Jenny Craig here I come!

It is quite common to see competitions come up on Facebook, and I love to enter them and dream about the wonderful prizes. But recently I had the amazing luck to be chosen as the winner of a competition being run by mumcentral.com.au in which I won 12 weeks of Jenny Craig support and food, and a 12 week gym membership through Goodlife Gyms.

What an amazing opportunity to get my weight under control and to put myself and my health first. I have been doing the Jenny Craig program now for almost two weeks. The food is great, and it mostly doesn't feel like diet food at all. The menu is varied, and you can easily swap a meal (in consultation with your Jenny Craig support person) if you want.

For an example of the types of food that I am eating, take today for instance. I had pancakes for breakfast, which I topped with cooked apple and cinnamon, choc-chip biscuits for morning tea, a super-yummy falafel salad for lunch, fruit for afternoon tea and I will enjoy fish & chips for dinner! The Jenny Craig menu can be found here if you are interested in having a peek at what they have to offer.

But I guess that the reason for doing the program is to make a difference on my weight - so how are things going I hear you ask? Well in the first week I was amazed to lose 2.5 kilos!!! I weigh in on Monday so I will hopefully have another loss this week, although I don't expect such a big loss this week.

A big thank you to Belinda from Mumcentral.com.au for choosing me for this wonderful prize, and I am looking forward to seeing where this program takes me. I will also be updating pictures of some of the yummy things that I am eating on the program.

Saving Money on Groceries

I am not sure if anyone has a copy of the $21 Challenge book - but if you are a family on a budget I can highly recommend it. See $21 Challenge Link for info on how to buy the book.

The idea is that by using what you have in the fridge, pantry & freezer, you should be able to occasionally do a shop quite cheaply, which not only reduces food waste but saves you a bit of cash. I used their strategy this week when we only had $100 in our everyday account (don't worry - we had money in savings but I refuse to dip into this unless necessary) and we still had a few days until pay day.

By using what we had already, we only spent $75 on groceries for our family for the week, including buying cat/dog food and batteries.

Our menu this week looks like this:
Sun - Pizza (using leftover ingredients - just needed some chorizo sausage from the deli counter - $2)
Mon - Stirfry with noodles - found some steak for $4.50, already had noodles, broccoli, carrot, onion
Tue - Spag Bol - just needed mince - It was $7 but this will make two meals as I will freeze half of the cooked meat mixture - just needed spaghetti (69cents) as we already had tinned tomato & mixed herbs.
Wed - Chicken drumsticks & home-made fried rice (had all ingredients in freezer/pantry)
Thurs - Hubby is out so the kids will have frozen fish fillets, pasta/sauce packet mix & frozen veg (already had this), I will have a frozen dinner ($4).
Fri - Takeaway - Budget $30 - We allow this once per fortnight - to tell the truth I am not the biggest fan of takeaway but I would say that the family aren't the biggest fans of budgeting either so I give in an allow a treat!
Sat - Either pizza again as we will catch up with friends or crumbed chicken - have all ingredients in fridge/pantry

Note: We make our own pizza bases - they are ridiculously cheap and much tastier - I will plan to post a recipe in the future as they are quite easy.

Baking - Jam drop biscuits (using up the bits of jam in a few jars in the fridge) & Chewy Choc slice. I will post the recipes later in the week - both were made using ingredients that I already had.

Lunches will be sandwiches or leftovers, as for example fried rice is perfect for leftover lunch. Breakfasts consist of whatever cereal we had already or toast. We also bought fruit for the children's snacks.

Whilst this does not occur every week, I try to do this about once ever 4-6 weeks. It helps us use up what we have already and helps to teach the kids that sometimes you have to make do with what you already have. If you haven't yet seen the $21 Challenge book then have a look at the website (there are a few chapters that you can sample for free) or perhaps see if the book is available at your library. What have you got to lose?