anyone who doesn't lose weight having it explained as time of the month/menopause/perimenopause/haven't drunk enough/haven't eaten enough. It's never the diet.

Great if you have lost weight with SW but come off it, it is not 'healthy eating'. Far from it.

Most diets are designed to fail. It's how the diet industry makes its billions every year. So no, YANBU.

Don't eat them then

My mum and auntie have lost 6 stone each in the past year. They just eat healthily and have one night off a week. Slimming world does work if you're not an idiot.

BuggerOffDailyMirror If you're eating half a plate of potatoes with your roast, you clearly haven't understood the plan. And WW make the chemically yogurts and low fat ready meals .... but whatever suits you better.

Slimming world does work if you're not an idiot

Bit rude. How many people do you know who've lost X stone and kept it off on 'maintenance'?

Fun fact - slimming companies do not provide details of long term weight loss. If you look at their advertising they're clearly expecting people to keep going back because they don't keep the weight off.

I know plenty of people. You just need to use your brain. If you keep doing what you're doing, you will maintain. If you start eating crap again once you hit your ideal weight you will put it back on again.

I agree wholeheartedly with the rice/pasta/potato thing, and I also take issue with the banning of cooked fruit. There's a lot of pseudoscience bollocks spoken - why is white pasta 'free', but wholemeal bread not, but on the whole it is good at getting you to eat more vegetables and fruit. Where people fall down is thinking they will lose weight on a mountain of free pasta and potatoes, it's the fast foods that make you lose weight, and it does do portion control with the plate ratio.

SW doesn't work for me either.

I do know people who have lost loads, and if,you were eating burger and chips, fry ups before, then it's definantly a better way of eating.

I didn't like having to,pay £5 if you missed sessions either. It seemed like a money making machine to me.

I also,found the sessions slightly juvenile. ,ie. Having to go,around, find out how much everyone had loss,,give them a clap etc. IT was a bit like show and tell in an infants school! I wanted to be educated on weight loss, not just to turn up and listen to people's weight loss.

I found cutting out sugar and reducing portion size, including pasta and rice to be more effective.

I've recently started doing slimming world again (I did it post-baby originally, going to group, following plan to the mark, etc) but this time without the add-ons as I know a little more about nutrition now (I follow high carb diet normally which is awesome for me and my MH/anxiety and when I'm exercising like I should and not snacking like a beast blaming OH I've maintained a really healthy weight) like hi-fi bars (I don't want justification for eating chocolate every day... I especially don't need to be told they're a 'healthy' extra), no diet drinks (they're going to kill some slimming worlders with the amount is aspartame they consumer I swear) or fat free yoghurts (I have the occasional coconut yog or full fat Greek which I count as free and only have small portions). I also don't use frylight, it's totally unnecessary (you can sauté in water and seasoning.... you don't NEED oil for chips, etc but a teaspoon of olive or coconut won't do any harm).

It's helpful for me to have to think about "SYN"ing processed foods, alcohol, takeaways or snacks and helps me avoid what I used to do (swap lunch for a cake...have a glass of wine every time I ate out...demolish a whole bag of sharing crisps while watching a movie...etc) while still being able to have the foods if I want them without feeling like I'm having a "day off" from my diet. I also like following the rule of at least 1/3 plate speed fruit or veg, I usually do half a plate - or use my small plate and eat a big salad first.

I tend to use my syns for drinks on a Friday, a takeaway or meal out on a Saturday and in gravy/roasties/yorkies/stuffing on my roast on Sunday. But then again, I refuse to SYN avocado or my smoothies (I know how much fruit to put in!), so I probably go way over my syns - but I'm still losing weight.

I suppose I like some slimming world principles but not the entire slimming world plan.

Katedotness:
What I find odd about SW is when people post pictures of their meals, showing huge platefuls of food (look at all this food in my SW breakfast!) and it's more food than I eat in a day.

Small plates, and lots of 'free foods' which fill up a plate but don't stay in your stomach very long.

People keep it off 'on maintenance', how wouldn't they? There were several people in the group I went to who had maintained for a couple of years.

I've put a bit of weight on now because I've gone back to eating too much crap, nothing to do with previously losing weight or following a certain plan.

Great if you have lost weight with SW but come off it, it is not 'healthy eating'. Far from it

Can you please explain how a diet that is mostly lean meat and fish, vegetables, fruit, eggs, pulses, dairy with limited amounts of crap like crisps, chocolate, alcohol is far from a healthy diet?

I know there is the whole high fat/low carb vs low fat debate, but in reality, you can't do LCHF and lose weight without severely limiting carbohydrates, so an alternative is to limit fat and calories, which is what SW does. And when you get to your goal, what they encourage is to carefully increase consumption of things like nuts, dairy, olive oil, while still keeping an eye on the amount of crap that you eat.

I do wonder if people who say that SW is not healthy actually know what the plan is.

I do monitor my calorie intake and macros/vitamins to check I'm getting enough of everything too. I was vegan for a while and got used to doing it everyday, now I feel panicky if I don't check I've eaten enough/not eating too much. I do it for my DC too. It's much easier to keep healthy levels when eating animal products so I probably don't need to do it anymore.

I also don't go to meetings. I had 3 months online membership (£60!!!!!) and then gave it up once I'd learnt the principles.

If you don't want to do it don't do it.

Quim sort of. More that I hadn't thought about it and just came up with the figure. As soon as I said it I though 'you sound like an idiot' and expected her to say 'thats quite a lot based on your height, frame'.
But she didn't. She agreed with me and put it as my goal.

Isn't that dangerous? Does that mean that someone with an ED can turn up and insist they are obese and need to loose a lot of weight? I found it worrying

If you don't want to do it don't do it.

Well yeah, obviously. But I do think it's sad that people get sucked in.

I've done both WW and SW.

I lost and gained the same stone year in and year out with WW. Didn't really teach me how to eat more healthily as I could eat what I wanted really. X amount of points, and 49 weeklies for if you fuck up. I'd eat 3/4 packets of crisps a day, because I could in my points,

I've been going to SW since April and lost nearly 6 stone. Never eat Mullershites and don't do any of the silly "tweaks" like coat foods with smash instead of breadcrumbs. I've always enjoyed fruit and veg but wouldn't eat them intentionally, not it's weird if I don't have them.

I'm doing SW to change bad habits, and I intend on carrying on once I get to target, not by going to meetings, but by eating more of the good stuff and limiting the crap I ate.

Ststratter the leader of our class made out fruit juice and non 'whole' fruit to be akin to poison.
I just can't buy that.

Steamed apples may not be a 'good' as organic papaya fresh from the market but its not 'bad'.

Can you please explain how a diet that is mostly lean meat and fish, vegetables, fruit, eggs, pulses, dairy with limited amounts of crap like crisps, chocolate, alcohol is far from a healthy diet?

1. Yo yo dieting - which is where a lot of us end up going from diet to diet with weight gain in between - is seriously bad for you, google it. Here's one article for a start

www.health.com/heart-disease/yo-yo-diet-heart-disease-sudden-cardiac-death

2. It's very easy to exclude some essentials from your diet if you are limiting your intake according to principles like 'low fat' 'low carb' etc. This is why the ideal is a healthy balanced diet. Do you remember when GPs were concerned they were seeing a lot of malnourished children whose parents were keeping them on a restricted diet, e.g. skimmed milk and low fat this and that?

3. Low fat diets affect the way your brain works. Again, google it.