January weight loss

New Year and a new you?
Throughout January I've noticed a few TV chefs opting for low carb dishes as a way of losing weight. If you can't face life without eating carbs, then why bother dieting that way? You will be more likely to succeed in your efforts eating food you normally eat. This blog contains a record of what we've eaten over the years - just to show you can eat real food while losing weight. We have also produced some really tasty recipes for you to try such as this tasty kebab:
We managed to lose weight eating everything - and that's all food groups together.
Faddy diets are just short term gimmicks and very difficult to sustain. Once you give up, you'll probably find yourself even more attracted to the foods you gave up! Our message is really that weight loss is possible eating the foods you naturally eat, but keeping an eye on where this fits into your daily calorie allowance.
Take a look at our weight loss story and you'll find out how we managed to incorporate our lifestyle into a weight loss programme that included joining in with festivities, holidays and celebrations. We've also managed to keep 7 stone in weight off - five years later. Friends and family have followed our simple set of rules, and lost weight too, so why not give it a try. If all else has failed, what have you got to lose? Except weight!

****

Be who you want to be.

Do you know how many calories you can eat each day?

Our very first blog post about our weight loss journey - back in 2011.

You'll find our successful weight loss method and a few tips and tricks here: WEIGHT LOSS STORY.

Tweak what you eat and lose weight.

Copyright © forget dieting forever (2015), all rights reserved.

TEMPURA ONION RINGS

These TEMPURA BATTERED ONION RINGS were so crunchy and light; the perfect accompaniment to any meal. They add texture and crunch when needed, for example, with sausage and mash.
In keeping with our weight loss philosophy - paying attention to what we eat, being honest about how much - we get to explore some fabulous recipes without any guilt. This weight loss method is the only one we and others have found fits into our daily (real) life, is easy to follow and most importantly, helps keep the weight off. Eating food like this!!
We were looking for lots of 'crunch' to go with this steak, because we ditched chips in preference to gnocchi. You can buy gnocchi ready made, and as we did with this meal, it can be boiled then lightly fried. It's a good alternative to chips, especially if you are indulging with these amazing onion rings.
We served ours with cavolo nero - an deliciously interesting vegetable to be recommended. This link will show you how we cooked it.
The batter was lighter than a standard batter and therefore saves on calories.
We didn't use bicarbonate soda either, as some recipes do, and they still turned out perfectly light and crunchy.
For the tempura batter (serves 4): 60g plain flour, 40g cornflour, salt and pepper, cold fizzy water. Mix the dry ingredients and slowly add enough water to a thin consistency that will stay on the back of a spoon. Dip raw onion rings into the batter and then into hot oil. You could use a small saucepan with enough oil to submerge the onion rings. Heat to around 170ºC - drop a little batter into the oil and if it rises to the surface and bubbles, that's about the right temperature.

****

Be who you want to be.

Do you know how many calories you can eat each day?

Our very first blog post about our weight loss journey - back in 2011.

You'll find our successful weight loss method and a few tips and tricks here: WEIGHT LOSS STORY.
Tweak what you eat and lose weight.

Copyright © forget dieting forever (2014), all rights reserved.

Smoked cod and poached eggs

Have you ever eaten smoked cod with poached eggs? We've occasionally eaten smoked haddock and poached eggs, but never cod. The supermarket was selling smoked cod loin at a very reasonable price.
If you're not a fan of smoked fish, you might find this cut of fish interesting. Compared to smoked haddock the cod was less smoky and more delicate, and went perfectly with spinach and poached egg. All very moreish.
The fish was very easy to cook. Place the cod into a small saucepan and cover with milk. Turn up the heat and simmer for around 4-5 minutes (we had two 150g fillets). Turn off the heat while you prepare the rest of the ingredients. We used frozen spinach, as it is economical and there is no waste. The bacon added a lovely crunch to the meal.
This meal with a slice of toast was around 450 calories.
Just like everyone else, we have indulged over Christmas and the New Year. Our weight has fluctuated over the festive season by a couple of pounds here and there. We've addressed this by thinking about what we are eating and in the last few days we've returned to our pre-Christmas weight.
It's around this time of year when we notice the bits and pieces of 'leftover' nuts, biscuits and chocolates lurking around the house. Noticing what's around us was how we originally came up with the weight loss idea.
Four years ago I noticed my other half would pick up a mince pie (or two) and munch on them as he wandered around the kitchen. These mindless snacks can have a big impact on weight. Just two mince pies amounted to 500 calories - enough calories for a whole meal. He wasn't necessarily 'enjoying' them either, but eating them so they wouldn't go to waste. We now choose to eat whatever we want to eat, but (roughly) within our daily calorie allowance.

****

Be who you want to be.

Do you know how many calories you can eat each day?

Our very first blog post about our weight loss journey - back in 2011.

You'll find our successful weight loss method and a few tips and tricks here: WEIGHT LOSS STORY.
Tweak what you eat and lose weight.

Copyright © forget dieting forever (2014), all rights reserved.

SPICY PASTA WITH FETA

Pasta with feta with a refreshing yoghurt and pea dressing. 

Losing weight eating great food is also our secret to keeping the weight off. 

Give you body a good balance of everything to help eliminate cravings. 

Eat regularly, but most of all enjoy what you are eating. 

Calories in - calories out may sound too simplistic (and boring), but at the beginning of 2011we developed this simple equation into a very simple and successful WEIGHT LOSS PLAN, which helped us to lose over 7 stone between us. We learned there is no need to starve and no special foods are required.

Maintaining the weight seems to have surprised a lot of people - and almost 4 years later, we've continued to keep the weight off. Unlike lots of diets where the weight just piles back on once the diet is over.

To make this pasta dish, there are two stages - the yoghurt dressing can be made first and you can set it aside until you are ready to make the rest. We doubled up on the yoghurt dressing so we can use it again. In fact, you can double up on all the ingredients, as this is delicious eaten cold. Take it to work and your friends will be jealous of your tasty salad bowl.

Here's how we made this dish, adapted from an Ottolenghi recipe.

SPICY PASTA - serves TWO
Yoghurt dressing

60g natural yoghurt

25ml olive oil

50g frozen and defrosted peas

crushed clove garlic

salt/pepper

Blend yoghurt with 25ml of the olive oil, 50g of the peas and crushed garlic. Add salt and pepper.Mix until you have a pale green sauce. Set aside until later.

Spicy pasta

120g dried pasta

100g frozen peas

15g pine nuts (or chopped hazelnuts)

20 ml olive oil

1/4 teaspoon of chilli flakes (if you like it hot, use half teaspoon)

15g fresh basil leaves

50g feta cheese 

salt/pepper

Cook the pasta according to the instructions.  Add the frozen peas for the last couple of minutes.Drain well because the shells fill up with water, then very slowly, add the pasta to the sauce (so it doesn't split). 

Place the 20ml oil into a small frying pan. Add your chilli flakes and pine nuts. Cook gently until golden brown - 4-5 minutes.

Tear basil, crumble the feta and mix into the pasta. Top with the pine nuts and drizzle with the chilli/oil.

**************

Be who you want to be.

Eat great and lose weight. 

Copyright © forget dieting forever (2014), all rights reserved.

Please do not copy any of this material without our express permission.

LOSE WEIGHT - EAT FROM A SMALLER PLATE?

Can you lose weight eating from a smaller plate? I tested this theory - unintentionally - and was surprised at the results.
I was preparing a couple of salads using two different plates, the one on the right being slightly smaller by 3cm.
Having dined on soups and stews for a few days, while studying, I was really looking forward to lots of crunchy vegetables. Before I realised there were two large salads staring at me, and they looked about equal in content. Then I thought, why not weigh them and of course deducting the weight of each plate. That's when I found the smaller plate weighed 50g more than the large plate on the left. Without thinking, I was actually adding more food to my (smaller) plate, almost as if I was trying to make up for the difference in size. I suppose it didn't really matter, as 50g more salad wouldn't really make a difference to the number of calories on the plate.
If you're thinking of using the smaller plate to help lose weight, then you may be eating more than you think! A good set of scales will set you on the right track.

Be who you want to be.

Do you know how many calories you can eat each day?

Our very first blog post about our weight loss journey - back in 2011.

You'll find our successful weight loss story here. Tweak what you eat and lose weight.

Copyright © forget dieting forever (2014), all rights reserved.
Please do not copy any of this material without our express permission.

SLOW ROASTED PORK (and diets)

Slow roasted belly of pork never fails to please. From the crunch to the meltingly soft pork below - this has to be one of our favourite dishes. By the time you take it out of the oven, most of the fat will have been cooked out. It's the flavour of the meat that's left… see our recipe below.
You can make pulled-pork sandwiches later too, if you have any left that is. We've made this before with a spicy Chinese marinade, but this time we    added cider.
Now SUGAR is finally making headlines, as the

Love bread - hate diets?

Restrictive diets usually limit the amount of bread you can eat. Next thing you know, you're craving the bread you can't eat.
I love bread - and it was one of the things I really missed when dieting. There was no substitute really.  What we did about this problem is probably not what you would expect, but it worked for us and helped us enjoy losing weight.
Dieting was always a negative experience for me - can't have this, can't have that. But we now realise it doesn't have to be like that.

HOW TO LOSE WEIGHT

Welcome to all our new followers. We hope you enjoy looking around this blog for some weight loss inspiration. Changing the way we think (or see) has had quite an impact on our weight. If you find it difficult to lose weight, why not change the way you think too? 

If you find it difficult to stick to diets - as we once did - why not give this PART-TIME weight loss plan a go? What have you got to lose?

It's been nearly 3 years since our first blog post, and there's now so much content I thought it was time to post a quick overview. I've noticed the blog needs tidying up as some of the links are not working, so please bear with me:

Binge all weekend?

Hunger dictated this very filling lunch of SAUSAGE, EGG & BEANS with mushrooms, tomatoes and buttered toast.
The sausages were very meaty - about 95% meat content. Proper sausages!
Often we'll have salads or sandwiches for lunch, but when we've been a bit more active - as I have today - we look for something more substantial. Working in the garden is good exercise, and I would say I must have burned a few hundred calories. Enough to offset the higher calorie lunch than usual.
We aim to eat around 450-500 calories at lunch time. I can well remember when I used to follow restrictive diets where I (frustratingly) tried to survive on 300 calories for lunch, and end up so hungry (and miserable) I would eventually eat anything and quite often - everything in sight.
There was a piece in the Daily Mail today about people who binge all weekend consuming up to 10,000 calories over two days. The article, although extreme, struck a chord with me - as it probably did with many dieters. You've spent all week dieting, then the weekend arrives and you give up. Start your 'diet' on Monday, and by Friday you are so hungry you just want to eat, eat and eat. I then used to promise myself I would 'start a new diet' on Monday - and this gave me justification to carry on eating. This process was repeated year after year after year. I didn't binge like the article though. The weekend becomes a free for all food frenzy. You feel guilty. Who wins in this situation? The diet industry with your repeat business of course - not you. 
BUT, there is a way out of this destructive cycle.  
We ALL have a calorie allowance. We can eat ALL types of food. That's why OUR METHOD works. We recognised right at the beginning that we loved our WEEKENDS too. It's a time to relax, be with friends and socialise. Even during the week, we allowed ourselves MORE food than most conventional weight loss programmes. Over two years we shed the pounds quite easily, and more importantly we've kept them off. So go on, take a leap of faith, give this method of weight loss a go. What have you got to lose - except weight.

****

Do you know how many calories you can eat each day?

Here's a link to our very first blog post about our weight loss journey, which we began in January 2011. We started this blog as a way of recording what we ate while losing weight. The blog is a food diary, and contains lots of recipes, tips and ideas about losing weight.

You'll find our WEIGHT LOSS PLAN here. 

Copyright © forget dieting forever (2013), all rights reserved. Please do not copy any of this material without our express permission.

Steak and onion rings

It's been a while since we ate STEAK and CHIPS. A couple of huge home cooked onion rings replaced half the portion of our mighty chips. The hot balsamic tomatoes were deliciously sweet and sticky.
We like to eat a balance of foods - and if you take a look through our recipes/diary, you'll notice we eat everything. Our weight management system does not dictate WHAT you should eat. You get to choose your own food. Hopefully, in the end, you'll learn enough about the food you eat, to make simple lifestyle choices that will help you to lose and maintain weight loss forever. Interestingly, according to some weight loss theories, you tend to eat more the more varied your diet and therefore gain weight. However, we've found the opposite to be true. Why?

2000 CALORIES ON A PLATE

This is what 2000 calories looks like (excluding the bread). We bought this large bag of chip shop chips from  a new chip shop and found it weighed 800g. We couldn't believe it. Not all chip shops dish up such a generous portion, so next time you're buying some why not weigh them and see for yourself.
Our philosophy is to eat the food you love - and we've certainly done that - while losing weight.
If you ate all these chips, you would be eating the equivalent of ONE whole day's calorie allowance for the average woman.

Chip shop fish and chips

After spending the afternoon decorating, we were ravenous. We were going to have a BBQ and salad, but for some reason we fancied fish and chips.
We must have been looking for the carbs after all our exercise. Even while we were losing weight we continued to eat food we really wanted rather than a lack lustre alternative. This was a lovely treat, and perfect after a hard day working on the house.
Had I realised we would have preferred a meal with carbohydrates like this, I could have

Chicken & avocado pasta with a mint and lemon dressing

Wondering what to have for a solo lunch and needing a little inspiration? Why not take a look around the kitchen and see what you have. Here's what I found around the kitchen/garden!
We like to grow vegetables in pots, and the peas were just shooting so I picked a few pods. There was a pot of mint. Some leftover chicken breast and a couple of asparagus spears.
Here's what I made - which will also make a great lunchbox alternative.
For my recipe below I've estimated the calories in this dish, which are incredibly low.
Our long term strategy for maintaining weight loss is to keep applying the knowledge we have built up while following our simple METHOD. Especially about CALORIES (see below), and what they mean to us. This has worked remarkably well, and we continue to eat whatever we want yet keep the weight off.
I am aiming to lose a little bit more because (annoyingly) I seem to be

Smoked salmon

Here's our quick lunch - smoked salmon with scrambled (duck) eggs. The richness of the eggs complimented the salmon perfectly. We estimate this dish at around 450 calories - including the toast.
Losing weight doesn't stop when you reach your 'goal'.
Because we have lost weight slowly, we found we learned a lot about the foods we like to eat. We know how many calories they contain and we can now roughly calculate a plate of food just by looking at it. This is helping us keep the weight off.

WALKING FOR WEIGHT LOSS

It's GET WALKING WEEK, so why not incorporate walking into your daily routine and reap the weight loss rewards?
After two years of slow and steady weight loss, we know this form of exercise has helped.
Apart from the health benefits a lot of people forget that walking translates into CALORIES. Just half an hour of walking could mean you burn 100 calories or more per day. This could equate to 10 lbs in weight loss per year.
Why not take a look at what we said about CALORIES.
WALKING is not just a social activity either, because quite often I'm on my own. Shopping is a good example.
I've got a small pedometer and can track just how far I walk and on a shopping trip I can clock up 1.5 miles easily by parking a little further away and wandering down a street or two before going into the shops. I also get to

MAKING CALORIES COUNT

Lunch was a beef salad with buttered new potatoes - a great start to our week.
Having lost all our weight slowly but surely over the last two years, we tend to use our 'method of weight loss' as a guide now. We haven't put the weight back on, but strangely enough, we keep getting asked if we have lost even more weight. The answer to that is

WHY DOES MY WEIGHT FLUCTUATE

If you've been dieting for a while you will probably have experienced weight fluctuations. It's annoying if you have a weight target in mind and the scales seem to point further away from your goal. Diets can look easy on paper, but in real life they can seem impossible to follow. Diets can also impose a strict regime that may be just too difficult to fit into your lifestyle. Expectations might be high at the start, and you may feel fed up when the weight doesn't fall off. But keep in mind that weight gain didn't happen overnight, so how can you expect it to disappear in a few days. During our weight loss, we noticed our weight could fluctuate

Tandoori style chicken breast strips

Chicken breast - tandoori style. This is a very simple lunch or light dinner idea. The chicken breast strips were kept moist by the tandoori paste. Why not cook more than needed and use the rest for sandwiches/wraps or lunch box salads.
Here we ate approximately 160g of chicken breast, boiled new potatoes in butter with salad, sweetcorn and coleslaw. We would estimate this dish at no more than 500 calories. An average daily calorie allowance for me is approximately 1900 calories. For my other half, it's more as he's physically taller too.
Do you know how much food and drink you can eat each day? Take a look at our link below and find out now. Whether you want to lose weight or maintain weight, knowing how your food and drink fits into the equation, is the secret to success.

Forget dieting and eat the food YOU love. Why not search for our other great recipes and tips. Or, make sure you never miss another recipe and Subscribe to Forget dieting forever by Email.

REMEMBER: We all have a calorie allowance - do you know yours? 

We like to post our main meals to show you what CAN be eaten. You won’t find us posting every last morsel though – but we hope this gives you an idea of how far calories can go!

Read about our UNIQUE METHOD of weight loss and find out how you can lose weight eating the food you love.

Copyright © forget dieting forever, all rights reserved.

Dieting? Choices and control

We have always said planning meals ahead will help you lose weight and keep the weight off. Once you get into the habit, it does become easier.
When you are busy socialising, it's all too easy to come home and say - there's nothing in the fridge... let's get a takeaway. Nowadays, we like to think we'll have something available, because we have planned ahead.
You never know what you might fancy, but if you are given a CHOICE, you may opt for the less calorific meal.
Just remember YOU are in control of what you eat - especially when you have something to choose from. If you decide you want that takeaway instead of something you've prepared - then eat it. If you don't want to think about calories, then don't. It's almost impossible to judge calories in a takeaway anyway. Losing weight takes time, and if you are too strict on yourself, you'll give up. If you have something prepared, then decide you would prefer the takeaway, all is not lost - you will have lunch ready to go the next day.

MEN AND DIETING - can you see yourself here?

Hi, my name's TIM and I am sitting here writing my side of this journey through weight loss, over 4 stone lighter than I was knowing that if I can do this anybody can as it is simple and easy and to be honest with you I do not know why I did not know or was not told some of this easy life changing information.

I come from a family that is on the big side, both my parents and brothers are on the big side. Personally I know that I was obese all my adult life or at least the past 25 years. I have used all the excuses under the sun I am big boned, it’s in my genes, slow metabolism and of course for a lot of men it is the alcohol. Although I was obese I was also active with golf, skiing, playing refereeing and coaching rugby so I was fit but overweight. Some weekends I would even take part in two games of rugby and 18 holes of golf without too much bother, and I was, in fact doing significantly more exercise than I do now because I no longer play. The simple fact is I am now eating more food than I was two years ago and still enjoy those chips in the canteens when I choose to eat them but learning what I know has been a real lesson.

I would say I was a fairly typical bloke