Food For The Cash Rich But Time Poor?

If my Yorkshire mother ever chastised me with the admonishment: “You love yourself just a little too much,” then it’s because she wanted to pull me down a peg or two!

However, had she wrapped her dentures around the culinary delights posted to her door by www.loveyourself.co.uk, home to a high-quality food offering aimed at helping you shed the pounds, then she might have thought twice about chastising her errant son!

The original idea behind Love Yourself was to take the hassles out of dieting, by combining well-rounded nutrition and diverse flavours to create healthy meals that are not only tasty but convenient, hence the door delivery approach.

So, it was with more than a little curiosity that I delved into the box that arrived on my doorstep with a two-day supply of meals: a 1500 calorie Performance Diet and the 1700 calorie Keto Plan.

The first came in at £25 and the latter £30 and, in third place was my hungry Filipino wife: six stone six but with an appetite like a horse! She opted to volunteer for the Keto Plan in light of the fact that she needed ‘building up’ rather than ‘building down’! Me, as the chief ‘dasher arounder’ went for the Performance Diet.

Performance Diet – 1500 calories
For fear of sounding like some fawning journalist eager for another crack at the whip, so to speak, this was absolutely brilliant! Not only tasty but extremely satisfying.

I am only 154 pounds (11 stone on the nose) and hardly overweight so, personally, this was not about losing weight so much as seeing if it was tasty and left me satisfied. It delivered both and by the time I had eaten my last meal at around 7pm, having consumed everything else across the day, I was not only stuffed but totally disinterested in anything like biscuits or chocolate.

And that, I feel sure, is what Love Yourself is all about: tasty, good quality food, well-prepared, a low-calorie count, convenient, satisfying and delivered to your door so that you don’t have to bother about much other than how to operate the microwave.

Meal 1 – egg & avocado sandwich
Sounds grim, doesn’t look anything special, tastes fantastic!
Meal 2 – Not sure what happened here but there wasn’t one. Probably a simple labelling issue!
Meal 3 – chicken & tomato pasta
Sublime
Meal 4 – potatoes with chicken & beetroot
Tasty and very filling with lots of new potatoes.
Meal 5 – chicken & basil stir fry
A nice end to the evening

Keto Plan – 1700 calories
According to Mrs Hopkins – a little fussy on the culinary side – the carrot cake chia pudding was wonderful. She kept eating a little at different points of the day, alongside everything else!
Breakfast – carrot cake chia pudding
Snack – chocolate and vanilla pralines
Lunch – chicken breast in herbs with a pumpkin seeds sauce
She loved it

Dinner – mozzarella & rocket salad with a basil dressing
Was so thrilled, invited me to share it! I had a mouthful and was equally enthusiastic.

The biggest challenge about dieting is feeling satisfied. If you are ‘full’ – or satiated as my history teacher used to say – then you are less likely to crave the sweet stuff, the chocolate or all those ‘naughties’ that pile on the pounds.

The food from Love Yourself was genuinely tasty, calorie controlled – each package indicates the exact number of calories for each meal - and totally satisfying. The food is well-prepared, delivered in lots of eco-friendly packaging and ready for a quick zap in the microwave. The only difference here, of course, is that each box contains the ‘good stuff’.

However, it does not come cheap at the thick end of £25-£30 per day, but, if you have tried all the dieting fads and had limited result, subscribed to the gym but never been (and that will set you back £60-£70 a month) then give this a go because exercise only works hand in hand with a good diet.

The meals are put together by experts and, if you are prepared to invest in yourself, then perhaps you will lose weight if you are honest and avoid snacking and the temptation to slip in a Mars bar between every meal!

Not really one for ‘ratings’ but, if I were, I’d give it a 10 Simon and sound the gold buzzer! Food with the X-Factor!