Still going

Well I am still going, I weigh 105 so have lost 10.5kg in 3 months in a pathetically painful 2 steps forward, 1 step back approach, eventually accumulating the 1 step forwards.
Junk food is very addictive and very very bad. Its good to fit into a whole range of clothes I had stored as I have lost a little over 1 dress size, but I am certainly not winning the war as I still eat bags of m&m's etc. that cancel out some of the huge amounts of exercise I do!

8 Week Challenge Day 4 - Saturday

It has been a very good 4 days so I decided to photo-blog day 4.


A.M. 1 peice of Burgen Rye, 1 egg, 2 Swiss Brown mushrooms, 1 kiwifruit, 1 cup of tea

Lunch: Well I got distracted and didn't eat my usual early lunch and I was starving! So I went to my emergency meal. I actually planned this a couple of weeks ago for when I was dying for superquick takeaway- to just make this. It takes 4 minutes and totals 400 calories. I don't want to use it too often as it is processed. all foreign ingredients and high in sodium. But I don't really care because it's a very satisfying answer to food that could be alot worse. The idea came because last year I discovered Trident 3 minute laksa noodles and after eating heaps of them I looked at the calories - 1200! Yes one packet, looks just like 2 minute noodles, was 1200 calories, what you should eat in a whole day!!! I think it is because the noodles are fried, it has sachet of powdered coconut cream and a sachet of chilli oil. So I looked for alternatives and found this Tom Yum soup with rice noodles in the soup section for 200 calories. It is very very tasty and has a hot chilli sachet, I have never used more then half of it and it is a spicy chilli soup. Then I thought hey I could just throw in some frozen ingredients and presto a meal to rival most Asian takeaways.
So anyway Lunch was Tom Yum rice noodle soup (200cal) with a spinach portion and 8 spinach and prawn dumplings (200 cal) heated in the microwave.

Afternoon Snack: 2x 2cm pieces of licorice (how weird American spell check does not recognise this word? Do they have licorice in USA?) and 1 kiwifruit.

Dinner: Waldorf Salad (2 celery stalks, 1/2 apple, a few walnuts, dressed with 1/4 lemon and a smidge of mayo) small tuna tin. Followed an hour later by 2 spoons of sultanas, pumpkin and sunflower seeds.

Some dieters may think I have too many fats in by diet but I have decided it is the one nutrient I am not willing to give up as I am very concerned about my skin and hair issues and I am finishing uni so I need healthy brain function. I take a multi vitamin and alternate taking magnesium, vitamin B, chromium and fish oil so that I take each a couple of times a week.

Exercise:

A.M. Walked 5.42km/55mins/burnt 471 cals around streets.

P.M.75 mins of BL DVD - consisting of
                       5 mins Warm up
                       20 mins Boot Camp

                       20 mins Sculpt with weights

                       20 mins Low Impact                       10 mins Stretch routine

I think I burnt the same calories in exercise as I ate. I would guess at my weight and how hard I worked - I would have burnt about 800 calories in the P.M. so about 1271 calories for the day.

My cat usually ignores me and just continues sleeping when I am working out but today she kept curling around me and when I was doing floor work she was smooching and jumping on me.   Then she just fell over and fell asleep in this position while I sweated and puffed profusely.

So I'm going well. I jumped on the scales and it reads 107 kg so I think I have lost 2 kg this week. My metabolism is alive finally after months of working towards this point.

8 Week Challenge Day 2

Food
A.M. Cup of tea with light milk
         Large nectarine
         Cup of cabbage soup
Lunch: 4 corn thins with butter and Vegemite and celery with spoon of cottage cheese
P.M. Approx 1 cup of fresh pineapple and a spoon of cottage cheese
Tea:  Stuffed Red capsicum with turkey mince, carrot, zucchini, garlic, chilli, ginger & 1cup of Basmati Rice
        

Dinner, also made up and froze 2 more serves.

Exercise
A.M.  60 mins of BL DVD - consisting
                       5 mins Warm up
                       20 mins Boot Camp
                       5 mins on stepper machine
                       20 mins High Impact

                       10 mins Stretch routine

P.M. Some vigorous vaccuming. Desperately wanted to go for walk but constant rain. I couldn't think of another exercise to do as I really couldn't do any DVD's as my shoulders, arms and legs were hurting from boot camp. Note to self I really cannot do pushups. With winter coming up I must think of an alternate (must be free) exercise when I cannot go outside.

Speeding up my Metabolism

I am absolutely done with losing weight so slowly. This post is a summary of what I have learnt elsewhere and what I have discovered by trial and error to speed up my metabolism and lose weight at a more appropriate rate. 


PCOS has really deadened my metabolism and endocrine system. This year I have eaten quite well (like thousands of calories less then I used to) and exercise two hours a day and get very small results. I do go offtrack sometimes and recently I just gave up for a week, ate badly and then started eating 'normally'. I dropped a couple of kilo's! Ofcourse I put it back on as I notice my body takes about a week to register if  I was good or bad a week ago. So anyway that probably doesn't make sense but I think my body was finally starting to respond. I always give up right on the precipice of succeeding with everything I do (like right now I am all of a sudden blogging when I was just getting the point of being ready to write an assignment due next week).


This is my system I have recently pulled together as I have had bits of success from these strategies, but haven't done it all together. I am expecting better weight loss results now:


Exercise:

• I can't out-train a bad diet. I tried. It has to be both.
• Exercise in the morning before breakfast to burn fat stores and again before dinner.
• After warm-up, start out hard and then slow down. This way you kick you body from burning fuel to burning fat stores quicker and also burn a few more calories in your second part as its kind of like interval training, your go-hard burns through your go-slow. *tip from somewhere?*
• Have mini excercise bursts throughout the day to fire up your metabolism. I have a mini-stepper. I could only do a minute at a time on it 2 months ago and now I do 5 minutes with some hand weight exercises. *This may have no scientific basis as I have come up with the idea myself as I figure if interval training works then there must be some small benefit from firing up even if you go back to your resting pulse rate 3 minutes later.*

Diet:

• Eat less. Though I am large and think I can sneak in more food because I use more caolries then the next person, I can't. Due to my lifelong PCOS and pre-diabetic insulin resistance, I am physically metabolically and endocrinalogically  programmed to hold on to all this damn weight now that I have it. And that is science.
• To eat less and walk the line of not going into 'starvation mode' or ketosis (where metabolically this is just not good) eat regularly, with more protein and less carbs.

So I eat 4ish times a day  and I tend to eat the same foods pepared in lots of different ways. I eat:

• Oats, low fat milk, LSA, banana, blueberries and strawberries as smoothies, porridge.
• Vegetables - zucchini, red capsicum, carrot, silverbeet, spinach, lettuce, rocket, tomatoes and mushrooms in a variety of ways like omelettes, garden salads, grilled, stuffed.
• Eggs, Chicken, turkey, cottage cheese, a few nuts or sprouted legumes as a protein component of every meal, even if its a really small amount.
• Soups made of veges and legumes, chickpeas etc.
• Apples, pineapple or other seasonal fruit
• Flat bread and occasionally rice

My favourite meals have become waldorf salad, pizza (under 100 calories for a wholegrain flat bread, tomato paste, lots of herbs and veges, and yes a spattering of full fat mozzarella cause you have to use so little of it to get the flavour) and stuffed veges.

8 week challenge Day 1 - Wednesday

There is nothing special about this challenge, it's just a book I bought at Aldi a few weeks ago for a couple of dollars. Its called Walk off the weight and had a really good diary section so I am filling it out. Because I probably won't update my blog everyday - it is too distracting sometimes, I'll just spend hours on here.


I have though been slowly increasing my knowledge and refining my practices through trial and error. Which is why I thought I would blog for the next couple of days. To keep a record of what I am learning.


Food
A.M. - Porridge: 5 spoons of oats, honey, light milk
Lunch - Waldorf Salad - 3 celery stalks, 1 red apple, 1/2 lemon, 8 walnuts, light mayo
Snack - A few spoons of filling as pre-preparing dinner
Dinner - Whole red capsicum filled with grated zuchinni, carrot, turkey mince, ginger, chilli, garlic & sweet chilli sauce.
Snack - Weak hot chocolate with light milk. 


Excercise
A.M. - 60 mins of BL DVD - consisting
                       5 mins Warm up
                       20 mins High Impact
                       5 mins on stepper machine
                       20 mins Low Impact
                       10 mins Stretch routine
P.M. - 25 minutes brisk walk until I got caught in very heavy rain. Luckily I was right at outside the local club and sat in their covered verandah for about 45 mins. It was still raining and dark so I went in and asked if their courtesy bus could take me home when it next went out. So lucky as I joined the last time I was there 9 months ago so they looked me up on the computer. Phew! The walk home would have really sucked!!!

Chicken Tarragon Pie with butter-free pastry crust

I have never made pastry or pies in my life. But I gave it a go yesterday.

The recipe I found for the pie crust seemed OK, it was 2,3/4 cups of flour, 1/2cup milk, 1/2 cup of oil, spoon of salt. I am pretty sure that is considerably healthier then store bought frozen pastry which is half butter/shortening.

The last couple of times I have bought celery I have chopped off the bottom and the leafy tops and kept them for cooking. They last only a couple of days so I wanted to put them to use in this pie. These celery throw away bits had gone into my sweet potato and chickpea curry last week quite successfully. It uses more of the celery so saves money and the nutrition and flavour in the celery leaves is good.

 The filling was whatever veges I could rustle up, chicken, tarragon, water, cornflour, stock.

 Cooking up the filling

I lined a 6 muffin tray with some pastry and the filling and this is how they turned out. Ugly but yummy.

 The rest of the filling went into ramekins with a bit of pastry and sesame seeds on top. Again ugly but yummy.

It was a miserable day outside so I spent it on the couch with my cat reading for uni and watching TV.I ate chicken pie for late breakfast, lunch and dinner!

The need to disappear and some of my meals

Yes I did a little disappearing act, I do that alot, in real life as well as online. It's not hard for me to see where it all went wrong. My last post was Feb17. I spent the whole of Feb 18 volunteering for my former employer- taking a social group of 85 year olds to the horse races. I thought I would be OK as I wouldn't be involved in the office. I was wrong. I was very very wrong. As the staff involved in the outing, who formerly reported to me, could not help themselves but update me on everything that was happening. Though yes I was very annoyed, it was also a great excuse to go off track with my eating. And that I did. I should not allow the excuse but I decided to eliminate the cause of the excuse. So I called in sick for the next weeks day of volunteering and am devising ways to have no contact whatsoever with my old job.


I have been back on track again for a week. When I am good I am very very good and when I am bad I am positively evil. So unfortunately having a couple of bad days every few weeks is cancelling out alot of the good.


I completely forgot about blogging most of the time. Here are a few shots from the last week.

Steak, potatoes, cheese, beans

Salad roll

Turkey with cranberry, Waldorf (no cheese) and salad 

Now this was good and there is plenty more in my freezer  - I made another batch of sweet potato and chickpea curry with brown rice and  fresh coriander

Waldorf (no cheese) and salad. Sprouted legumes are  good for  some protein in what would otherwise be very low protein meals.

Stir fry beef in hoisin sauce and fresh ginger, veges including the pak choi from my courtyard garden

fresh pineapple

Egg on rye and garden vegetable medley

Oh now this was good I have made it a few times this week. Fried tofu then coated in honey and sesame seeds with salad dressed in lemon juice and balsamic vinegar. TASTE SENSTATION!!