Hey Jeg,
You've done great to lose almost 3st so far, but in a year at 2lbs a week should've lost you 7st. It sounds like you're really not committed - the meals out, the "taking it easy" approach, and so on.
If you really want to shift that remaining 5st, you've got to commit yourself to a full-on, forevermore change to your lifestyle. Forget the whole idea of a diet. Losing weight and keeping it off means you absolutely have to look at changing the way you live, else you'll go back to old habits once the "diet" is over and eat it all back on again.
This doesn't mean cutting eating out. It just means you choose the salad and ask them to hold any fatty additions (caesar dressing may be yummy, but it's a lot of calories).
Slimming World, Weight Watchers, and everyone else who makes a fortune out of people like you and I are helpful
if you put the effort in. But realistically the solution is very simple: You must consume fewer calories in a day than your body requires to function.
Male adults need 2,500 calories a day. Female adults 2,000. If you are 5st overweight you actually use more than 2,000, but it's best to keep these numbers in mind.
Slimming World has the additional problem that it seduces you with the wonderful idea that you can lose weight without reducing the volume of food you intake. Free fruit, free yogurts, free salad, free chips even (which do taste nice, and we still make them the SW way now and then). But in reality if you eat two bananas, a couple of yogurts, and two apples in your day that's a whopping 500 calories already, and you don't notice it because it's your "free" food.
I've switched over to calorie counting, but not obsessively - I don't eat Nimble or use the skinniest milk. I
do weigh my cereal, because the reccommended 30g is surprisingly little, and at 200 calories (average) for 30g, It's astounding how much I must've been packing away before.
Eating home-made, well-balanced meals is actually surprisingly filling. If you have any of the Slimming World cookbooks the majority of the recipes in them come to about 500 calories per serving (although the calories aren't listed in the books I have, so I'm using a calorie calculator to figure them out).
So. Cereal or a couple of slices of toast for breakfast. A 250 calorie ham salad sandwich for lunch, safe in the knowledge that I could stretch to a 500 calorie BLT if I fancied it. And 500 calories for dinner. Add to that a little time down the gym, some lunchtime walks, or whichever exercise you find that you enjoy, and the weight really does come off. Even better, once you've been doing it a couple of weeks you just aren't hungry enough for a whole Chicken Tikka Masala with Nan bread, two poppadoms, and a side of Bombay Aloo any more. Your stomach adapts very rapidly, and soon you'll find that a single sandwich for lunch is perfectly sufficient.
Even better, when you see something tasty, you pick it up and check the calories. And then you go "I'm not eating that! That's a whole bloody MEAL!"
'Owzat for a kick up the jacksie?
EDIT: Ah yes, and if it helps I
did have to snack on fruit between meals for the first couple of weeks. Apples, grapes, cherry tomatoes... But after the third week I'm no longer doing that.