A lady at my weightwatchers meeting asked me what I ate for lunch? Personal question, I thought before remembering where I was. I’m one of the few vegetarians in the meeting and I have been losing weight. I misinformed the lady about the pate base; it is yeast, not soya. Here’s my weight loss so far:
Unsure how to run a spreadsheet in imperial measures, I converted it to kilos. In old money, which is what I actually use (along with everybody else), over the last 23 weeks I’ve gone from 16 stone and half a pound to 14 stone. Please note, this is with my clothes and shoes on. After all, I have to carry them around; they might as well be part of my weight.
You’ll notice a sudden drop in the 22nd week. That was the week I visited the shoemaker. Hard to explain why filming a shoemaker would have such a dramatic effect on my weight loss but there it is.
One thing I often each for lunch is Suma’s Organic Mushroom Pate, spread on a slice of bread. It’s filling, nutritous and tasty.
A lucky man can find treasure but an unlucky man can't even find a mushroom
There’s 200g in each tube. I’m generous with it. Maybe I get five slices out of it, maybe four. You’re meant to keep it in the fridge but that does make it tough to squeeze out of the tube. I’m not really strong enough. I keep thinking of patenting some device to squeeze it all out efficiently (or at all). I’m not sure that you need to keep it in the fridge; it is sealed in its tube. If you click on the picture above, you’ll see the condensation on it just after I pulled it out of the fridge. So what’s inside the tube?
Suma’s Organic Mushroom Pate contains water, yeast (14%), mushrooms (10%), sunflower oil, palm fat, potato flour, onions, dried onions, sea salt, yeast extract, paprika, cloves, nutmeg, thyme and garlic. One tube contains 1692kj/406kcal, 16.8g of protein, 21.2g of carbohydrate and 28.6g of fat.
Weightwatchers has this ludicrous system of measuring food by something they’ve branded called ProPoints. The idea of this system is to get you to really think about what you consume, orally. It’s geared to people who do not exercise as they have evolved to do. For example, yesterday I walked two and a half miles to get to B&Q to buy a lawn mower, which I returned with in a taxi. Wasn’t feeling too good yesterday but on another day I would have walked back with the lawn mower, which weighs 8kg. The taxi driver said he hadn’t walked that far in “thirty years”. The woman who runs the Patcham weightwatchers is very good at her job (can’t argue with the chart above) but whenever she suggests taking exercise, the meeting puts up fierce resistance. The problem being that most people seem unable to grasp how to incorporate exercise into their daily lives. For me the solution is obvious: walking. Walk wherever you can. It’s good for your health and its good for your soul. It’s what we’ve evolved to do. We’re walking creatures.
Weightwatchers has a website for its members who pay on a monthly basis. The website is not user friendly. The pop out for the food database does not respond to Firefox’s <ctrl><+> to make the text bigger. Nor is there a button on the page to increase the font size. In effect, the site is disability unfriendly. I’m not sure that there has been any litigation against websites which are unfriendly those with impaired sight but it is certainly bad practice to make it like this. Looking at the source code, the site is scripted in html, javascript and flash. The pop out is a flash pop out. Presumably this has been done because the weightwatchers company knows much about making money and very little about the procurement of IT services.
An entire tube of Suma’s Organic Mushroom Pate contains 11 weightwatchers ProPoints. Since this is a branded since and a money making machine, I expect weightwatchers will be in touch for me revealing this information. Bring it on. I’m not called Scrapper Duncan for nothing!
Suma do a number of different flavours of these pates. There’s spicy mexican, tomato, classic flavour, herb & garlic, herb, olive, roasted onion pink pepper and organic savoury herb. Those links go to Suma’s wholesale website.
Why do I attend weightwatchers and slag it off? Although I’m ignoring their ludicrous point counting system, being weighed by Dee at the Patcham weightwatchers meeting once a week gives me a focus which I wouldn’t otherwise have had. I tried to lose weight for ten years. Most of that time, I actually gained weight! After joining weightwatchers 23 weeks ago, I cut out drinking alcohol and eating cheese, butter, chocolate and crisps. Each of the weeks where my weight went up were weeks when I consumed those fattening products. I’ve begun to walk or cycle everywhere I can manage. This often means that I’m walking six or seven miles a day, which wasn’t very pleasant to start with but as the weight has come off, it has got easier.
