I know this was supposed to be a mystery writer’s blog, and on that subject I can report that I’ve written the first chapter of Murder of a Working Ghost and left poor Haley very upset indeed. But when I’m not writing, the majority of my creative efforts are being spent on food.
The last time I did the Slimming World diet, I did it very plainly. I ate only free foods. I figured out about two or three staple meals and I ate those over and over again without variance, and I did nothing fancy with my A or B choices beyond the occasional bowl of porridge or rice pudding.
Crucially, I also rarely went away for the weekend, and I did no exercise. On that regime, I steadily lost between 0.5 lb and 2 lb a week for two years.
This time, however, I really struggled to produce a consistent weight loss. In the process of trying to figure out what was causing my problems, I was told that to prevent myself from becoming habituated to one B choice, I had to vary them every day.
Eventually I figured out that the key factor in the weight loss glitches was exercise. When I exercise too much I don’t lose weight. I put it on. This is just typical of my arse-about-face existence, where I don’t work the same way as regular humans, and if I’d known it was even possible, I should have expected it.
As there’s no way I’m not dancing, I’ve resigned myself to a weight loss pattern which now goes something like 4.5 lb loss followed by o.5 lb gain, followed by gain or maintain, followed by large loss again. The overall trend is still about a loss of a pound a week.
However, during the process of figuring this out, I had to get creative. Which inevitably lead me to look at my B choices and try to think of ways to make some of them – prunes! Scan bran! – less like a punishment and more like a treat.
It started with overnight oats. Several people said how nice it was, but I was trying to avoid oats, so I wondered whether you could do a similar thing with muesli. I measured out my 40g of Alpen sugar free and tipped it into half a large pot of natural fat free yoghurt. Then I added half a pot of my favourite mullerlite (currently lemon tart flavour), a pinch of ginger/mixed spice and enough frozen summer berries to fill the pot nearly to the brim. Mixed it all up, covered it and shoved it in the fridge overnight.
Wow, it was good! Really tasty, sweet and filling, and there was enough of it for me to eat in two portions, giving me a supper and an afternoon snack.
Naturally I had to see if you could do the same thing with other B choices. It turns out that you can.
Try crumbling 40g Apricot Shreddies into a pot of plain yoghurt/apple strudel flavour mullerlight and adding a couple of handfuls of frozen blueberries. Whack it in the fridge for a few hours and it will assume the texture of a pudding. Then you have something sweet, filling and delicious to eat in the afternoon.
Or try crumbling 40g Chocolate mini weetabix into a plain yoghurt/cherry bakewell flavour mix and filling it up with frozen cherries. This one is really decadent!
Mix and match to your heart’s content.
I’m aware that there are a lot of recipes out there where you use your B choice for baking, but most of those add syns to the mix. I wanted a syn-free option, so I could save my syns for luxuries like half a pint of beer and a curly-wurly. So the important part about this B choice pudding is that it is completely syn free.
None of this helped me deal with the prunes and their intense yet somehow unpleasant sweetness, but more on that in the next post.