Tid-bits!

First, thank you to all of you who have commented or emailed me with some great WW tips and tricks! That is exactly what I needed! We went to the grocery store and stocked up on some items for snacks and switched out some of our regular items. We bought fat-free sliced and shredded cheese, 98% fate free cream of chicken and cream of mushroom soup, WW yogurt and things like that. I also bought the Progresso Lite soups and those are yummy! So, thanks for the ideas!

Every now and then we'll make a chicken pot pie for dinner. I had already bought all of the stuff to make it last week before we started WW. I entered the recipe (easy to do at ww.com) and it came out to be 11 points per serving. Not terrible, but not great either. So, I looked around at the ingredients and made a few changes and wa-la, got it down to 7 points per serving. I mean 4 points people is a big deal! That is 2 snacks during the day!! I sub'd the regular cream of chicken soup and Cream of Mushroom for the 98% fat free versions. Instead of a pie crust on bottom and one on top, I just added the filling into the aluminum pie shell and put a pie crust on top. This was the biggest "point" difference and it tasted the exact same as it always does! Perfect!

I bought some chocolate peanut butter Fiber Plus Antioxidant bars and they are delish! I sent Ryan into the store this evening to get some Vita....something muffin tops that are supposed to be 1 point and 100 calories. Great breakfast item. He couldn't find them so I am going to have to do a little research to find out where I can buy these. It's kind of fun subbing things and eating healthier and it REALLY makes you realize the bad things you may have been eating before. For example......

I came across this website:

http://www.dwlz.com/restaurants.html

It is a website that lists pretty much every restaurant and their entire menu, nutritional info on each item and then the associated point values for WW. Some of the restaurants have not been updated with the new PointsPlus numbers, but they are working on it. What is absolutely shocking is the point values of some things I ate regularly and even more so the point values (and fat grams) in some salads at area restaurants. I mean, seriously, it is crazy! The pecan crusted chicken salad at Applebees (never tried it because we are not really Applebees fans, but I have heard this salad is good) has a whopping 81 fat grams and like 20 something points. You could eat a cheeseburger for less than that! I looked around at several and it just really makes you see how bad a lot of restaurant food is. Ryan and I really like to eat out and we will continue to do so, it's just nice to be mindful of these kinds of things! Usually when I know how bad something is, it really makes me think twice about eating it! That's what I like about WW- you can still eat what you want, it's just a lot of portion control and not eating bad all of the time.

So, for those of you joining WW or already a member, we should continue to share ideas and info!