UK Posts : January 2005 to December 2006

[Richt]

We are lucky in England Colin with the fact that we dont have that many Frankenfoods available to us.

[colinwants2bthin]

Made the Flax crackers last night, not to bad. Has anyone tried using this for a coating on fish or chicken? Perhaps not a good idea!

[MotherOfGizmo]

HI Colin, I'm not from the uk but I have used the flax mixed with grated parmesean cheese as a coating on chicken and on pork chops, I liked it! Never tried it on fish, not yet at least.

[Elizellen]

I have used that too MOG and it tastes good :yes
Also I sometimes grate up some microwaved flax bread into breadcrumbs and use that for breading and stuffings.

[Helena_HastingsUK]

Hastings Gal here with choccie questions!

I was just groaning to Elizellen on private messenging that we need a UK group and lo and behold there was one. This ADBB is just so huuuuge it's hard to keep track of every thread!

I also asked her this and now copy it to the group in case anyone knows -

Is there any reason why I cannot have the following things while following Atkins:

1. Holland & Barrett Chocolate flavoured Soya Protein 'milkshakes' to replace one meal a day, made up with soya milk.

2. Cadbury's Highlights with squirty cream to avoid eating a bar of chocolate.

As you may surmise, I am a chocoholic. I've started and restarted Atkins about 50+ times in the last 3 years and am now 3 stone heavier than when I started. I thought that if I incorporated things with chocolate flavouring into my daily routine, it would keep me off the real stuff. Sort of chocolate patches instead of nicotine ones LOL


Helena in Hastings
See what I get up to all day here: http://www.hastingspress.co.uk

[Helena_HastingsUK]

LET'S KEEP THIS BOARD ALIVE & ACTIVE!

Looking on the International Board in general I see there have been several attempts to get a UK thread going but they have all died a death!

So come on guys and gals lets commit to this thread so we can support each other and who knows maybe some of us could actually meet up some time if the travel is reasonable.

This thread already has more replies and more views than any previous UK one, so lets keep it going folks!

Helena in Hastings

[Helena_HastingsUK]

Eating away from home

As Colin has pointed out elsewhere, it's a nightmare trying to find the right foods on the move. Every ready-food outlet is the same: pizza, baguettes, sandwiches, wraps, crisps, cakes, pastries, sausage rolls etc etc ad nauseum.

What we need is a pressure group! Maybe we need to make a leaflet which every one of us can give out to every ready-food outlet to remind them that there are plenty of low-carbers out there who would buy from them if they had to right kinds of foods.

Tell you a (not-so) funny story. I went on an all-day coach tour during which a 'cold buffet lunch' was offered at noon, at a cost of £6 each. I bought my ticket, assuming that there would be salad, ham, boiled eggs, chicken drumsticks, tuna mayo, something along those lines, that I could eat. Imagine my horror when, entering the church hall in which we were to be fed, I found that each place setting contained two plates, covered in clingfilm ----- one contained four sandwiches; the other a cake and a pile of biscuits! I had nothing, and by 4pm was dizzy and shaky. I'll never forgive them!


Helena

[Squeaker]

It's almost impossible to find food which isn't surrounded by bread isn't it?
We had the Ascot races relocated up here last week and I trolled off into town in the hope that there may be a stray salad lurking around - no such luck.

[colinwants2bthin]

I don’t know about you but I am sick and tired of people telling me how bad the Atkins diet is for you. I am sure most of these people have not got a clue about how the body works. It think this maybe is one of the reasons big supermarkets are loathed to sell low carb products. They do not know how many of us follow a low carb diet and think this is a fad that will go away! Meanwhile the producers who have caught on just over inflate their prices.

[Helena_HastingsUK]

Bread products continued.

Yes the bread products are absolutely everywhere. We cannot avoid them, but those of us who have 'issues' with carbs have to learn somehow to see them as the enemy.

How do the rest of you cope with this?

Today I walked into a popular bakery shop in Hastings town centre, looked carefully at all the Belgian buns and huge array of pastries, cakes, breads, buns rolls, etc, and whispered to them, silently: 'I don't need you, you bunch of poisonous b----st---rds'. Even though my tumbly was a-rumbling! Then I bought a sugar free fizzy drink (rare for me) and came home, picking up two cooked chickens on the way.

Eating lunch at the PC: chopped up chicken, red cabbage, a few olives, red pepper, and a blob of mayonnaise and a splash of olive oil, all stirred up together, with 2 litres of sparkling water on my desk ready for this afternoon's work.


Helena

[Helena_HastingsUK]

Reply to Colin re Atkins-hating in the UK

I have to agree Colin. In 3 years of telling people that I am trying Atkins I have had nothing but (a) disapproval and (b) warnings.

On Monday's Woman's Hour on Radio 4 a woman who is promoting her book The G.I Diet (Jenny Brandmiller) stated that Atkins had got it wrong. Too much fat was known to cause heart attacks, she said, like it is a fact that cannot possibly be doubted. She talks about low-sugar but has a banana with her breakfast every day.

You can hear the programme again by going to the BBC website follow to Radio 4 then "Listen Again".

Personally, I don't take diet advice from people who have always been slim, or have lost a stone. I want diet advice from people who were once 300+ even 400+ pounds and lost it. And that, in a nutshell, is why I believe in Atkins and nothing else.

Helena
Sunny Hastings

[colinwants2bthin]

I’ve got to be honest and say at the moment I don’t have a problem. That’s not to say I don’t ever fancy a nice bag of fish and chips or a nice cake. What attracts me to the Atkins is that I know that if I waver just once then that will put me back 10 days. I do have one little vice that has certainly done me no harm, in fact for me it is a life saver and I am sure benefited me no end and that is a protein shake I purchased from my Gym! 2 scoops mixed with water, Ice & 1tbs cream. Its banana flavour and is wonderful. I would even drink this if I were back to my old ways! 1 Pint mixed up is only 1.5 carbs per serving & 27g protein. I don’t think the majority of forum members would approve, but the weight is still flying off. Some times I have 3 glasses a day especially if I am exercising to excess. I think this is all part of the feel good factor. Feeling good stimulates mind and body!

[colinwants2bthin]

Helena I totally agree, how can people that have no history of weight problems possibly understand how us obese people (I personally find that word offensive) struggle to keep ourselves looking NORMAL! (Again that bloody offends me) What made me instantly warm to the atkins was the fact that this guy puts our overweight down to a medical condition. We are not all PIGS!!

[Squeaker]

The person I get the most flak over around this is my brother-in-law, now this chap is around 6ft tall and weighs 28 stone. He keeps telling me how much fat I'm eating and how I'm going to die. Now this is a guy who eats at least 3lb of butter everyday, fries everything in lard and will think nothing of eating 8lb of mashed spuds and a loaf of bread (whilst the rest of us would have, say, a sandwich). I'm sick of trying to explain til I'm blue in the face, that if he was on this diet he could eat meat (he loves the stuff) and salad (that's a different issue of course, anything green is poison to him). But of course he can't possibly eat cheese because he claims it gives him nosebleeds so rations his diary intake to butter and cream.
I'm afraid I resorted to "well if you think I'm a heart attack risk have you tried looking in a mirror recently?". He won't go to the doctors because all his physical ailments are weight-related.
I'm not ever going to knock anyone over their weight related issues after all if I wasn't overweight I wouldn't be doing this WOE. But I find it ironic that the only real critisiscm I get is from someone who is in a worse situation than me.

[Alienore]

I find that it's at work that it's hardest to keep sticking to lowcarb. I sometimes go to meetings that run over lunchtime and everything that gets served at these meetings is so high on the list of sugary calories and carbohydrate that if I ate it I'd have a humungous sugary spike and want to eat crap the rest of the day.

I tend to bring my breakfasts and lunches into the office and that helps considerably but if I'm attending those meetings it's far more difficult to plan as I may be travelling distances and not have access to a fridge.


Deborah