Half way there!

Yesterday I got my "two stone award" and "gold body magic" award at Slimming World! For me personally, there was a statistic of far more significance: I have now crossed the "half way" point towards my target weight of 12 stone.
I'm starting to notice things about my body shape, my shorts have been falling down for a while now and I need a belt with all my trousers. I can see my whole belly now instead of having to pull it in or crane my neck. I often sleep right through the night without waking up to go to the loo. My daily run is enjoyable! I don't need an afternoon nap anymore. All good things!
Last week was the first time when my recorded weight went up, by half a pound. I put this down to the fact that I had an operation to remove the metalwork from my arm but I don't think this was the true cause. I didn't take a break from my "regime", I still ran every day and stuck to my diet. The reason for my weight loss was simple but I needed my wife to point it out to me. In slimming world speak, I was having to many syns!
After a few weeks of losing weight, and getting into the habit of running daily, I allowed myself a glass of milk every day thinking that the 700+ calories that I burn when I run 4.78 miles would cover the extra. Soon, it was a small glass of orange juice as well and then I read that chocolate nesquik was a good recovery drink after exercise so that was added to my milk. If you add the spoonful of honey that I have with my muesli, then suddenly you find that I was having over 16 syns in a meal that I always considered to be a "small meal"
All this week, I changed that to just a half cup of muesli with a spoonful of honey. The result I have lost 3lb this week!

I make up ten or more portions of chilli or curry and freeze them. Sometimes they are meat free, but if I add meat its usually one pack to the ten portions - you could quite easily quadruple the quantity of meat and it still wouldn't be excessive. To the curry, I add finely chopped onions, tinned chopped tomatoes, mushrooms, finely diced celery and carrots, fresh garlic and spices (turmeric, and curry powder, sometimes a bit more).
The chilli has a tin of baked beans, red kidney beans, chilli powder and a couple of chunks of dark (70% cocoa+) chocolate, with chili powder.
I make up two platefuls of salad every day, one for my mid-day meal and the other for the evening. I have chopped lettuce, spring onions, peppers, olives, cherry tomatoes, beetroot etc - all the usual and mostly syn free apart from the olives.
I serve this with rice (make lots of portion at once and freeze in philidelphia cheese containers). As you can see its a full plate and tastes delicious. I suppose I will get bored of it eventually but for the time being its working!