Castle Personal Training
Castle Personal Training is a Corstorphine, Edinburgh based company who specialise in weightloss/toning and Pre and Post Natal exercise.
Free foods on Weightwatchers and Slimmingworld?
Hi guys,
Hope you’re well. I have 2 friends, blatant brag, both of whom are more than just a little bit overweight. One of them is a member of Weightwatchers and one is with Slimmingworld and they’re both doing my head in. I genuinely don’t care what kind of diet people follow, it’s not up to me to tell my friends what they should be eating as I’m not the food police. Obviously if they were to ask my opinion I’d happily give it but they haven’t. They do spend a lot of time arguing with eachother over food though and it’s exhausting.
Slimmingworld and Weightwatchers are interesting diets so I’d like to have a quick look at them a bit more closely, compare them and then point out the very obvious flaw they both have.
First of all; they are polar opposites in the advice that they give. Let that sink in for a minute. the biggest weightloss plans in the UK are giving completely contradictory advice!
So that’s how he stayed so skinny!
Weightwatchers flex has lean-protein items as a “free food” where as Slimmingworld tells people they can eat as much pasta, rice, potatoes etc as they want (so carbs). Do you smell what I’m cooking here yet?
Free you say?
I don’t care about the completely contradictory advice. Yes one of them is so clearly full of shit that it ought to be illegal as it disregards everything we know about healthy weightloss, insulin response etc. cough* slimming world *cough* but I’ll leave that to one side.
I care about the idea that anyone can have “as much of anything as they like”. Telling overweight people that eating as much pasta or rice as you want is fine is just kidding them on. In the same way that telling someone they can have as much yoghurt or chicken as they want is not OK.
It’s fun but doesn’t help you lose weight.
You can’t eat “as much of anything as you want” of anything, including bananas, looking at you Slimming world!
All foods come with calories and they do matter when you’re trying to lose weight. It’s easy, and OK, to say people can have as much veg as they want. It’s really difficult to eat 2500 calories of spinach every day so that can be forgiven. But it’s remarkably easy to go over on pasta, potatoes, fish, chicken, eggs etc. Portion size always matters.
I get that people like WW and SW because of the freefoods, I also know some people choose Slimmingworld deliverately because they can then have more pasta etc. but you do have to realise you are just kidding yourself if you think you can have ridiculous portions of something yet still “are being good”. A portion of pasta is 70-75 grams for someone looking to maintain weight, so having 150-200 grams at a time is not going to help you lose weight. And it’s very easy to eat 150 grams of pasta, in fact all carbs are easy to overeat on which is why so many people are overweight.
The same goes for eggs and chicken. A 3 egg omelette is a standard portion but a 4 or 5 egg omelette is very easy to wolf down and if you have trouble eating a whole chicken then you’re buying very big chickens!
Go ahead, you’re on WW.
I have written about this many times, and I understand that losing weight is difficult people telling you to eat differently every time you open a newspaper but it generally boils down to this;
If you want to do this for yourself without paying anyone for any advice; Go to a BMR calculator website and calculate how many calories you should be eating every day.
Then go to Myfitnesspal.com (free) and signup so you can enter the foods you’re eating for a while and see how that fits in with your desired calorie intake and macro split and job done, just adjust your diet as necessary. If you use this method then you’ll actually learn something, about healthy eating and portion size, which you can use forever going forward.
Sure, it means you can’t eat unlimited amounts of food but, on the plus side, it will mean you’ll get results faster.
Take care,
Peter
Castle Personal Training 