I tried Slimming World Kitchen meal boxes for a month — I struggled with one ingredient

As Christmas fades into a distant memory and a cold, dull January sets in, for many of us thoughts inevitably turn to losing weight. There’s a whole range of diets out there to help you, and Slimming World is one of the UK’s most popular.

And last year the company branched out by launching boxes with the Slimming World Kitchen service. The service allows you to select up to five different meals online, and then boxes with everything you need delivered direct to your door. Even better, all the meals are classed as “free food” under Slimming World rules, so they are aimed at helping those following the diet plan to lose weight under its “Food Optimising” system.

I’ve successfully lost a lot of weight using Slimming World in the past, although I’m not currently a paid-up member. I tested out the Slimming World Kitchen boxes , and lost six pounds after a week while following the wider rules of the plan.

So I decided, with my own January health kick under way, this time I would use the boxes for a full month. It works on a subscription basis, so when you first sign up you need to state whether you want the boxes every week, two weeks, three weeks or per month. You can also skip weeks, and cancel your subscription at any time.

This is how I got on with making all the meals across January and the things I did and didn’t like about the service. And, of course, whether it all helped me to lose any weight.

How it works

To get started, go to the Slimming World Kitchen , select the week you wanting your delivery, and then chose from the selection of 15 recipes. You can choose up to five dishes for a week, and there’s an option for a two-person or four-person portion size.

All dishes are individually priced, and they come up on the website as per dish and per portion to help you budget – for example, sizzling steak in oyster sauce is £13 (£6.50 per portion). Meat dishes are generally more expensive than veggie options, and it works out cheaper if you have four people to feed, with prices from £10 – £13 for the two portion options and from £13 – £22 for the four portion options.

Dishes for the weeks I was picking included jerk hake with mango salsa, hunters chicken with baby roasties, and sticky spiced tofu and rice. I decided to go for dishes that I would never normally make myself at home, or dishes I’ve never really nailed at home despite many attempts.

What’s in the box?

The boxes are fairly hefty (particularly if you’re having five meals), and inside there’s a booklet with numbered recipes. Inside the box are five bags filled with the ingredients that you’ve ordered – numbered to correspond with the inside the booklet.

In a smaller section of the box is a clearly marked tab for refrigerated items such as fresh meat and yoghurt. These need to go in the fridge. Now, this might be fine if you have one of those large American fridges, but I don’t, so instead I had to take out the veg that I felt needed to go on the fridge from each bag.

I tried to keep everything else inside the brown bags (like vinegars, garlic, ginger etc) to try and keep myself organised for the week of cooking-from-scratch ahead.

The beauty of the meal boxes for Slimming World devotees is that EVERYTHING in the box is “free food”. Followers can eat unlimited amounts of foods categorised as “free” – including lean meats, pulses, fruit and vegetables and herbs and spices – and still lose weight, at least in theory.

Everything in the recipes is weighed and measured ready, so things like spices are measured in sachets, you have the exact number of tomatoes you need, and even sachets of things like tomato puree.

The booklet also gave thorough point-by-point instructions on how to cook each meal – with preparation times given as a guide also – ranging from 25 minutes to 45 minutes.

Although, I would say that if you’re preparing the food on your own, as I was, I found the prep time to be a lot longer, possibly as I’m quite slow at chopping up veg. If you’re a kitchen whizz you would probably do it quicker than me.

How much money it cost

You can order in either a two meal option or four meals. I went for the two meal options throughout, and each is individually priced ranging from

• Week 1 – £60 for five meals (plus £4.99 delivery);
• Week 2 – £49 for four meals (plus £4.99 delivery);
• Week 3 – £49 for four meals (plus £4.99 delivery);
• Week 4 – £61 for five meals (plus £4.99 delivery).

Total for the month: – £238.99

How much weight did I lose?

And here’s the million dollar question. I’m pleased to say I did lose weight – and quite a lot of it – after using the mealboxes for a full month.

It’s important to note that during the month with the meal boxes, I also closely followed the Slimming World diet plan. So that meant for me things like fruit and fat free yoghurt for breakfast and lunches like beans on toast (using my Healthy Extra B for the wholemeal toast) or homemade tuna pasta (using my Healthy Extra A for a cheese topping).

The great thing for people following the Slimming World plan is that the meal boxes are ALL entirely free meals, so you’re able to use your HEA and HEB choices during the day on your other meals. I started the diet after a hefty Christmas of over-indulgence, so, as any seasoned dieter will know, you always lose more weight on the first week of a plan as a lot of the weight lost is “water weight” your body is holding onto. I am also overweight for my height of 5ft 6ins, so I know I have some way to go to be within a healthy range.

Either way, I was absolutely delighted when I got on the scales at the end of the first week and had lost 6 lbs in weight – this was the same amount of weight I lost when I first tried the mealboxes last year.

After that big first week, naturally the weight loss dropped down to a more reasonable one to two pounds in the following three weeks. So after the full four weeks using the meal boxes, alongside following the Slimming World plan, I was pleased to have weighed in and lost 10lbs in total.

I never went hungry and ate, quite frankly, massive portions of healthy, veg-packed, home-cooked food in these meal boxes and yet I still lost a great amount of weight by sticking to the plan.

My favourite five dishes

There was a decent variety of styles of cuisine you can pick each week, including a selection of vegetarian options as well as fish dishes and pork, beef and chicken options.

I happily ate all of the meals (after spending so long lovingly preparing them) but some really stood out to me and that I will definitely try to make again. These are my top five.

1) Creamy chicken supreme

This was a real hit – the sauce, made with fat free yoghurt, stock and mustard, tasted as good as you’d have in a restaurant.

2) Barbecue baked sweet potatoes

I thought I’d better try a fully vegetarian dish, but this was the biggest revelation for me. The taste of the aubergine barbecue was fantastic. I’ve already cooked this up again as it was so tasty.

3) Posh risotto with steak and garlic mushrooms

I ordered this as I’ve never been able to nail a proper risotto. And with this one I finally cracked it. This was a great, flavoursome dish and helped by the excellent quality of the steak.

4) “Just like mum’s” savoury mince with colcannon

Now, my mum has never made this dish for me. But whoever’s mum has is a lucky kid as this one tasted great.

5) Beef lasagne with charred broccoli

Again, another dish I’ve never been able to achieve well at home. This was a lovely lasagne, although I have to admit I “cheated” a little and used my Healthy Extra A allowance to add some cheese on top.

And those I won’t be trying again

Some of the dishes felt like a lot of prep for not that much reward. That included the chicken tikka masala with cucumber salad which I felt was disappointing.

I also ordered a jerk pork dish that I had forgotten I tried last year that I didn’t like then. And it wasn’t any better this time round, so I regretted ordering that.

The salmon dishes I tried were also a little disappointing this time around – I tried a “showstopper salmon” so I expected big things but I just found it a tad bland.

What I liked about the meal boxes….

What I love about the meal boxes is that they’re packed full of healthy ingredients, and you know that EVERYTHING in there is “free food” if you’re following the Slimming World system, so there’s no need for weighing anything, or ticking off your HEA and HEB.

The fresh meat and vegetables also seemed to be really great quality, and the stock cubes and tinned produce on some recipes were quality brands. And because you’re cooking everything fresh, you can always freeze portions if your family or partner don’t want to eat the dishes.

That’s also a good way to make the money you pay stretch further as well if you’re sticking to the plan. You might end up wanting to save extra anyway as the potions are huge.

What I didn’t like

After four weeks in, it felt like a hard slog in the kitchen to be honest. I got fed up of slaving over a hot stove for around an hour on the four or five nights of meals I’d gone for – as I was cooking them all by myself so it felt like a lot of prep. Although I suppose standing and chopping for an hour at a time was a good bit of cardio.

But by far the worst thing about the boxes was the fact onions needed to be fried in almost EVERY . Now, I love the taste of a fried onion and I know they’re a great way to add flavour to a dish. But I’m not all that keen about the way they stink your entire house out, not to mention your clothes and your hair, when cooking with them.

So, maybe it’s not a big deal if you’re a regular onion user yourself, or have a brilliant extractor fan in your kitchen, but mine doesn’t seem to work very well. I also got a bit of “vegetable fatigue” by the end of the month.

The dishes are absolutely packed with fresh veg which, yes, I know is good for you, and for weight loss, but some recipes seemed to ensure you got your full five a day on one plate and it felt a bit like overkill. So much so that I started trying to save some of the veg from some of the dishes so that I could use these in lunch dishes instead, eg, extra pepper and mushrooms that I could use in a healthy omelette for my lunch.

The verdict

There’s no doubt to me that these boxes offer some great inspiration and new recipes to try. The produce was all fresh and super healthy, and it felt good to be cooking everything from scratch – I can see that it would work for a whole family to eat these meals (even for those not aiming to lose weight).

It also gave me inspiration to use a more varied selection of fresh herbs and vegetables in my “normal” repertoire of recipes to give them a boost too. The fact you get a book with the box means you can then replicate the dishes you like again at home.

However, what I would say is that if you ordered Slimming World Kitchen without being a member of the slimming club, you would need to know a bit more about the plan as a whole if you were using the meal boxes to try and lose weight across the week. While the booklet does have a section explaining the how Food Optimising works, it doesn’t actually explain the rules of the wider plan.

Also, the box only provides your main meal for the day, so it would be useful for people to have some suggestions of what they’d need to be eating for breakfast and lunch if their aim is weight loss – although naturally there are plenty of plugs to “join your local Slimming World group” throughout.

I lost weight eating the recipes because I followed the Slimming World plan religiously alongside them. As mentioned, I’ve done the plan myself before so I did know the rules about which foods are “free” and which foods I need to count as HEA and HEB and the weights for these, and also the “syns” system too where you can have a certain amount of treats each day. However, if you are using the meal boxes for a different style of diet, the booklet does also include at the back a full table of nutrition information per portion with calories and fats.

Naturally, the food works out more expensive than if you were buying it all yourself at the supermarket, but that’s because you’re getting tailored recipes. Although I was a bit shocked when I saw the full amount I’d actually paid across the whole month of £238.99.

I would personally not go for a full five meal box again as I found the amount of food with the size of my kitchen and fridge a little overwhelming. But for an occasional blast of inspiration I think it is well worth a three or four meal box as most of the recipes were really great quality.