Trialling the Exante Diet & Toning Up Those Arms

So I’ve been trying to diet for like a month now, and I’ve been failing. It just seems to be everyone’s birthday or everyone suggests take away or I just want to eat my weight in chocolate. It’s like I’ve lost all my willpower despite knowing i’m off on holiday in 2 months and last time around I hated every single photo of myself. Well, I hated my arms. They just look huge in comparison to my body. Although I have bought dresses that cover my arms for this trip, I still want to loose a bit of weight and I have decided to do a bit of toning up.. for the first time ever.. well, since I quite the gym a few years back.

Over the past week I’ve been trialling the Exante diet and replacing one meal a day with a shake, bar or meal and I thought i’d share my thoughts on it.

I have never attempted a diet like this where I use diet products, I’ve only did ones that are a full lifestyle change such as Slimming World or Weight Watchers.. I was definitely apprehensive when the products arrived and they looked very sterile. But since I was actually just replacing a meal a day and trying to eat healthy the rest of the time I was ready to give it a try. I received enough for two weeks of replacing one meal a day, some were shakes, some were bars, some were desserts and there was a couple of meal sachets. I eased myself in with the shakes.. I have to be honest and say made with water (as suggested for weightloss) I found they weren’t to my taste. For the sake of the experiment I was downing the whole thing at a time. Thankfully that was enough to leave me feeling food and I didn’t want to eat anything else. However, made up with skimmed milk I actually found them more enjoyable. More milkshake like, I definitely needed that creamy edge that comes with milk rather than water. Of course, that wouldn’t aid my weight loss much… The two chocolate bars I received were really nice, very filling meaning after one I didn’t have the temptation to eat more as I do when I regularly have chocolate. The cereal bars on the other side, I couldn’t even finish.. I could taste that they were made up with protein powder and that really put me off. I wasn’t too keen on the two meals either as they were so much like baby food.

HOWEVER, the two I did enjoy a lot and I could recommend are the Gooey Salted Caramel Mix & the Maple Syrup Pancakes. Oh my goodness, both of these are so good that I’d choose to pay extra in a store for them. The pudding was just like a mug cake which was probably what made it appeal but it was so much simpler to make, you just mix it with water then microwave! At the moment pancakes are my favourite food, but oh so many calories especially with the syrup but these Exante ones already contain the syrup. They were a little drier than i’d usually like but it wasn’t enough that it felt like they stuck in your throat. Because these two were so good it makes me feel like I’d be open to try more from the Exante range such as the Cheese & Bacon Breakfast Eggs, the pizza base mix and the Blueberry & Rapsberry Pancakes.

In conjunction with Exante, I have started lifting some small weights to tone my arms. I do 100 on each arm and even though I obviously can’t see a difference after a week, I feel better for it, just because I’m doing something rather than just moaning about it. It’s something I can do while watching TV at night and I don’t need any special clothes to do it. Knowing I’m doing something about the parts of my body I hate definitely helps with my low self esteem even if it doesn’t do anything else.