Slimming World isnt working...I dont know what Im doing wrong!

[woahthere]

I have been overweight for quite a long time. Im a size 16. I have been trying on and off for years to try and lose weight. Ive thought for ages that actually my diet is pretty good, however, I still could never lose weight even when I upped my exercise. Many of my friends have done slimming world and lost lots of weight so i decided to go for it as I am obviously doing something wrong. The 1st week i stuck to it 100% and lost no weight...my sw consultant checked over my food diary and said it was excellent. The 2nd week I again stuck to it 100% and didnt feel like Id lost any weight but to my surprise I lost 2.5lb although oddly felt like id gained weight. Missed my 3rd week weigh in and am due one tomorrow but I know Ive not lost anything...if nything Ive gained. Since starting this diet Ive had horrendous stomach cramps, non stop wind, my stomach is sticking out a mile and my face is now covered in spots. Im utterly miserable and I just dont know what Im doing wrong. Please help :(

Hi I always struggled with sw particularly when they introduced extra easy, I put weight on then! Most success has been low carbing, come and join Biwi boot camps threads on here you will find a number f sw refugees

Ive done low carb before, and I know it works, but I found that once I gave in and had a treat that then i was like an uncontrollable beast and wouldnt stop eating naughty things. I hoped that sw would be a compromise, but actually it feels really restrictive. I dont seem to be able to tolerate pasta or potatoes or bananas or fruit...which is most of the free food! which leaves me a bit buggered really! maybe I should low carb again. part of me liked the support of the sw group, and the fact that everyone else seemed to be losing gave me hope!

this is what i ate today....can anyone point anything glaringly obvious out that im doing wrong....

Breakfast - scrambled egg made with egg, splash skimmed milk and fry light with baked beans
Lunch - supernutty salad from m and s which has quinoa, almonds, a few pistachios, poppy seeds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds (sounds like a lot but its only a bit of each and i counted it as a hex b), green beans, white beans, brocolli, i also had some chicken and tomatoes, then strawberries, grapes, pineapple, mango. Then 3 jaffa cakes = 7.5 syns
Teatime - roast chicken, brocolli, cauliflower and carrots with a splash of gravy
Also ate redcurrants, raspberries and peas from my garden while i was gardening :). hexa i used on skimmed milk in my tea. had 1 diet coke too.

To be honest, Im wondering if its the fruit, but sw tells you its superfree... im so confused what to do......

You are doing the Extra Easy plan???

If so you need 1/3 of ALL meals to be superfree. You had no superfree with brekkie.

I had great succes with SW in the olden days but their new extraeasy or whatever it's called just doesn't work for me, I can do the old red or green but not the new one.

Are your nuts and seeds measured and weighed to work out your HEX B???

It wont be the fruit.

Count the splash of gravy as syns as well - Its better to over estimate your syns than under estimate them.

no i didnt have 1/3 this morning, but usually i do i promise, we just had nothing in the house at that time until i went out and bought more fruit and veg. more than made up for it later though. im not sure im getting the idea of eating 1/3 superfree...is it not so you dont overeat on the rest of it...in which case, i really didnt!

i did my best to measure the seeds and nuts and removed all the peanuts so it wouldnt be too much. Because I wasnt 100% sure though I only had 7.5 syns the rest of the day so I had 7.5 left to cover the gravy, and any potential lurkers in the seeds.

why not the fruit, i keep reading really bad stuff about fruit at the moment.

It sounds daft but all these little things add up and dont help.

IMO - its the lack of Superfree with EVERY single meal on EE plan.

Loads of peeps slip up on EE - I cba with it as I dont want to eat the amount of Superfree with EVERY meal thats actually required to make the plan work. You cannot make up the superfree after the meal with fruit an hour later or whatever. The idea is - if you eat 1/3 superfree with your meal - your too full to eat too much carbs and protein.

Have you tried doing original and green plans for a few days to see if you get better results with that??

yes will try it, we were told to stick with ee for the first few weeks but its not working so will go on to red and green days i think. thanks.

You can have your Superfree in a fruit salad after your meal. Some people find it easier to take that way.

And 1/3 doesn't mean you have to eat more - just if you were having a small side plate, 1/3 of that could be Superfree, doesn't mean you have to pile your plate high.

The fruit won't be damaging your losses. Are you weighing and measuring your healthy extras? Counting for every wee extra in the day? (ie: fruit juices)

Always remember to exercise common sense, stop eating when full.

I have been following sw for a while now, have done all plans. I found that after a while on the ex easy plan I got lazy, so am back to the original days this wk :)

You'll get support on the thread entitled 'the big fat list and the days of doom' as its a sw support thread.

What I meant re Superfree was doesn't matter what size of plate it is!!!

Sorry if this sounds thick, I don't know anything about SW, but did you know all those nuts and seeds will have hundreds of calories in them? They are massively high in fat. I used to love snaking on those bags of Munchy Seeds, thinking they were all healthy etc until I read the calories and found they were something like 300 calories for a packet of about 40g or so. Mad.

it was always the 'stop eating when full' part I had trouble with.

Is it your portion sizes? I know that on SW no weighing, measuring - but i always felt that I had carte blanche to stuff my face with pasta

I reckon there are more syns in the salad you talk about as they are often full of hidden syns & it is often better to overestimate than under estimate. If you are following ee, then you really do need to have enough vegetables too. The fruit is fine, but I do think you need more veg.

Good luck with it as its worked so well for me.

I couldn't get on with slimming world either. I gained as soon as I started exercise and couldn't shift it again.

I now do low carb with great success and it is only now I understand the biochemistry behind how my body works with carbs that I realise how many I was actually eating. There is alot of sugar in fruit. Also diet foods with low fat and artificial sweetners can cause an insulin response because your body is expecting sugar.

If you have had success with low carb in the past why not try it again. There is plenty of support on here via the bootcamp threads and it is so much easier than weighing stuff out and counting syns and the food is delicious

Hi, thanks for all the helpful responses. I do count all my healthy extras. I dont drink fruit juice. It was difficult to calculate the healthy extra nuts and seeds part so it was part guesswork...so to make doubly sure I just calculated the syns and discounted the idea that any of it was free or hex b, and even doing that it only came up 6.5 syns, but then take into account that it was salad, free foods and nuts and seeds and Im sure you would have to take a few off, but even so 6.5 plus 7.5 plus my gravy, im pretty sure it wasnt more than 15 syns. I think I ate quite a lot of veg...lots of salad, lots of tomatoes, brocolli, cauliflower and carrots for tea that was more than half my plate. I struggle with the idea that slimming world tells me I can eat as much as I like, but then others are telling me I need to watch my portion control as I thought the whole idea of sw was that you can eat as much as you like...however, I dont eat pasta etc anyway, I eat mainly couscous and I cant realy manage a lot of that. I dont want to give up, i just want to make it work! Low carbing is good, but Id like to have the flexibility to eat a little chocolate every now and then or have a glass of wine.
I dont eat anything with sweeteners in as I think they are quite bad for you, but I allow myself 1 can of diet coke a day (although not every day).
I hate being fat, its so hard to lose weight :(

Are you eating enough? I'm doing SW extra easy ad have shifted a couple of stone. Yesterday I ate
B: weetabix fruit with skim milk (HEA and b)
L: tuna with ff nat yog (1/2 tin) large salad with mixed leaves, sweet potato. Tom, cucumber and green beans
Snack: mullet light yog and rasps, kiwi
Run for 25 min
D: chilli con carne and brown rice

Plus 4 pints of water.

You really have to watch hidden syns. I also avoid heavy carbs and make sure you drink plenty of water. I just wonder of you are eating enough calories each day? Maybe your body goes into starvation mode and saves the calories you are eating. Do you feel hungry?

Welcome to join us on the big fast list thread...

Couscous is pasta. If you're eating couscous surely it's the same as eating pasta?

I have been doing SW for a while and found it good at first when I was watching portion control but after a couple of weeks I stopped losing weight. Out of interest I totted up the calories I was eating when sticking to the plan and I was eating around 1800 - 2000 a day. I have gone back to basic calorie counting and eat between 1500 and 1700 a day and am losing again. That means I can have a treat but I count it within my calories. I understand that SW can help with that feeling of when a food is restricted you crave it more but it didn't work well with me. I follow certain principles tho, like restricting my bread, free veggies etc.
I think you're eating too many calories. Find a website that tells you the amount of calories your body needs to maintain your weight and then eat less than that and you'll lose weight.

And you need to eat 500 cals less per day to lose 1lb per week and 1000 less a day to lose 2lbs a week. My calorie intake needs to be 2500 to maintain my 14 stone weight (I am 5 foot 7 and 38 years old). Therefore if I want to lose 2lbs a week I need to eat 1500 a day. That's not alot and is very tricky to manage with SW in my opinion.

I've got an app on my phone called MyNetDiary and it is ace. You program on your height, weight & age etc and what you want to lose and it works out your calorie intake. It's got thousands of different foods in its memory, you can write down each meal from its database and it tells you the nutritional & calorific content. You can add exercises which take off a few calories. It has a weekly round up, you can see what you've eaten and keep a record of everything. It's really good.

Well I weighed in and have actually lost 1lb, but still, thats only 3.5lb in 4 weeks...but better than a kick in the teeth! Think Im going to reduce my fruit and up the veg even more and lower the carbs a bit.

I dont think Im eating too many calories goofy. Breakfast 300 calories. Lunch 400 calories. Dinner 200 calories = 900, plus 3 jaffas is 135 = 1035 even with added skimmed milk and fruit I cant see it being more than 1500. Agree with facecrack that if anything i might not be eating enough!

Couscous might be made out of the same thing as pasta but it doesnt affect my stomach in the same way...its something to do with the way its processed I think, pasta is stretched and it does something to the gluten I think. I just know I dont get a bad tummy after eating couscous, but I do after eating pasta. Plus, I bet people eat far more pasta than they would contemplate eating couscous!

I sed to be a SW consultant back in the say & we recommended 10 syns a day 15 once a week - not sure if this has changed.