Pasta with only 7.7 cals per 100g? Slim chance of eating again!!

Tags

5:2, Fast diet, slim pasta

Finally curiosity got the better of me, and I purchased a packet of Slim Pasta.

Never heard of it? Neither had I until a few weeks ago. But some of the ladies on the 5:2 Facebook group swear blind that this pasta is the best way of filling up whilst on a fast day.

So, my verdict.

Upon opening the packet, my initial reaction was not great. To be honest, it sort of looked a bit like an octopus had died and been snipped up into little, floppy, unappetising pieces. This was compounded by the fact that I’d paid over £2 for the pleasure (a vaguely terrifying price to be honest, but I was eager to give it a go.)

I resolved to not judge a (highly unattractive) book by it’s cover, and ploughed on with cooking. Regrettably, heating it did nothing to improve it’s appearance. My stomach lurched in uneasy anticipation.

I served it with a simple sauce of tomatoes and chilli and got stuck in.

Hmm. What can I say? There isn’t much positive that I can comment on here. It had the consistency of a badly cooked slice of silly putty, the flavour of a mildly distasteful and flavourless piece of soggy fabric and was generally completely inedible.

After soldiering through half a bowl of the odious stuff, I pushed my plate away, beaten. It was either that, or vomit all over it. Seriously, if someone had forced me to have just one more bite I think I would have happily poked both their eyes out and wrestled them to the ground, rather than consume it. It was that bad.

The positives? Well, it filled me up. But come 3pm, I was hungry again. Clearly, the body is NOT fooled by a calorie free product, even if it appears bulky.

My recommendation? No matter how much of a ‘carb’ person you are…don’t do it! Fill up on yummy green veg instead.

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Beating the Recession and photographic evidence of FAST Diet results!

Tags

5:2, betty paige, Fast diet, food, recession

The Recession.

It’s an ugly, sneaky little word somehow, isn’t it. It sort of slips sibilantly off the tongue in a vaguely indecent way, like rancid oil leaking out of a pipe. Recession. Recession.

Enough verbosity. I’ve had ENOUGH of the recession. End of. I’ve had enough of seeing THIS.

Yet another ‘To Let’ sign on the high street and yet another business vanished in a puff of recessional smoke. As a small business owner myself (www.pipsgarden.co.uk) its disheartening, to say the least. I watch giants such as Woolworths, Blockbusters and HMV struggle, falter and threaten to crumble and I think to myself; what chance do I have, a mere minnow of a company, when the behemoths fail? 

However, one thing I WILL say for myself, is I’m good in a recession. I may not like it, but I am a master at budgeting and sniffing out a bargain. One of our real life savers during these ‘belt-tightening’ months has been a site called http://www.approvedfood.co.uk.

Approved Food ticks my mental boxes on a few levels actually.

Firstly – it has a lot, and I mean a LOT of bargains. (and we’ve managed to buy obsene amounts of chocolate on there for really not much money at all, which to me, is a high priority in life.)

Secondly – the ethos behind the company is that it is essentially selling food that otherwise would have been thrown away. Yep, that’s right folks, some of it is out of date! But when you read up on it and absorb the actual facts of the matter, you swiftly realise that the ‘Best Before’ date actually means very little. There is plenty of stuff that can be MONTHS out of its best before date, and still be perfectly edible.

So hoorah, a company that is not only thriving in the recession, but is actually providing a really valuable service – namely reducing the appalling amount of food waste that occurs in this country.

It’s sort of permeated into other avenues of our lives actually. We now find ourselves thinking twice before binning the end piece of bread on a loaf. Hey, smear a bit of garlic puree, butter and dried parsley on it, whack it under the grill and it makes a cracking bit of garlic bread to have with a spaghetti bolognaise! We now find ourselves using half a pepper and bagging the rest for another day, eating leftovers for lunch in the strangest combinations (it still can’t beat my ‘leftover curry sandwiches’ that I used to have for breakfast during my university days though…yeech…) and generally just being massively more aware about waste.

So there you go, at least the recession forces us to reflect a bit on the way we live our lives.

Talking about wasting…I feel that I have been literally wasting away these last few days, with this vile lingering stomach bug. However, it has kicked me down to a size 8, which is the first time I’ve seen that size in many many years, and I know how people like a bit of photographic evidence…so here goes!

I know its not nearly so much fun without the ‘before’ piccie – but take my word for it, the wobbles and flab were MUCH worse a couple of months ago, and joking about tummy bugs aside, most of this was due to the Fast Diet. So there you go. Obviously I shall now be attempting to just maintain weight, rather than lose any more, as I don’t want to be insanely skinny and start to look ill. 

I will be having a break from fasting this week in fact, as I am attempting to regain a few pounds. So there you go! The scales said 8st 3 this morning, which is just a wee bit too small for my liking. I prefer to be more of a ‘Betty Paige’ kinda gal, than a waifish Kate Moss!

My figure inspiration! (and I have serious Betty Paige hair jealousy too – but I just got to accept it, that fringe may look awesome on her, but would make me look like I was wearing a badly shaped acorn shell over my forehead.)