I’ve recently been studying the Slimming World Diet, as a good friend of mine joined up and lost a couple of stone in a relatively short space of time. I didn’t want to pay the fee to join up, preferring to find out about the diet and just do it following the rules. So I set to work on Googling the rules. It’s easy to find the rules on the internet, so I’m not going to go into those in detail in this article. I just wanted to point out the way the diet works.
The Slimming World Food Optimising way is based on low fat and low glycaemic foods. So you can have foods that are fairly high in carbs such as Bananas, Pasta, Rice & Potatoes but they don’t have such an impact on your insulin production which is what makes you store fat. And if you look at the Super Free Foods, they are very low carb and fat.
So, I wanted to find out how they worked out the Syns. The new version calls them SWIPS but they’re exactly the same. Apparently, the wor SYN made people feel it was negative. Presumably the sound of the word 🙂
There’s advice on forums about dividing the amount of calories by 20 to get the amount of Syns in food but a more accurate way is to take the fat content and add it to the carbohydrate content, then divide by 5. Which is easier to work out than dividing by 20. The Slimming World diet isn’t based on calories. If you add up all the calories you have in a day on Slimming World, you might be shocked, so it doesn’t make sense to calculate Syns by calories.
If you look at the SWIP content of a teaspoon of sugar, it’s 1. And there are 5g oF sugar in a teaspoon of sugar, so 5 divided by 5 = 1 SWIP or SYN if you prefer.
The same applies to Butter or other pure fat. A teaspoon contains about 5g of fat and again divided by 5 = 1 SWIP or SYN
Where is goes a bit awry is when you have something like a banana. There is about 15g of carbohydrates in a medium sized banana, which should give it a Syn value of 3 (15 divided by 5) but bananas are Free foods because of the low glycaemic value. (Under 55) Unless they’re mashed – which is because mashing or blending fruit breaks up the fibre, breaks cells open and releases more bad sugars that wouldn’t be released with normal chewing and digesting. That’s why smoothies are bad too. You will use a lot of fruit and just be swallowing sugars which in turn will rush into your blood stream, causing your pancreas to release insulin and convert those sugars to fat.
Another strange thing is a packet of crisps. Slimming World give crisps a Syn Value of 6 but a packet of Walkers Salt and Shake has 12.5g carbs and almost 8g fat. The potatoes are Free, so the Syn value is 12 + 8 = 20. Divide 20 by 5 and you get 4 Syns. Not sure what’s going on there. Also, the carbs should really be free as they’re part of the potato which would make a real Syn value of 1.5.
The most accurate way of calculating SWIPS – syns (in my opinion) would be to add the ‘sugars’ and fat together, then divide by 5. As anything containing sucrose would be a bad choice. And if you wanted to be more exact, take the amount of carbs that take the food over a glycaemic index value of 55 and add them to the fat content, then divide by 5. Sorry! I’m getting carried away now 🙂
I feel the need to write a new diet – Hmm!
If you’d like to know more about the glycaemic Index and what it means for your health, go to this website: Glycemic Index
They have a brilliant search facility to find out the glycaemic Values of 1000’s of foods.