Beans, beans, they're good for your heart...

Oh come on, it's STILL funny even if you're not 5! :)

At the turn of the year I announced to my lad that I am buying less meat.  Mainly it's a budget thing, veg and pulses cost a lot less than meat, are tasty, filling, and go a long way.  Anyway, he announced that that was fine, he was going vegetarian.  He's 13, whether it sticks or not, I don't know, but he's stuck to it so far and good on him.

It's also been good for me to have to shake up our meals a little bit, it's so easy to get stuck in a rut with food and make the same stuff all the time.

We've had some really tasty meals.  Pasta with home made arrabiata sauce and some salad (Ally had Quorn meatballs in his).

A lovely tarka daal (recipe by Jack Monroe - https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2016/12/29/tarka-daal-vegan/):

A nice veggie fried rice with grilled halloumi and veg:

Baked eggs with peppers, onions, and tomatoes:

This super quick and easy vegetable and quinoa laksa:

Minestrone and not-meatball stew:

But my favourite so far was a made up beany chilli that I chucked together last week:

2 x tins chilli beans
1 x tin baked beans
1 x tin pinto beans
1 x tin black eye beans (please do not confuse with black eyed peas, that makes chill.i.am instead of chilli)
1 x tin chopped tomatoes
a few squirts of tomato puree
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon (or pop a cinnamon stick in, but don't eat it!)
seasoning
the crushed chillis/cayenne/chilli powder part of it is up to you, make it as hot as you like :)

Just simmer it all together for 20-30 mins gently, just to reduce the liquid a little and make it a bit thicker, check the seasoning and the spice level, then serve.
We had it with steamed rice and a salad of spinach, tomatoes, red onion, coriander, and a bit of salt and lime juice.  Very tasty, will definitely make it again.  I'm sure it would freeze nicely too, but we scoffed a huge pot of it over a couple of days so it never made it that far...

As our meals are all vegetarian now (although I do still have small meat binges now and again, my boy doesn't though!) so rather than me cart a pile of fruit and veg back from the supermarket every week I decided to get a local veg box delivery.  I went with Pillars of Hercules (http://www.pillars.co.uk/) because I really like them, good fresh produce and their farm shop and cafe is great if you are ever out their way, do check it out.

This is our first box from Pillars, delivered today:

It's a great size for us, I was worried it would be too much but as we are eating more veg now it's great.  We have:
A few HUGE potatoes
beautiful dirty carrots
a bag of curly kale (a fave of mine!)
a lovely dirty neep
some leeks
a few nice big onions
2 long pointy red peppers
a lemon
a few oranges
a few tomatoes
a cabbage

It costs £15 a week and is delivered on a Thursday to us which is perfect.  I plan our meals for the week on a Thursday and do the shopping on a Friday or Saturday. I will have to get a few extra bits and bobs, but I would rather spend £15 a week on fresh, tasty, organic veg, most of which is grown locally, than £15 on supermarket meat.  we'll see how we get on.

If you want any recipes of any of the pictures of our veggie feasts, do shout.  I tend to make things up as I go along but can give you a fair idea of where to start.

Big veggie love!
Jill xx

Saturday night's alright for biting...

Apologies for another cringe worthy title (sorry, not sorry... :) )

The past couple of days I have been suffering from 'slimmer's memory', it's a real thing! ;)
I forget that I've had biscuits, crisps, extra little bits creep in to my meals, and then there are the 'f**k it' moments.  When I remember all the things I've already eaten, know i've gone over my Slimming World syns, but think 'f**k it' and eat more anyway. Might as well get hung for a sheep as a lamb, eh?

Then on Friday night, after a really busy week being back at work after 4 weeks holiday (yes, I know, I AM lucky!) I took myself off to bed early, I think I was asleep by about 10pm-ish and slept til 9am, lovely! And I had a pile of Facebook notifications, loads of them, very odd! However, lovely Clair my current Slimming World consultant had invited lots of people to like the page for this blog, and my numbers had doubled overnight!  How nice, it even prompted me to make my breakfast of wheat biscuits and berries look pretty and take a picture of it to post rather than just throwing it down my neck.  It also really helped to refocus my efforts and stop sabotaging myself this week. So hello! Welcome, and thank you so much for being here, I truly appreciate it!

I had already taken the time to plan my meals for the coming week, so I was almost back on track, but my snacks were the problem.  So today I have been much better. I made a big pot of chicken, leek and rice soup and have been snacking on it throughout the day.  I'm also making a bigger effort to drink more water as I often forget to at the weekends.  But it's Saturday and I know I will need nibbles for the evening ahead.  I'm a grazer in the evenings.

So I've made some hummus and dippy veggies (or crudites for the less heathen like amongst you!), sweet potato skins scooped out and mixed with bacon and spring onion, topped with melted cheese (my Healthy Extra A allowance), and then a mix of fat free greek yogurt and some chopped chives (this was just the result of messing about with what was in the fridge - try it!), and a wee packet of chocolate buttons for 4 syns. There was also a bowl of pickled onions and beetroot but I scoffed them. I'm going to have a cheeky wee Jack Daniels and diet coke too (4.5 syns for 35ml), it IS the weekend :)

That wee lot should keep me going all evening!!

Oh and just to prove that I really do eat a huge amount of food, this was tea from 2 hours ago:

Lamb leg steaks with visible fat removed, marinated all day in fat free yogurt and harissa paste (a tiny 0.5 syns per level tspn!), couscous loaded with red onion, green chillis, tomatoes, lime juice, and fresh mint, coriander and flat leaf parsley. A favourite tea that I had forgotten about til I saw a jar of harissa in Asda last week.

Hope these give you some ideas if you are following Slimming World, but to be honest it's just tasty grub for anyone.

Big love,
Jill xxx

Blow your trumpet!!

First things first...2 years since my last blog post?! Life has been busy!

However, something happened today and I felt the need to bore as many people as possible with it :)

A bit of background: In May 2011 I decided to change the future for me and my son, Alister.  I abseiled off the Forth Rail Bridge in aid of Chest Heart and Stroke Scotland, saw photos of myself, and was so horrified at how big I looked that I weighed myself for the first time in a long time. The number on the scales terrified me: 19stone 8lbs. I was less than half a stone away from 20 stone, how did that even happen without me noticing? 

Seriously, if you need some motivation to lose weight, get your arse in a safety harness, it's a real eye opener!!

My immediate thought was that I was essentially killing myself. Having lost my dad far too young, I couldn't willingly make that a possibility for my son. None of us can stop bad things happening, but we CAN stop making them more likely if we want to.

Over the next few years I lost about 3 stone through using the MyFitnessPal app to log all my food and exercise. I would go through spells of losing weight easily, then during holiday periods I would fall off the wagon and put a bit back on again. But at September 2014 I was at 17 stone 2lbs and had taken up running, using the C25K app (I'd definitely recommend this if you fancy giving running a go). I was also following the Fat Girl's Guide to Running (with Julie Creffield) on Facebook. I signed up to Julie's first monthly fitness challenge which included daily and weekly fitness and nutrition challenges. At the end of September I was thrilled to have lost 10lbs!! 

In the meantime, an old friend of mine, Nikki Williamson, had trained as a Slimming World consultant and was going to be starting her classes in October. I'd gone to groups in the past (Rosemary Conley, Scottish Slimmers...) but was in the "I'm not paying someone to weigh me" camp. But as it was Nikki, I decided I would go to support her in her new venture. I even believed that I wasn't going for me for a bit :) 

So I hopped on the scales on the first night and the 16stone 6lbs that showed on the screen wasn't a surprise. I set myself an interim target of 13stone and it felt like a mammoth, unreachable number right then.  

Apologies, this has become a bit of self therapy, but hang in there, I will get to the thing that happened today!!

To cut a long story a bit shorter, on 16th June this year I reached that first target and set a new one of 11stone. 3stone 6lbs lost in 9 months, happy days! Slimming World just seems to fit in to my life easily, and I finally admitted that a group support network is exactly what I need. We have a walking group set up now on a Wednesday too, which is lovely!  I've now lost 3stone 11lbs, and managed to not put weight on over my summer holiday period, a massive result for me. Shopping is weird, I can't remember when I last shopped for size 12 or 14 clothes, but it's nice trying stuff on. I absolutely can't remember when I last weight 12 stone anything, but I do now!  I even won the Woman of the Year award in our Slimming World group. Me! Ha ha!! This is the same girl as in the first photo up there ^^

Anyway, today I went to Aldi. I have lots on this weekend and was planning to get a Tesco delivery but rejigged some stuff and went to Aldi today. It's about a 5km round trip walk for me and I needed lots. Now school and work are back to normal I'm determined to get back in the habit of planning the meals for the week and shopping for that.  So I took Alister's big rucksack and another couple of bags and off I went with my list.

I put all the heavy stuff in the rucksack and carried the lighter stuff in bags. So in the rucksack I had bags of veg, frozen peas, frozen prawns, tins, masses of fruit, 6 litres of milk, bacon, mince, eggs...it absolutely weighed a tonne. I had to stop a couple of times on the walk home to take a rest but then plodded on. As I was walking I tried to guess how much the rucksack of stuff weighed. My estimate was about 4 stone. As I've lost 4.5 stone since last September I thought it would be interesting to weigh the bag when I got home to see how close it was.

2stone 2lbs. That was it. Nowhere even near 4 stone.  This huge, rammed full bag weighed less than half the amount that I've lost in the past 11 months.  A third of what I've lost since I was at my heaviest.  I don't feel much different to how I did back then. I'm not smarter, or happier, or prettier, or funnier, or more caring, or less loving.  I'm just smaller and weigh less.  And healthier. The weight loss has been gradual so I don't really notice anything different. But I've said to a few people recently that if I was given a 7 stone bag to carry around with me I'd sure know about it! And I'm completely blown away by this thing today. Even half the weight of that rucksack is heavy! I know so many people in our group who have lost a stone or 2 stone and aren't blowing their own trumpets about it - GET BLOWING!!!!

Fill a bag with stuff, weigh it, get it to the weight you have lost, and I bet you completely underestimate the enormity of what you have done! Go on! Do it today!! Then give yourself an almighty pat on the back, and a big hug!!