Now I can have stronger bones without penalty

Since writing my last post about choosing between chicken or cheese, I've managed to confirm what I heard lately about Slimming World revising its rules on Healthy Extras. (HEs are to do with having extra calcium and fibre for good health)

These new rules were announced in November 2018, and SW members were briefed about them from 24th December. Of course, no longer belonging to SW, I didn't get the message! But my friend Jackie has now rejoined SW, and naturally she passed the news on to me. She hadn't benefitted much from the rule change, as she'd been consuming things that used to count as HEs but no longer do. But she reckoned that I, as a major milk-lover, would now have some syns freed up, to use on something else.

Indeed I do. 5 syns are now freed up every day, representing the syn value on 250ml of semi-skimmed milk. 

At home - or in the caravan - my normal consumption of semi-skimmed milk has always been 500ml every day:

# 25ml in tea before breakfast, as I wake up.
# 75ml with my breakfast cereal (30g of All Bran).
# 25ml in tea, to finish breakfast with.
# 25ml in tea at lunchtime.
# 25ml in tea with my afternoon snack.
# 25ml in tea with my evening meal.
# 100ml with my late evening cereal (45g of Jordan's Natural Muesli with no added sugar).
# 200ml in a mug, to drink on its own, to finish my late evening snack with.

And semi-skimmed milk was my only calcium-orientated HE choice. 

The HE rules still lay down that 250ml of semi-skimmed milk represents one syn-free 'calcium' HE. But now - with two 'calcium' HE choices to make - I can double that allowance, so that all of my regular milk consumption is syn-free, saving 5 syns.

If I exceed 500ml on any day, the excess will of course be synful. So an extra 200ml in a mug with my afternoon snack would be a 5-syn hit. But that's now perfectly manageable. Even a 30g hunk of cheddar cheese, a 6-syn blot on my daily escutcheon, will still now leave me with a good safety margin for further indulgences. (The daily syn limit is 15)

But I don't intend to relax my regular regime one bit, even though my ordinary daily syn total now goes down from 7 to 2 syns, and 35 syns are freed up weekly for treats.

It will however be good to know that, taking the week as a whole, there is more scope for the odd extra glass of wine, or the odd extra slice of cake. There will be significantly fewer days when I exceed the 15-syn limit.

Keeping my spreadsheets looking green rather than amber or red (the colours indicate the daily outcome) will be a psychological boost, an encouragement. I won't now have to anticipate a dietary shipwreck every time I have a meal out with friends, because those five spare syns will act as a very useful buffer.

That said, I won't go mad. Having more scope to eat and drink doesn't mean that I must.

But it's very pleasing to find that something I always thought was wrong and misconceived - having to restrict my milk intake, when milk is so good for me in terms of its calcium benefits - is now no longer necessary. So I might consider having an extra mug of milk in the afternoon, instead of tea. I want strong bones in my old age!