Meal Plan Monday – Getting Started On Weight Watchers

Happy new year lovely people. How are you all?

I’m going to be trying to make quite a few changes with Southwarkbelle this year. More on that in a bit but, at risk of being a new year cliche, I’ve also got a few personal changes to make.

The first of those is shifting some of the baby weight.

I’m still breastfeeding, and I know from my previous two babies that I’m not someone who loses weight that way. Burning an extra 600 calories is great, unless you are constantly starving and eat 1000 calories in cake. But even when I have lost weight while breastfeeding, the final few pounds never shift until I fully reclaim my boobs. It seems my body likes to hang on to a bit of a fat reserve for the baby.

But it is time to make a start.

MissA is now almost eight months old. I got pregnant with her very quickly after a miscarriage but that means I did two, almost back to back, first trimesters and in both I could only stave off the nausea by constantly snacking. All in I’ve been either pregnant or breastfeeding for more than 18 months now. I’ve also had a string of injuries since MissA was born and these have made it hard to do much exercise. While I have lost a few pounds here and there, they have mostly crept back on again. So I’m not expecting this to be quick or easy but I am done having babies now, I want my body back. I want to feel healthier and more energetic, to do everything I can to still be here, bugging my kids, when they have kids of their own and yes I want to look slimmer and get back into my old clothes.

To that end, I’ve signed up to Weight Watchers and will be posting about my progress and my meal plans here.

It’s not normally the sort of thing I would air so publically but I’ve decided to give it a try because:

1- I’m spending bloody ages on meal plans for the family anyway, I might as well share them.

2- I suspect I’m more likely to stick with it if I know I’ll have to publicly confess to my failures!

3- TBH, I’m hoping people may come here for the weight watchers bit and then visit some of my other posts too.

If you are doing Weight Watchers, what are your tips? Are you a newbie trying to lose baby weight like me? If so leave a comment and say hi or pop over to my Instagram feed where I’m trying to do that utterly irritating thing of posting pictures of my meals.

In the meantime here is this week’s dinner plan, these are all weight watchers recipes from their website. While I’m starting out I’m using these as my guide but hopefully, as I get further into it, I’ll get better at using other recipe sources and maybe doing my own thing a bit too. I’m not including breakfast and lunch here as I’m only having to suit myself there. I just buy in a few things and make it up as I go along. Much easier than trying to feed a whole family the same meal when you are the only one who needs to lose weight, but more on that in a couple of weeks:

I’ll be back with another meal plan next week and a blog about why, in a world or diets, I chose Weight Watchers. I’ll also share the results of my first weigh in. Slightly nervous about that!

And those other changes I mentioned? Well, this is the first post for the new iteration of the Southwarkbelle blog. I’m working on taking the leap from blogger to WordPress – watch this space…