Weight loss tracker sign from www.thesassybird.com
Don’t get me wrong, I love Slimming World. I love everything it’s helped me achieve and I generally won’t have a bad word said about it. Nothing and no one is perfect though and my love for Slimming World isn’t blind. There’s one thing I really hate about Slimming World. They don’t play nice with others.
In the past 12 months, we’ve had the Porky Lights scandal, the Asda Slimzone scandal and the Aldi Slimfree scandal. For years, Weightwatchers have worked with the likes of Heinz to bring out a collaboration range or with Tesco to display the WW points value on Tesco’s own brand of healthy food. This makes it super easy to shop and decipher what you can and can’t eat at a glance. Go Weightwatchers.
Last year, Slimming World brought out their own range of ready meals finally (HALLE-FUCKING-LUJAH – we don’t always have the time or energy to make everything from scratch guys) but with one catch, they’re exclusive to Iceland.
The Porky Lights scandal
The Iceland range includes syn free sausages. They’re okay, but you know you’re eating blag sausages like. Sometime last year, Porky Whites butchers released a range of low fat sausages called Porky Lights and not only are they seriously delicious and way nicer than SW own brand but they’re only half a syn – totally worth it. They were like rocking horse shit. People were panic buying them. There were pure scenes in the meat aisle of the Asda as Starving’ Sandras and Munchin’ Margies fought to the death over the last pack of the delicious meat balloons.
But hang on, Slimming World couldn’t have the fact that Porky Whites were preferred over their own syn free sausages – surely not! They released a statement saying they’d tested them and Porky Lights were lying on their nutritional info and they couldn’t possibly estimate how many syns were really in them. They’re not half a syn they said, there could be as much as 4 syns or even 8000 syns in each sausage, they just didn’t know. Porky Lights had bypassed all the food standard agencies and laws and pumped secret calories into each sausage and the kind hearted people at SW HQ were just trying to protect member’s weight losses.
I mean, I personally carried on eating them (I could actually get hold of them once the Mullerlight Marys stopped stockpiling them – that’s another thing I hate about Slimming World actually – the members have no chill) and I still lost weight but yano, each to their own.
The Asda Slimzone scandal
Then Asda released a range of ready meals that claimed they were free on Slimming World – i.e. Asda had looked at what foods were free on SW and made meals out of them. But hang on, this would threaten Slimming World’s Iceland range; Asda, a much more convenient supermarket releasing a cheaper range? Nah fam. They couldn’t possibly have that, so ‘to protect customer’s weight’ they said that Asda couldn’t claim that they were free on Slimming world (even though they most likely used ingredients that SW themselves have designated as free) and took them to court. To this day, SW won’t add them on to their database of syns soooo to me that doesn’t look like they’re protecting their customers, they’re just protecting their bottom line. Maybe I’m just a conspiracy theorist though.
The Aldi Slimwell scandal
The same thing happened with Aldi’s ‘Slimfree’ meals so they’ve renamed them as Slimwell. Either way, they taste fit, they’re not on the SW database yet (that I know of) but… it’s up to you if you side with the Slimming World mafia or not. I actually started writing a post about the best Aldi dupes and it ended up turning into a rant about Slimming World. I didn’t know I held so much anger inside.
Please play nice
I just don’t understand why they can’t work together with other brands like Weightwatchers do. They’re fine with the likes of Mullerlight and Frylight and practically drug push them in meetings so I assume they line the pockets of Slimming World quite generously with magazine adverts etc. So Slimming World here’s an idea, maybe swerve the Iceland exclusivity and start stocking in other supermarkets. Iceland aren’t always a convenient shop to get to. Learn to play nice with others, it’s starting to feel a bit negative and it’s the only thing I really hate about Slimming World.
Shameless plug
One more thing – at the risk of getting my ass shut down by SW HQ, I have designed a food diary. The bits of paper they give you in group get tatty and lost easily and there’s just not enough space on them to record your food intake in my opinion (oops, that’s a third thing I hate about Slimming World but I swear down I love it really overall). When I was following the plan in the early days I bought a food diary off Amazon but it wasn’t great so I designed my own and you can use it really easily with SW to record your food, syns, meal plan, shopping list etc and there’s even some hilarious excuses in the back for when it all goes wrong. Shameless plug… but it is my own website after all. Oh AND until the end of Feb 2018 use code SLAYDAY for 25% off anything (excluding clothing) on the shop. Good luck guys, go forth and lose.
