It’s been a good weekend, but not really in terms of food! I’ve stuck to my WLR calorie allowance for a 0.5lb loss over the week, but actually had a small gain this morning – just shows that sometimes it’s not enough just to eat the right amount of what – the type of food matters too! It’s generally not been bad though… oh and I forgot to add my WLR nutrition stats from Thursday like I said I would! Must try harder to blog this week!

Friday:

Breakfast: Chocolate Maxitone Sculptress shake blended with water and a banana and a berocca. I had my shake in two parts so didn’t have a snack before running

Lunch: Tuna and red onion sandwich with wholemeal bread

Snack: about a teaspoon of Artisana Coconut Butter and half a Pack Tunch Apple Cinnamon bar

Dinner: Was a meal out at a steak and lobster restaurant, paid for by work so I made sure to make the most of it! I had a little seeded wholemeal roll with butter, starter was scallops in a creamy cheesy sauce, main course I had 60z fillet steak and a half lobster, with extra veggies instead of potatoes (and I even managed to refrain from eating anyone else’s chips!) Desert was a sorbet things…tasted like a Solero ice cream, which was nice. I finished off with a Baileys coffee which was served with a cube of the best Scottish Tablet I’ve tasted in a long time! To drink I had 1 small white wine, 1 large white wine and one small prosecco. The meal was beautiful but I had to go straight home and sprawl out on the sofa, fell fast asleep after a few minutes! It was a mix of tiredness and having eaten so much!

No photo’s as the people I work with would find it odd if I whipped out the big DSLR and started snapping away at the food!

Drinks: The usual, coconut coffee, tea, water…

Exercise: 24 minute run, 3.4km

Saturday:

Breakfast: Mug of tea was all I could manage first thing, but I thought I shouild get a good start with some proper breakfast a few hours later (I was up at 7am though, damn cat!)

I then made a smoothie in a bowl – Maxitone Sculptress chocolate protein powder with a banana, some cinnamon, semi skimmed milk and a spoon of Artisana Coconut butter – beautiful! Needed more coconut and cinnamon though! I was still so full from the night before that I actually only managed about 1/4 of it!

Looks a bit grey in the picture but was actually o lovely rich chocolately colour!

I also blended in a 1/4 tsp of this to make it nice and thick:

Snack: the other half of the apple cinnamon Pack Tunch bar and some Snack a Jacks

Lunch: We were out a lot longer than expected so ended up having lunch out. I had a panini with brie, bacon and walnuts and a chocolate/coconut/caramel/biscuit cakey thing, ate half with lunch and I ate the bananas from my boyfriends cake too!

Dinner: Pizza – cheese and tomato, and the other half of my cake thing

Drinks: tea, coffee, water and Fruitiser Manog and some other fruits.

Exercise: Haha, yeah right, like that was going to happen on Saturday! After dinner I watch I don’t know how many episodes of Damages series 2 back to back and fell asleep on the sofa (again!) while my boyfriend got paid to spend the night enjoying the Editors.

Sunday:

Breakfast: Double espresso latte with coconut syrup

Followed by the rest of Saturdays breakfast, struggled again as I was still full from Saturday!

Lunch: Egg and ham roll, small fruit salad, salt and pepper crisps

Snack: Prawns with spicy salsa dip and a handful of maple crunch cereal – I was going for a full bowl but we were out of milk

Dinner: Chicken curry with plain naan bread, cooked at home but the sauce was in a jar! Very nice though!

Drinks: Pomegranate Fruitiser, tea, coffee, water

Exercise: I walked into town and back, maybe 40 mins each way?

This weekends poor food choices have mostly been a result of tiredness and hunger due to not planning! I did also take my measurements this morning and it seems the 0.5lb I put on had all gone on to my left arm! I have a little off every other body part, but my arm is 0.5″ bigger!? I’ll see what happens next week! I’m really not fussed about the small gain on the scales, I know I over did things, and I look better and feel better after this week so I know things are going in the right direction!

This week, I’m going to try be more prepared, run Monday, Wednesday and Friday lunchtimes and go to spin class Tuesday after work. I’m going to leave it a bit longer before adding weight training back in.

You may have noticed I’ve been eating Artisana Coconut butter! I ordered a small box of goodies a while ago and it finally arrived! Here is what was in there:

I did attempt to jump on the blog world bandwagon of making my own coconut butter, but after many, many hours of this

I decided that, actually, Artisana is totally worth the money!

I’ll try post tomorrow about some of my goodies! And I want to do a running update sometime soon too.

I’m just going to finish of this delicious organic Pomegranate & Apple juice then I’m heading off to bed for an early night!

Wednesday:

Breakfast: 20g oats with vanilla rice milk, 1tsp maca powder and 1tbsp of almost coconut butter – more on this once I’ve made it properly!

Snack: Banana Bread Nakd bar before lunchtime run

Lunch: Tuna, Light Mayo and red onion sandwich on wholemeal bread – just what i needed after the run!

Exercise: 20 mins run and about a 30 min walk each way to/from the cinema – Crazy Heart – good movie, not normally my sort of thing but I did enjoy it.

If anyone was paying attention to the numbers you may notice my calorie allowance has gone up a fair bit. I switch to a loss rate of 0.5lb per week instead of 1lb per week. I figured with the meal out tomorrow and family visiting at the weekend I’d be best upping my allowance and chilling out about it. Next week I’ll switch to 1lb for the week again.

Thursday:

Breakfast: Smoothie made with 10g coconut, 75g frozen raspberries, 75ml semi skimmed milk and half a banana (I made double but could only manage half)

Snack: Skinny latte form starbucks, with almond syrup – I needed the sugar and caffiene to wake me up!

Lunch: Sandwich on chunky granary break with tuna mayo, red onions and sun dried tomato

Snack: Same as breakfast, except it was frozen, someone turned the fridge up too high at work.

Dinner: Was supposed to be a Keema curry but it was going to take about an hour and a half to cook and I was too hungry/couldn’t be arsed… so instead we mushed up the beef mince with some onion, seasoning and herbs, fried some bacon, toasted some wholemeal pittas and make bacon cheese burgers! And served with with new potatoes cut into wedges them baked in the oven with some olive oil, chilli and fajita seasoning. I saw “we” but really I washed dishes while my boyfriend cooked everything! It was gorgeous, one of the best meals I’ve had in a while – he can definitely do that again!

Drinks: Coffee with coconut syrup, 2 cups of tea. water, half a can of Irn Bru

No exercise tonight, typing is about as active as I can manage! Run tomorrow lunch time though! I don’t have my stats for today as I haven’t updated the food diary with the changed dinner, I’ll do that tomorrow.

I wont moan too much though, I’ll just get on with posting my food!

Breakfast: Small fruit salad and Berocca

Lunch: bean and chilli cake with pineapple chutney and cauliflower cheese – weird combination! I didn’t take lunch to work and thought the veggie option in the staff restaurant sounded good. It wasn’t. It was so dry and tasteless, very disappointing!

Snack: Large pot of blueberries

Snack: Chocolate Sculptress shake

Dinner: Frittata with bacon, spring onion, yellow pepper, courgette and red leicester cheese.

I fried 3 slices of bacon in coconut oil, then chopped into little pieces

Beat 4 whole eggs with semi-skimmed milk (maybe 1-200ml, my hand slipped!), salt, pepper and nutmeg. Added 50g grated red leicester and the chopped bacon.

Fried chopped courgette (80g), spring onion (40g) and yellow pepper (40g)

Poured over the egg mix and cooked for a few minutes on medium

To cook the top I put the frying pan under the grill for another couple of minutes

Then ate just under half and lay on the sofa moaning about how full I was!

Drinks: 2 latte’s with vanilla syrup, fruit teas and water

No exercise to day, but another lunch time run for tomorrow.

I’m going to get my food ready to take to work tomorrow, pack my running gear, iron a top and then lie down and do nothing.

I re-joined Weight Loss Resources today to keep me on track – it’s great to be back and so quick and easy to use!

Quick re-cap of the last two days then…

Sunday:

Breakfast: Bowl of Orange & Cinnamon Oatmeal from Spoff Cereals/Oatmeal of Alford – as you may have guessed I LOVE my oats! I always look at the Oatmeal of Alford oats but for some reason have only just bought my first bag, and I’m glad I did! This was one gorgeous bowl of oats! I mixed them up with some dark chocolate spread – perfect combination!

The dark chocolate spread is the one I picked up from the health food shop in Edinburgh last month, it’s beautiful! And dangerous, I’ve had several spoonfuls straight out the jar

Snack: Chocolate Maxitone Sculptress shake (that’s a bit of a mouthful!)

Lunch: 2 slices crispy bacon fried in coconut oil in a sandwich with wholemeal bread and real butter – bliss! Followed by a Creme Egg – oops! Was worth every bite!

Snack: One more Sculptress shake

Dinner: Tinned mackerel in tomato sauce for some good and healthy fish oils (shame about the sugary sauce!) and half a kabocha squash roasted with cinnamon – yummy!

Drinks: Water, water, water and water! It was a thirsty day

Exercise: 3k run which I posted about yesterday

Monday:

Breakfast: Plain old boring oats… not really, I still love them! Made with vanilla rice milk (I think the only nearby shop that sold the almond and hazelnut flavour has topped stocking it!! Disaster!) and then I stirred in some Dark Chocolate Dreams – very dreamy indeed!

Snack: Chocolate Sculptress shake, had this rather late so was starving by the time I got round to it and it didn’t sit too well while running during my lunch break!

Lunch: Tinned salmon with some multi-grain Ryvita

Snack: Large pot of blueberries – love these so much, think I may have to buy a blueberry bush type thing for the garden! I also avoided a naughty snack of Baileys fudge this afternoon, it’s delicious stuff but it actually wasn’t so hard to say no.

Dinner: Fresh ravioli stuffed with spinach and ricotta (shop bought) with sauce made from a tin of chopped tomatoes, a large squeeze of tomato puree, garlic salt, cayenne pepper, basil and oregano, with a couple of slices of chopped bacon and a wee pile of red leicester cheese stirred in – forgot how much I loved this!

Drinks: 1 espresso with a little milk, 3 Twinings fruit teas and water!

Exercise: 22 minute run round the industrial estate my office is in – same distance as yesterdy but 5 minutes quicker – I really need to sort out my pace and slow down, I pushed too hard and felt terrible!

I don’t have many photo’s as my camera is a rather large DSLR and I’d look a bit weird bringing that out at work to photograph some tinned salmon on my desk…. but here is one I took last night of my little packed lunch bag!

It feels so good to be eating well again, I know it will feel so much better once I’ve made the full week (of course I wont be stopping there though!)

Only difficulty I can see this week is a work dinner on Friday, but it’s a steak house so should be easy to make a sensible choice and I don’t want to drink too much early as I’ll have a busy weekend – my dad is visiting with my little sister! I’m so excited! Shame the whole family can’t make it but will be great to see the two of them!

Right, I’m off to pay a bill, do some ironing and sort out my food for tomorrow – rock ‘n’ roll.

After breakfast my boyfriend appeared dressed in his running gear and reminded me that I had suggested we drive down to the beach and go for a wee run along the Esplanade so I threw my clothes on (I got myself some proper running kit for the 5k in April – long sleeved top and some small running shorts, currently being worn over leggings! Both black Adidas with pink stripes ) I also got my Nike Plus on so I could see what sort of speeds I was doing but my ipod battery ran out part way through. I do know that we did 3.2k in 27 minutes, as usual this was alternating between running and walking. I just went with how I felt rather than timing it though as I can’t cope with looking at the watch on my wrist, running and breathing at the same time! I definitely need to work on my speed – not going faster though, I need to slow. down. My boyfriend had to keep grabbing hold of my arm and pulling me back every time I got carried away and I noticed a huge difference in how long I could run for just by slowing down a little. Once I can run for a decent amount of time without stopping to walk I’ll work on speed.

To help with my “It Starts Here” I ordered some Maxitone products. I’ve never used them before but a brochure popped through my door with some good offers and motivational pictures/stories from the Maxitone Body of 2009 winners and runners up. Tara from Tara’s Health, Fitness & Nutrition blog was one of the runners up – I think the fact that I feel as though I kind of ‘know’ her from the Weightloss Resources forums and from reading her blog helped give me that little bit more of a push – it made it seem more real and achievable. Tara has worked really hard over the last year and achieved truly fantastic results, I know I am capable of doing it too! Part of me is even tempted to work towards the Body of 2010 as a goal to keep me motivated…

Anyway, I ordered a Sculptress pack from Maxitone, Sculptress shake, capsules and shaker. According to the blurb on the site:

Sculptress shakes are an unique low-GI high protein shake, designed for weight conscious women looking for high quality nutrition to support their weight loss goals. They are designed to be used as part of a healthy balanced diet. Each serving has 32g of protein enriched with the finest whey to support your daily requirements. Sculptress shakes contain ingredients such as CLA, green tea and caffeine that provide metabolic support. It’s an ideal formula to add to your weight loss regime and help you get back into the dress size you deserve.

Sculptress capsules’ ingredients have been proven in research to help you burn and mobilise fat and could increase fat loss when taken with an effective exercise programme and diet. If you’re exercising regularly and hard, Sculptress capsules could help you to reach your weight management goals faster than exercise alone.

We shall see what happens then! I don’t really go for the whole “diet pill” thing but it was a good offer and I thought why not give it a try. The ingredients list contains some good vitamins and other ingredients I’ve read good things about, rather then your typical diet pill from Boots. They have made me feel rather hyper today – that’ll bee the caffeine and green tea extract, green tea normally has quite an effect on me!

I got the shakes in chocolate flavour and they are yummy, should help fight the chocolate cravings.

I know I said I was going to use the Sun Warrior protein powder but there aren’t too many UK stockists and it’s really rather expensive! I have found some elsewhere though so when I’m done with the Maxitone I’m going to try that, it’s much cheaper than both Sun Warrior and Maxitone, but since it’s brown rice and pea protein I’m pretty sure it wont be as tasty!

So, after my run I had the Maxitone shake

Then for lunch I fried some bacon in coconut oil and had in a sandwich with wholemeal bread and real butter – it was fantastic! I cooked my bacon for ages to make sure it was super crisp! And as a cheeky little reward for running I had a Creme Egg!

Afternoon snack was another shake and I’m just about to chop and roast some kabocha for dinner, not sure what to have with it yet but I still have another 500 calories to eat!

]]> http://stelladoeshealthyeating.co.uk/2010/03/07/it-starts-here/feed/ 5 StellaDoesHealthyEating IMG_4664 http://stelladoeshealthyeating.co.uk/2010/03/07/kabocha-squash/ http://stelladoeshealthyeating.co.uk/2010/03/07/kabocha-squash/#comments Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:14:19 +0000 StellaDoesHealthyEating http://stelladoeshealthyeating.co.uk/?p=783 ]]> I meant to update on this ages ago! Sorry for the delay….

I’ve posted about my desperation desire to get a hold o f a kabocha squash after reading so many rave review on the American blogs I read – especially Heather’s! Finally on a trip down to Glasgow for a gig I managed to find a couple of them in Waitrose (how I wish we had one up here!). Annoyingly one of them went rotten before I had the chance to try it Good thing I bought two! Anyway…

The first bite left me feeling a bit ‘meh’ but once I had some more I quickly understood what all the fuss was about! It is very similar to pumpkin, but just has that extra ’something’. It’s pretty sweet, I had it with salt, pepper and rosemary last time but I’m having the other half tonight and that’s getting smothered in cinnamon! I was advised to eat the skin but since it was sitting next to the one that went moldy I decided to pass on that this time!

I am missing one week out – the theme was water and I was going to get something when I was at the zoo and I’d forgotten to charge my battery so it died on me half way through the day I did get a couple of shots but…they were just a bit crap really.

Theme: Close Up

Theme: Diptych Collaboration - I joined forces with someone else from the Flickr group for this, the idea was to each take a complimentary photo and put the two images together. We chose music as our theme and this was my contribution

Theme: Flares as in sun flares not the 70's kind!

I can’t remember if I said on here or not, but I have entered a 5k run which is taking place at the end of April. Now 5k might not sound like much, but I’m really not a runner! I was doing pretty well with it last summer when the personal trainer got me on the treadmill and dragged me out for a couple of runs in the sun. I did keep it up a little bit for a while but gradually lost interest. I have a vague idea of wanting to enter the half marathon in Glasgow in September so figured the 5k would be a sensible idea! I have only had two proper runs since enterting, the first 5k and the second 4k. I covered 5k in 40 minutes with a combination of running and walking, roughly a minute of each, 3.5mph for walking and between6-7.5mph for running. I did similar with the 4k. I had wanted to practice the distance but until I get faster I think I might shorten it a bit, 40 mins seems like such a long time!
I have rather an ambitious idea which I hope I can stick to, 2-3 times each week I’d like to bring my running gear to work and go for at 20 min run at lunch time. Gets me out in the fresh(ish) air and gives me more free time in the evenings and makes it easier to fit in running AND weight training. I aim to start on Monday!

Any running/training tips will be very much appreciated!