Slimming world and snack shots ( free ones )

[ginorwine]

Have lost weight on sw and am now trying to maintain the loss - finding thus harder .
I'm feeling really hungry at the mo and crave warm foods and also choc .
Am having a curly wurly at night with a gin for my syn treat but in the day I'm wanting to snack .
I've really got into snack shots and tend to crave on mid afternoon and late am - as snack s not lunch etc .
I looked at the calories - I know sw doesn't count them - and two snack shots come to around 500 calories ! So how come they are free ? And why don't folk gain weight with this many extra calories ? I'd rather have extra choc or wine but they are not free like snack shots ! Wish cd use the calories differently ! Can anyone explain this ? I'm not going to group at the moment .thanks .

Taken from SW website:

There are lots of branded Free Foods out there too (eg Slimming World meals, meats, sauce and soups, some flavours of Mullerlight yogurts and Mugshots to name a few)

Our SW consultant told us that Free Food is free food, so you can eat as much as you like of it, that is the whole point of it. (The idea being that there is only so much you can eat!) but a third of the plate should be speed food, so make sure you do that at meals.

If you are doing SW then you shouldn't be worrying about the calories, as their plan doesn't work like that. You need to do one or the other, you can't do both.

That's what I thought pink re calories - I never count - it wdnt work fior me .

You don't have to count calories no, that is true, but if you are not losing weight or gaining and are sure you are following the plan then it's worth logging calories for a few days to check you are not over-consuming.

You don't have to, and TBH 2x snack shots at 250cals each per day , it's obvious where you are going wrong, but you can say they are 'free' and so can eat freely until you are blue in the face but assuming your meals are 'on plan' then this is the obvious thing to change.

The whole free food and Syns is just easy shorthand for lower calorie and higher calorie stuff and does help avoid getting over stressed about calories. It works very well in that and 95% of the time eating to plan will result in a calorie deficit, so calories don't need to be thought about.

However, there is a common sense element that free foods are not calorie free - just a lot more difficult to eat the amount you would need to have a significantly detrimental impact on weightloss. Whether two snack shots a day are enough for that, I don't know - is it impacting your maintenance? If not, knock yourself out! If so, well, you know what to change.

Our consultant is very big on eating mindfully and not just eating because you can. She says that if reaching for a snack, have some speed first. If you're still hungry, have something free, unless it's a planned syn.

Snacks I like:
Home made chicken tikka pieces - cooked in advance and kept in the fridge.
Baked mushroom with ham and hexa cheese
Mini SW quiches - these freeze quite well.
Pre-cooked chicken drumsticks with the skin removed with a bit of salad
Hard boiled eggs
Small portion of whatever I cooked last night with some veg on the side

Agree with pp- Danny is right. The only foods you can eat freely are those that are listed in your book as free foods. Other foods have a Syn value of zero, but they are not in the free food list. They go in the syns section of your food diary, not the free foods section. Free foods are only free if 1/3 of your plate is speed food and if you stop eating when you are full. It is not a licence to eat constantly and good grief, please let yourself feel hungry occasionally. It's good for you.

I don't think you should eat smash as a snack on your drive home.

I've done sw for many years but gave up a few years ago for exactly this reason. Too many rubbish processed foods being encouraged. Cook real food from the free foods list and have a small treat of about 200 cals a day. I switched to full fat Greek yoghurt rather than fat free and it made no noticeable difference to my weight loss/gain.

I will just add that it seems certain consultants are big on the Syn free rubbish and others aren't. Mine was awful. She had shares in muller light I'm sure.....

clash that's what I was trying to say, although reading it back my way looks a bit snotty

thenew I'd never thought about the free and syn-free distinction before now, as I don't eat muller lights and mug shots etc but that sounds like a sensible approach whether or not it is official SW advice.

I just thought sw was a dream come true in that I took it literally I cd eat as much as I want as it's literature appears to state .and I thought free and no syn was the same . Trouble is satsuma s don't fill me up - stodgy stuff does .

ginor I am the same, I have big portions of pasta, rice etc with meals otherwise I just don't feel satisfied. But almost always in proportion to protein and speed.

But between meals it's either fruit (speed mostly) or syns for me.

Fruit doesn't fill you up. If you read about fructose and the way it overrides your appetite, you will see why. When I quit sw and went low carb/high fat/sugar free it was a revelation as to how sw isn't really the dream diet I once believed it was. There really is no benefit to bring able to/allowed to eat unlimited quantities of any food, but high sugar foods especially. On some days at sw I would eat circa 500 calories of fruit, and all speed food and all 'allowed'.

I will point out, I am not smugly polishing my halo when I say this. I am a long suffering yoyo dieter and I'm not perfect and fully understand why different people do different diets. The sw extra easy sp plan is closest to the best diet for me really. Actually, the old red plan, but that's 'that which shall not be named' in classes now. But substitute full fat for low fat dairy. So, free protein, 2 b choices (but have nuts, oats or lentils not bread!), 1 a choice, watery veg. A small treat each day. Have full fat yoghurt once a day or every couple of days as a dessert or breakfast. This is the basic premise of many popular diets at the moment, such as the blood sugar diet which I am currently doing.

The problem with sw I have found is that due to this mentality of 'you can eat loads of food' it can attract a certain type of dieter who believes that they cannot cope without loads of food. It encourages this 'how much can I get for my syns' mentality which results in delights such as scan bran cake, pink and white marshmallows, all manner of concoctions made out of muller lights- even sw themselves have come out and said that if you use free food in this way then you have to count it as syns. Not every member, but lots of them. When you read threads on here, a large amount of successful sw weight-losers are those who don't eat all the zero Syn foods, but instead cook wholesome food from scratch and exercise portion control.

500cals of speed fruit is insane! You must have been, ahem, very regular

500cals of speed fruit is exactly the same as 500cals of mug shots in terms of the point I was trying to make -that if our energy intake is higher than your expenditure then you will not lose weight and more likely gain in the long term.

Making meals more satisfying and reducing the need to snack (I.e. changing habits) is the key, and as you say cooking nice wholesome foods and exercising control is the way forward.

Sorry, free food. Although a lot was speed. But it's not as difficult as you might think and I bet a lot of people do that, or even more. Large banana with breakfast, Apple at coffee time, maybe 2 satsuma at lunch, grab another apple or pear for the journey home, fruit salad with yoghurt as dessert. All encouraged and allowed. I'm not saying it's bad to eat a lot of fruit btw, it's still got to better than hobnobs. But just that it can add up to a lot of calories and it's a lot of sugar which for some people (me, unfortunately) isn't a good thing.

The new average bear
The diet you are on sounds great
I instinctively hate muller lights and I do believe in healthy full fat stuff but I thknk that I have developed a sw avoidance of fats now as I use my syns for syns for wine as I love wine . I also love ham sandwiches and beans on toast so I chose not to eat nuts - again a good fat - for my he b .
What is your diet called and how does it restrict calories with the fat
Ooh I really wd like a proper yogurt now !

Re the fruit
Yes I've eaten about 8 in a day to try to stick to free foods and do not feel full on fruit at any time .

I'm currently doing the 8 week blood sugar diet by Michael Moseley. I did a full 8 weeks entirely sugar free after Easter last year and lost 21lb, then a further 7lb on a maintenance plan. Then life happened. Now back on it trying to do another 8 weeks but I keep struggling this time around.

The basic premise is simple really. Less than 50g carbs a day. Full fat dairy. Good fats. Small portions of really healthy, tasty food. No snacks. He does suggest aiming for 800 calories a day for the 8 weeks but that is to reverse type 2 diabetes. I never did this, more like 1000-1200 with one day a week where i wouldn't count at all but stuck to the allowed foods. I still use a lot of my sw recipe books and their magazine but I use olive oil instead of frylight, leave the skin on meat etc.

As I say, I was doing sw so I was amazed I could be full and satisfied on probably half the calories and half the quantity of food. It's because fat is so satisfying. Even now, I'm amazed at how luxurious full fat greek yoghurt tastes after years of watery fat free on sw! The BSD doesn't work for everyone. For me it was a quick boost to shifting my baby weight and detoxing off sugar because I was a total addict. I'm hoping this time around I lose the remaining stone but also develop a way of doing it for life rather than falling straight off the wagon after the 8 weeks are up! We do have a thread on here in the 5:2 section if you want more info. The basic principles transfer quite well into the sw extra easy sp plan if you still want to have the structure of a plan.

Can you drink a glass of wine a day on that plan ? 😜

Not sure about one a day, but you can have a glass of red wine occasionally