Thinking about SW but don't want to have sweeteners

[MsIngaFewmarbles]

I need to do something about my weight which has rocketed and lots of friends are already on SW. I'm a bit concerned about artificial sweeteners etc though. Can you easily do the plans without adding chemically crap to your diet?

Also do you have to do extra easy? Out of my friends who are doing SW the most successful seem to be following the red/green days plan.

I do SW and have managed to avoid artificial sweeteners. For some bizarre reason, a lot of their savoury recipes have a tbsp or so of sweeteners in the ingredients so I just leave it out. Why would you put sweetener in a curry anyway! For puds, if it is a recipe that has artificial sweetnener in, then I just won't make it. I'll often have 1/2tsp of proper sugar on my porridge but I just count it as syns.

I have to say when I did SW it was very easy (almost seemed encouraged) to fall back on convenience foods, and cooking from scratch was always a little frought with difficulty in calculating 'syns' in routine, otherwise thought of as relatively healthy ingredients (I'm thinking things like olive oil, adding nuts/seeds to my salad etc). There were plenty of convenience ready meals etc which were 'free' and if you made your own homemade version there'd inevitably be 'syns' involved. It also encouraged fat-free dairy so lots of sweeteners in there, diet drinks allowed and so on, wheras adding a little honey to my porridge would incur syns. I ended up eating a lot of things on SW that I wouldn't normally. It also lead me to have a mindset of, I can eat as much as I want (esp as many carbs as I want, as long as there's no meat involved in the meal), which I'm not sure has been entirely helpful in altering my approach to food overall.

Having said that you can follow the principles of SW but in a moderated, whole-food way. Maybe it's just the group I went to that always seemed to be selling me various brand-names of processed convenience products, and had a sceptical attitude to cooking with real ingredients.

That's what I'm worried about Oneday. I also think I eat emotionally and portion control is another issue. I'm desperate to lose weight though and when I tried WW last year I ended up cooking twice a lot of evenings which put me off. I've been told SW is more family friendly.

This is also my issue with sw. Dh has lost a few stone now on it. A lot of people in the group encourage convenience packaged foods but in the magazine there are plenty of from scratch very healthy recipes which are so tasty. In fact we tailor any recipe we like from a cookbook to sw - remove fat, use fry light, lots of side salad if no veggies. I don't like hidden sugars or cutting out all fat so I still use full fat Greek yoghurt (total) and dh uses 0% but there are minimal sugars in that particular yoghurt.

of course the magazines are full if recipes and adverts for low fat, sweetener full, chemical substitutes as they pay for the advertisement space.
but you can easily do SW without touching them. in fact the basics of the plan don't need them at all (although frylight does make cooking a lot easier!) just lots of veg and cut the fat off meat.

that being said, there's a lady in our group who seems to wat nothing but mugshots and mullerlights!

I dont use any sweeteners in anything i make (although i have two in my cups of tea) but i dont add it to food.

I do use sweeteners, but, I think it would be fairly easy to not do...I have sugar in coffee at other people's houses for instance.

I use hardly any convenience foods - there are very few free ones, so actually I end up cooking everything from scratch. I very occasionally have something like low fat super noodles, but that's because in having them instead of something really horrific, lol. Mostly I make slimming world friendly equivalents to things that I would previously have bought ready made (dips for instance).

Low fat dairy isn't necessarily full of sweeteners, plain or Greek yoghurt, quark and cottage cheese don't have anything added to them, they just are low fat foods.

Nuts and olive oil can either be used as syns or as a healthy extra choice. I do use fry light though as it's really handy.

Oh and yes you can still do red or green instead of extra easy, I do green because I don't eat meat anyway.

What about a different plan? Doing 'I quit sugar' which is quite a healthy plan involving cutting back sugar/refined carbs and bit more eating more protein initially. You could then use 'my fitness pal' app

I avoid sweetners too. I actually find all the processes stuff has Syns but if you make it from scratch you avoid that.

I don't use sweeteners or any processed stuff & cook the same family meal for everyone. It takes a bit of planning but I've lost 2.5st so it's definitely doable.

Another one here who doesn't use sweeteners. Just syn things like honey sugar and also real oil instead of fry light.

I don't use convenience foods or sweeteners and I find SW very easy. Much of the main drive of the plan itself is home-cooking, the website is packed with recipes - I don't always use them, I make my own and just adapt them by drastically cutting down any cooking oils.

I don't go to a group so I don't get the meal replacements or bars stuff promoted at me and they aren't my thing anyway.

As for portion control, well, that is a different challenge, but the emphasis is load up the vegetables and eat enough till you are satisfied - it's not really about the old style of 4 baked potatoes or 10 chicken legs!

The things is, it's about moderation not denial. I love butter, with a passion. SW never says I can't have that butter, it does say "ok, have some butter on your toast, but measure how much you have and understand what that means in your day's overall intake". FWIW, 5g of butter is enough for one piece of toast and is 2 syns (about 40 calories). I take the responsibility of deciding whether I want it enough to have it in place of something else I want later on.

In the end, I still bake with butter and sugar, but I work out the syns for however many portions I make and if I want a piece of cake then I have it and I note it down and I take notice of it. And I enjoy it!

You can download a week's meal plan for nothing I think - why not try it for a week and see how you go?

Sorry, spamming!

Today I have had bacon and egg for breakfast - no added oil to cook, cut all the fat off the bacon, drain it on kitchen paper. I added some sliced aubergine because I like it, you could have mushrooms, tomatoes, a bit of fruit afterwards - whatever takes your fancy.

I'm making a bean and vegetable soup for lunch - with leeks, courgette and white beans.

And tonight it's sausages and mash with vegetables and onion gravy.

What, there, sounds like 'diet' food?!

Ive been doing sw on and off for two years and rarely eat processed food ( when on the plan that is!) I cook from scratch. My dinners mainly consist of organic whole meal pasta from lidl, brown rice, tins of tomatoes, puree, garlic, vegetables, eggs, very lean meat including 98% lean mince, fish, fruit, fat free natural yogurt (which is low sugar) potatoes, small bit of cheese, herbs and spices etc.

What is processed is minimal. The odd low sodium organic stock cube, tin of beans, i have two stevia tablets a day (one in each of my two coffees) and the daily bar of 85% dark chocolate from aldi. Actually i almost exclusively shop in aldi ( bar my meat and pasta) so it works out fairly cheaply too. So it really can be done without sweetners or too much reliance of processed food.

My problem is quantities!! I never know when to stop

I refill my fry-light bottle with Aldi rapeseed oil and use that for frying. It has a high smoking point and is really high in omega. I don't syn it cause i just use a few sprays per meal. Seems healthier than the actual frylight which is sort of creamy coloured and thick

I do Slimming World and at our group convenience foods and sweetners don't get mentioned at all. The raffle prize tends to be the ingredients to make a recipe out of one of the books, sometimes with an extra such as one of those mesh baking sheets to cook wedges/homemade chips on.

The 'shop' is a little desk in the corner, and the consultant mostly just mentions the books - there is no 'push' to buy Hi-Fi bars or scan bran.

I will have the odd Mullerlight as a 'pudding' but otherwise stick to fat-free natural yogurt for breakfast. I don't bother with SW desserts at all, I've not got a sweet tooth anyway and would rather have a little bit of a 'real' dessert than try and re-create one with sweetners.

I lost weight with sw online after my first was born and I also didn't want to use the convenience foods and sweeteners so just used normal sugar instead and it didn't make a huge amount of difference. I also used olive oil rather than a spray of 1 cal cooking spray and just had lean mince rather than the super low fat one and still lost a stone or so.
I am following it again at home using my info from before and am not being really strict but have still lost weight.
For me its more about getting me to think twice about eating a biscuit/choc once kiddies are in bed and eating healthy food even though 5.5 month old DD has had me up all night and all I crave is choc, as on the whole my diet isn't too bad.
As with all things I use my common sense and believe everything in moderation! x