New You Plan Day Five : Making Crisps out of Soup?

Can't believe I've made it this far! I've never stuck so completely & strictly to an eating plan, EVER. Not just weight loss eating, but also a few years ago I had high cholesterol and couldn't stick to a diet for that either!  

So why is this diet different?

Firstly I have to be accountable to you guys. There's no point me doing a free week's trial in return for blogging all about it, then not doing it properly. My readers want to see if it's worth the price tag, and if I mess around on it, you aren't getting the whole experience reported to you.

The other reasons are applicable to anyone doing the plan, the second being the money guilt trap. As you are paying £38.99 a week for your total inclusive food for those seven days, it's silly to cheat one or two days and waste your money. 

Lastly, this diet is different in that New You Plan's input doesn't stop with the delivery. There is free  live chat with a customer service advisor during office hours. There is a plethora of tools for weight loss maximisation on their main website. But what really is helping keep me on plan is the Secret Slimmers Facebook Page that I keep mentioning. Women (mostly) who are going through the exact same plan as you, with advise, answers to questions and encouragement for you daily. It's a very active page with fun events like Selfie Saturday and weigh ins weekly. Without the page I KNOW I would have blipped and scoffed something off plan by now.

 So, truthfully, how do I see the New You Plan diet, five days in? Well to be brutally honest, it IS hard. This isn't a diet where you simply make a few changes to you eating by adding more lettuce than potatoes to your dinner. You can only eat four New You products a day, a shake, a soup, a bar or a meal. The meals are SMALL. I'm not going to pussyfoot around that fact. You are certain to pour out your very first meal packet on your first day and think, 'oh my god, I could eat four of these in one go'. 

So you are making a big sacrifice of your usual eating habit of eating until you are full. You aren't hungry after the small meals, but you will notice the huge difference in portion size from regular meals. 

So the meals are small, but balanced for nutrients daily. The meal replacement bars are quite big in comparison. Like fun size Mars Bar size. Being able to eat chocolate on a diet is fab though. The other two products, shakes and soups, are straightforward, easy to make and taste good. I decided quite early that I didn't want any of my four products a day to be liquid, so I'm now turning shakes into bowls of mousse or frozen lollies, and this afternoon I attempted the soup mix crisps!

One pack of New You Plan soup mix, any Flavour, I chose chicken, add spices if desired. 

Add 30ml of water and mix into a baby food consistency  

Spread the mixture out in crisp sized shapes and microwave for 90 seconds

Peel from the paper and eat! Mine were more like savoury bites so I'll spread the mix thinner on my next attempt

Excitingly now my daily posts are being shared over on the New You Blog among the other stories of women's successes. I hope by the end of the full seven days I'll have a result somewhere near the average. I have a fashion event to attend next Tuesday, so it would be lovely to have dropped under 9 stone by then. 

*week one of the New You Plan provided for review purposes. Always see a GP before embarking on a very low calorie diet. All result vary, weight loss is not a guarantee* 

Battle of the Belfast Sushi Takeaways!

I was talking about sushi over on Facebook and my friend Claire recommended I try Sakura on Botanic Avenue in Belfast next time, rather than Yo Sushi! Michael & I had actually been to Sakura twice a number of years ago, when they were the only place that had a sushi train in Northern Ireland. It was so long ago I couldn't even remember what it was like to compare to our staple Yo Sushi! takeaway boxes. So I picked up a big twelve piece box for £16.50, at Sakura, and a large salmon & tuna box for £7.50 from Yo Sushi!

Top left £16.50 box from Sakura, top right is a little sushi mix bowl from Yo! which costs £1.50, bottom is the £7.50 Yo! large salmon and tuna box.

Firstly ordering at Sakura was trickier than Yo! because there aren't really premade boxes or pick and choose from. Secondly the menu to order from doesn't have images of each piece, and even though we get sushi often I still don't really know all the names of the things I like, or don't like. I know what a hand roll is (I'm not keen on them), California rolls and maki, but everything else is always ordered with a point at the picture on the Yo Sushi! menu. 

So even though the Sakura takeaway menu is more extensive than the Yo Sushi! one, I was a little flustered at what to order and in the end just asked for the large selection.

Compared to Yo Sushi! pieces, Sakura sushi is almost twice the size. I can eat a whole box of Yo! takeaway in one sitting, but I only managed five from the Sakura tray. They give you tonnes of wasabi, soy sauce and pickled ginger too.  

Sakura pieces are BIG

Generous amounts of ginger & wasabi with the Sakura box  

Tastewise I think Sakura is closer to what you might get in a traditional sushi restaurant in Japan, whereas Yo Sushi! is more of a westernised version of the food type, which I think I prefer. You can't say that Sakura portions aren't generous, in fact I've no idea how I'm going to manage to eat it all this evening while the raw fish is still good!

After my Sakura experience I think I'll stick with Yo Sushi! at least for takeaway boxes for now. I think Sakura would be better for sitting in, so that's on my to do list. Now what am I going to do with all this fresh sushi?? I'm off to hunt for some lose trousers with an elasticated waist band.... 

Buy me one of these and I will love you forever