Unlimited Calorie Free Food?! - THE FIT MUM FORMULA

Unlimited Calorie Free Food?!

calorie free food


As a qualified Nutritionist I read something equally confusing and shocking the other day, regarding calorie free food and it’s existence (other than ice, obvs).

Basically if you are on Slimming World then you count ‘syns’ which is another way of counting calories,

(but more confusing as it doesn’t really correlate with the actual calorie content in foods – please enlighten me if you can elaborate on how they’ve worked out what a syn is)

Stick to your syn (calorie, sort of) allowance and you lose weight.
So far so common sense.
Except that some foods you’d expect to be counted, are actually ‘syn free’ meaning you can eat them freely in unlimited quantities. You only need to count foods with syns.
No, not just celery either. Muller Light yoghurts.
Now unless Muller have done something crazy/magic then each yoghurt is around the 100 calorie mark last time I checked (I don’t eat them, there’s not  much real yoghurt in them).
Which means if I ate 18 a day, I’d maintain my weight. (I personally need around 1800 kcals/day).
But Slimming World rules tell me I can eat 1800 kcals a day of food, then I get to eat 6 muller yoghurts as a bedtime snack no problem.
Um, huh? I’m pretty sure an extra 600 calories a day would make me gain weight if I did it every day.
See, and this isn’t a dig, it’s fact; Slimming World has a lot of commercial sponsors/partners.
A natural, no added sugar, high protein low fat Greek yoghurt may be lower in calories, but it’s Muller that are promoted. It’s how all joint business ventures work – you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours.
It’s the same reason various other brands are encouraged on the diet plan – because SW got paid to tell you to eat them, rather than because you should.
As I said, just stating the facts.
Food for thought huh?

Have you eve tried Slimming World? What did you think of them? let me know in the comments below.

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2 comments
UK Yankee says February 28, 2017

It is so refreshing to read these thoughts about the business of Big Diets! I haven’t done SW but I did do WW for a while. I finally lost the rag with them when they changed their ‘counting’ method to something that made absolutely no sense to me. Under their new plan, I was ‘earning’ about a day’s worth of ‘Smart Points’ just by doing the school run. And they were heavily selling their own brand snacks and ready meals which are full of chemicals and preservatives. It made me very cross because though these things promoted weight-loss (through smaller portions) they weren’t promoting health. I finally left because the whole thing was so commercial and the leaders couldn’t seem to explain the anomalies! Felt really let down by the focus on weight-loss over healthy living! Rant over…:-)

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Polly says March 16, 2018

I’m sorry to hear about your poor experience but unfortunately you’re not alone there. Did you find something that worked better for you afterwards?

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