What’s the Right Diet for You?

Hello, hello!

So, who’s been watching the BBC Horizon special, What’s the Right Diet for You? It’s a programme looking at why different people over-eat and therefore what might work for them as a diet. They’ve taken a sample set of people and run them through a series of tests to calculate what sort of eater they are.

They’ve broken down the group into 3 subsets, which are:

• Emotional Eater
• Feaster
• Constant Craver

They’re fairly self explanatory by name and the BBC have also created an online test you can take to approximate which of these categories you are likely to fall into. You can find the test here.

I have taken the test and found myself to be 39% Feaster and 61% Constant Craver. Essentially, this means that I’m likely to have a genetic disposition which drives me to continually graze, with less interest in / ability to sit down and eat big meals.

Genetic or not, it certainly rings true that I do constantly graze. Where it’s gone wrong is that most people I know tend to eat square meals. What this means is that I end up doing both!!! The recommended diet for Constant Cravers is the 5:2 diet where you fast for 2 days a week and eat normally (with a healthy spin) for the other 5 days. Given that my bf has just started doing this anyway, I may as well give it a bash.

The idea is that it’s much easier to control your cravings for 2 days a week than it is to try and do it, yet fail every day. Knowing you can have that treat, but you just need to wait 2 days is far easier than eliminating it altogether. It should have clicked sooner but it didn’t. Every way I think about it, this option suits me much better than constantly telling myself “no” as I reach for a snack every 10 minutes!!!

So here I go again in my quest to find a more balanced lifestyle that allows me to shed a few lbs. And no, they didn’t say exercise was the key to weight-loss, they said reducing your calorie intake is the way forward. So you exercise nuts can jog on (geddit!?!) x

Juicing for Wellness, Days 4 & 5

Homemade Vegetable Curry

I may as well have just walked into a confession box because what I’m about to say isn’t good. I fell off the wagon big time yesterday. I was hungry, it was the weekend, I wanted to eat something familiar. I’m sorry!

In the interest of being open and honest, I may as well confess that yesterday morning I ate a couple of chocolate biscuits. Then at around 3pm I ate a burrito. It had pork, rice, guacamole, sour cream, pinto beans, peppers, cheese and a heck of a lot of flavour in it. It completely flouted the diet rules but it tasted sooooooooo good! It also gave me the motivation to buck up my ideas and get back on track. Well, that plus my bf watching me and telling me that I want to be healthy, not full of sugar.

So for dinner last night I had a corn on the cob and another bowl of my tomato and garlic soup. I’m back on course. Go me!

Today has been somewhat challenging as it’s been my first day back in the office and things are a bit slow after the Christmas break so I’ve had lots of time to think about food and stare at the chocolate bars and biscuits in the kitchen. On the plus side though, I’m feeling better than I’ve felt in months now that my cold is clearing and I’ve had some rest and good food for a few days.

Today’s menu has been much better:

Breakfast – strawberry, raspberry and blueberry smoothie made with just fruit and water

Lunch – tomato and garlic soup

Dinner – vegetable curry

Snacks – an apple, a clementine and some lemon & ginger tea

It’s not very juicy, I admit but it is bloody healthy!

I’ve posted the recipe for my homemade vegetable curry over on another of my blogs. You can find it here. It’s pretty quick and easy to knock up even on a school night and it’s bloody lovely. Not only that but there’s enough left for tomorrow night too. You’ll notice if you read it that I even experimented with the cauliflower rice that everyone’s talking about at the moment. It was pretty darned scrummy, if I do say so myself!

Happy eating, everyone. Just remember that falling off the wagon doesn’t matter, it’s about making a gradual change to improve the quality of what you consume. It’s not a race! x

Juicing for Wellness, Day 3

I did it, I went home and I weighed myself. I was expecting to weight about 11st 7lbs as I feel like I’ve been putting on even more weight recently so it was a pleasant surprise to weight in at 11st 1lb. That’s basically half a stone less for me to lose 🙂

So, the update on the juicing and the life with it. Here’s what happened on Day 2 following my blog post that day.

Breakfast was the carrot, apple and ginger juice which was pretty delicious.

Lunch was a change up. Instead of juice for lunch, I made a tomato and garlic soup, the recipe for which I found in a different version of the juice plan I was following. It was a smidge on the bland side but it was decent enough that the bf joined me in having some. You can find the recipe here.

Tomato and Garlic Soup for 2

We took the dog on a couple of walks yesterday and my energy was a bit low so I snacked on an apple and some grapes throughout the day and drank a fair bit of fruit tea.

By the time dinner came around, my cold had got the better of me so I had a chicken breast salad. My chicken was flavoured with paprika and cooked in a tiny bit of olive oil, my salad was without dressing. The leaves and avocado tasted better than ever because I was so deprived of food!

You’ll notice that my juice diet has strayed a little way off the juice track so I tried to bring it a bit more under control today, (day 3) but I was out and about so it’s been another compromise.

Breakfast – blueberry, raspberry and strawberry smoothie made with just fruit and water

Lunch – juice from Fuel juice bar, made with carrot, celery, apple and ginger

Dinner – chicken, mash and low-mayo coleslaw with a side salad, (we went out for dinner)

I’m not sure if it’s the cold/sore throat or the diet or both but I’ve been feeling mighty tired. My tummy is still bloated, I ache and all I want to do is sleep. I’ve added meat back into my diet in the hope that eating protein-based meals as well as juicing will help me pick myself back up but it’s proving challenging. I just want to snoooooooooooze! Still, I must keep pressing on because I don’t want to be this size and feel this unwell all the time. I CAN DO IT. PMA!

Until next time…  x

Juicing for Wellness, Day 2

Carrot, Apple and Ginger Juice

I’m still alive!!! I honestly thought at one point yesterday that I might die before I got to post today because I was so hungry and so tired.

As promised, this is an honest account of my juicing experience so here’s a run down of what’s happened in the last 24 hours.

Day 1:

Breakfast – Carrot, Apple and Lemon juice
This juice was bloody lovely and when I posted yesterday morning, I really thought I could do it.

Lunch – Cucumber, Apple, Kale and Parsley juice
By lunch time (12pm) yesterday, I was blinkin’ starving and this juice just did not hit the mark. As separate ingredients I like all of the components but as a juice, this was green yuk. It wasn’t the worst I’ve ever tasted but it did nothing to entice me to drink it either. I was ready to give up, I was grumpy and I had to re-evaluate.

Re-evaluation
As always with me on any sort of diet or healthy eating plan, I find that I am instantly grumpy and dreading the rest of the programme. With a cold as well as what felt like a starvation plan, yesterday was unbearable. I took a cold, hard look at what I want to achieve and came up with these priorities:

1. Health – I’m fed up of feeling tired, looking tired and having a pregnancy bump sized bloated tummy
2. Weight Loss – I have clothes I can no longer fit into. This is new to me and I HATE IT
3. Sustainability – Yo-yo dieting just isn’t a good idea, what I want is to change the way I think about food and actually use food to nourish me, not just to feed my sugar cravings

Once I’d prioritised, I looked at my options again. I could juice for weeks on end, making food the enemy, feeling grouchy, probably bingeing on junk along the way, OR I could make the plan work for me. Now let me share what I had for dinner…

Dinner – Corn on the cob, lightly cooked broccoli, spinach and Brussels sprouts with garlic and chilli, with a handful of black grapes for pudding.

I also had a “snack” juice yesterday, made with pineapple, yellow pepper and ginger which was pretty darned tasty.

I made it through and the way I did that was by tailoring the plan to suit me. My dinner was still just vegetables and it wasn’t particularly satisfying but it took away some of the hunger pangs and still contributed a lot of goodness to my eating plan.

This is how I’m going to do it from now on. I’ll juice in the morning, as I have done again today. I’ll probably have juices as snacks too and the rest of the time I’ll eat. I’ll eat like a vegan and I’ll get to my goals, taking this like a marathon rather than a sprint. What I realised is that this is about control; it’s not that I can’t have the Maltesers sitting on top of the book case, I’m choosing not to. In the same vein, I can choose to eat well but without just living off juices that leave me feeling like I’m missing out.

I still have no idea of my weight but I *should* go home today where I can check that out and report back. In the following posts, I’ll share any fab recipes I encounter which I think could help others trying to do the healthy thing.

Anyone else on a similar plan? x

Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead…Well Not Quite

The Weapon of Choice

Happy 2015 everybody!!!

I have to say, my year has got off to an excellent start as I sit here typing away with a gorgeous, snoring Beagle lying next to me 🙂

Anyhow, this isn’t just a generic happy new year post, I thought I’d conform to what society expects even more than that. This is a “welcome to my new year detox” post! Oh yes, it’s January and I thought I’d make it a challenge by starving myself. I mean getting healthy. Not starving myself, getting into a fit, healthy place.

Seriously though, the bf and I watched a docu-film on Netflix the other week, Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead and it was all about one chap, (Joe Cross) and his quest to sort his life out. He wanted to change things up, stop relying on medication, lose weight and generally feel more alive, and he brought a few people along with him too. Now, we’ve all seen these documentaries before and we’ve had juice diets rammed down our throats just about as much as we possibly can but something in this film just made me sit up and realise that I CAN DO IT! I really can.

I’m not fat per sé, but I am packing quite a few extra pounds at the moment which I wouldn’t mind losing. However, that’s not my main motivation. My main goal is to stop looking and feeling sooooooooooooo tired. It’s got to the point of ridiculousness and I know for sure that the food I’m putting in simply isn’t up to scratch. So I’ve set myself the challenge of turning that around before the spring comes. I have heaps of fun things going on so I need energy and I need it now.

Starting today, I’m on a juice diet. A hard hit of nutrients! Any avid readers will be pleased to know that I have a new juicer, following the disaster that was my Jason Vale detox back in May. (Read all about it here) There are no hard and fast rules to what I’m doing, I’m just juicing from now until whenever and I’ll be charting my progress along the way.

To join me, you can grab some juice recipes from Joe’s website, here. I’m currently on my first juice, 4 apples, 4 carrots and 2 lemons and it’s actually bloody tasty. What I like about this plan is that I’m not limited to 3 measly juices per day so every time I’m flagging, it should be juice time. My aim is to give you a real person’s run down of how juicing fits into daily life and just how low the lows are and how high the highs are.

Day 1 – 10.45 am – It’s a bank holiday, I can totally do this. I’m bloody starving but there’s a dog here to distract me and I want that healthy glow. Weight is currently unknown as I can’t find a scales anywhere in the bf’s house but I’ll check that out tomorrow.

I’m looking forward to this as the start of the best year ever! x

Day 1 of my James Vale, Juice Master 3 Day Detox

Things on this blog have been a bit serious for the last few posts and it’s been ages since I did any sort of review so I thought I’d jump back on it and try something new. With a hen do coming up this weekend, I’ve decided that I need to run some sort of detox program to try and get my body back to looking and feeling good. Given my past history of failure at these things, I’ve decided to try a 3 day detox.

I’ve downloaded Jason Vale’s 3 day Juice Master detox app and I’ve actually got as far as starting it. According to his motivational video, I’m already doing better than most because I’ve bought the food and started the detox. BOOM! This is the kind of information I need to hear to keep me on the straight and narrow.

The Shopping List

However, the people who said I wouldn’t be hungry LIED. These are the same idiots who say their bloating decreases, their energy increases and they love it from day one.

I’m struggling, it’s 2.30pm and I’m thinking of going straight to bed post evening juice when I get home because I am THAT tired and hungry right now. I even cheated and ate a satsuma…a whole satsuma! My teeth loved the opportunity to chew something 🙂

Then I ate an apple. Just now I ate an apple because I was feeling light-headed. I’m really not sure these diets factor in the extreme eaters like me. WHOOPS!

To be fair, I think it’s been extra bad for me today because my juicer overheated last night so one of my “juices” is full of bits as I had to resort to the blender. Tomorrow’s menu looks much better as there’s a fruit smoothie and there’s ginger in one of the juices which is pretty much my favourite flavour ever! Not that that makes me any less hungry right now. What I’m currently thinking is that might just eat the components of the juice for dinner. No juicing, just actual huge chunks of food. I can’t get more bloated than I am right now and it should fill me up enough to allow me to actually do some exercise which has to be a good thing.

Watch this space to see if I’ve fallen off the wagon by this time tomorrow… (think thin, think yummy smoothie, think bikini, think…oh sod it!) x

Sugar-Free, Grain-Free, Bean-Based Chocolate Cake!

Hello All!

Sorry for my delay in writing but I don’t have the full Office suite on my work laptop and editing images seems rather tricky. By editing, I do just mean cropping as let’s face it, my images are pretty basic!

Anyhow, one of the things I was doing this weekend which meant I failed to post was making a cake with beans instead of flour. Yes, I did just say I made a cake with beans. I chose not to make mine dairy free but you could essentially make this a sugar-free, dairy-free, grain-free cake. The cake I made is sooooooooo super rich that it really needs cream or custard or something with it to break up the flavour but I think simply adding less cocoa powder would help.

As this isn’t really a cookery blog, I’ll just provide you with a link to the recipe on my other blog and tell you that this really is a moist, tasty cake and well worth a try. I’ve even had one of my male friends who is an awesome chef try it and he agrees that it’s good cake. Mine doesn’t look as pro as the original recipe but here are some images. AND HERE IS THE RECIPE – CLICK ME!

The Whole Cake

It Cuts Like Cake

Tastes Like Cake

Sorry about the grainy photography, it always looks so good on my phone! This is a seriously rich, tasty chocolate cake. It’s easy to make and perfect for those of you needing a healthier but devilishly tasty treat or anybody who’s following a prohibitive diet. Get baking! x

 

 

Where to Eat – Japanese in Piccadilly

Hello, hello!

Friday night the sister and I ventured up to the big smoke for an evening of viewing pleasure in the Piccadilly Theatre watching Viva Forever. The show was great; cheesy, not the best musical you will ever see but it was funny and it took us back to a happy time in the 90s when the Spice Girls were our world!

One word of warning would be that if you are not British or have lived in the UK a while / didn’t love the Spice Girls and have never watched X-Factor then you probably won’t get it. We had 2 American ladies sat next to us for the first half of the show who promptly left in the interval, I don’t believe they understood a lot of the humour as they didn’t have the contextual reference points.

Whilst on our way, we needed to grab some food but were of course pushed for time and literally ran into the first place that looked like it might serve us quickly as we needed to eat, pay and be seated at the theatre inside 25 minutes 🙂 Well, the place we stumbled upon was Ittenbari and boy were we lucky! The place was full of Japanese diners which is always a good sign in a Japanese restaurant and the food we ordered was delicious; my favourite of what we had was the pork gyoza, full of flavour. The prices are also great, for just under £25 we had the gyoza (of which there were 6), 2 mains, a Coke and a Diet Coke.

So, I just wanted to post that quick up update to say that next time you are in a rush for the theatre anywhere in the Piccadilly Circus vicinity, stop on by at Ittenbari and you’ll be able to get scrummy food at a good price in no time at all!

I hope you are all having a good weekend and enjoying the fact that whilst it may be cold, the sun has at last reappeared!!! x

Budapest (Part 2, The Food)

As promised, here is the second part of my Budapest write-up and this one focuses on the food! If you haven’t seen Part 1, check it out here.

If you’re like me then you’ll probably have no idea what Hungarian food really is and therefore no idea what to expect. Well, we’ve left feeling almost the same! It was very hard to find restaurants serving traditional Hungarian cuisine in Budapest, there was a lot of influence from the countries that have featured in their history books. You can find Greek food, Turkish food and Serbian food on pretty much every menu in the city but Hungarian food is much harder to find.

On our walking tour, we were told that Hungarian food is extremely unhealthy and involves a lot of meat and deep frying. Dishes you should look out for include goulash, pancakes with cheese or meat in the middle and what they call cottage cheese but which is really a cheesecake like cheese full of syrup! What you may not be aware of is that they also make a lot of wines in Hungary and their wine is fantastic, I’ll recommend somewhere to try their wines in a bit 🙂

Ok, so things we tried whilst we were there…the pancakes with cheese in the middle. I had these on Margaret Island and they were like pancake parcels with a weird soggy centre. I’m not sure if they were a good example but they were very strange! Goulash…we had this at Castro Bistro (Trip Advisor link here). The restaurant itself seems bizarrely placed and feels a bit like you are sitting in the middle of a car park but the Goulash was good. I also had some strange chicken dish with beetroot patties…not so good!

The cottage cheese we were told, is best sampled in bar form covered in chocolate which you can buy in any shop. This is what it looks like:

The Packet

The Centre

Now these bars are rather tasty and they are a bit like a cheesecake, that kind of sweet yet tangy flavour yet get with some vanilla cheesecakes. Be sure to grab yourself one if you go!

Whilst we were there we also tried out some of the Turkish cuisine; by this I mean we had an epic kebab one night from a place called Ali Baba’s right by our hotel. We sat out on the street and ate our kebabs and they were delicious, served with loads of fresh salad and your choice of rice, potato or pasta salad. Finally, our other big meal came from a place called 400 upon the recommendation of our walking tour guides. We sat outside and the ambience was amazing, such a friendly, laid back place. We went for the Serbian meat platter to share, here it is:

The platter was pretty epic as you can see and came with a pile of chips, plus we had ordered some salad on the side. The various meats were pretty tasty but I had to wimp out and give half of my share to my bf as it was just too much for me! The golden rule with the restaurants is really to try and avoid any near the river. The Jewish Quarter is where you will get a more authentic experience and where you’ll find Hungarian people hanging out as well.

Drinks wise, we stumbled upon a couple of places by accident when it was raining one night. Firstly there was GM Klub which is clearly where some of the cool kids go; the DJ was a beardy dude on the decks, there were exposed pipes and a black and white film was being projected onto the wall. It seemed awesome until we waited so long to get a drink that we gave up and moved on:

GM Klub

The next place we stumbled upon was called Kadarka and is a fabulous wine bar. It’s very minimal, was pretty quiet and they sell the wines by the bottle to take away as well as to drink there. I went to the barman and asked for a sweet white wine and was presented with 4 samples to try so I could choose before committing to the glass. The wine was delicious and I’d highly recommend you pop in here.

Finally, I’d like to introduce you to Szimpla, a ruin bar which I’m told is awesome of a night time. Sadly, being old and having walked around all day, the bf’s leg had given up so we didn’t make it there for a night but we did pop in during the day; even if that’s all you can do, you have to go and check out the interior. There are several bars and the place extends outside and upstairs with so much to look at. My pictures do it no justice at all but here they are:

Szimpla

Szimpla

They have something on basically every night so head on down there if you’re young and fit!

So that was our food and drink experience. I’d say Budapest isn’t somewhere you go for the food but it is worth trying some of their more traditional dishes, just so you can leave assured that you had an authentic experience. There are plenty of lovely places to eat and drink so try as many as you can, it’s dead cheap out there and the wine is delicious! x

Fresh Devon Air…and Scones!

A couple of months ago the bf and I took a trip to London Zoo and whilst we were there we happened to bump into a couple of donkeys. That got me thinking about how totally awesome donkeys are and how totally not awesome it was that I still hadn’t visited the donkey sanctuary down in Devon. So we booked ourselves a little trip-ette down to the coast to visit some Eeyores. Said trip was last weekend as we had the super long bank holidays and I thought I’d share a little with you.

The first new experience for me was staying in a B&B and boy did we pick a good one. We stayed at the Tyrone B&B in Sidmouth and it was fantastic. Our room was huge, as was our en suite shower room; we had free tea, coffee, biccies, hot chocolate & toiletries in the room. The breakfast menu was phenomenal; fruit, yoghurt, cereal, full English (& any combination of), toast, etc. and the owners were lovely too. We even had a little map of the town and some leaflets on local attractions in our room. Embarrassingly, we left our room in a right state on day 1 thinking nobody would go in and when we returned it had been tidied, the bathroom cleaned, our tea stash restocked and our towels changed. You wouldn’t get a hotel of this standard for £33 pppn. (We had bedroom 1 if you are booking.)

Ok, enough bedroom talk, let’s move on. Whilst we were there we visited The Donkey Sanctuary which was brilliant, we had a guided tour which taught us loads, including the fact that donkeys shouldn’t eat grass – take note if you have one! Here are some of my many donkey pics:

This is a proper donkey pose!

The BF with a friendly donkey

Me with Abbie, the friendliest donkey you could ever meet!

I hope you did the polite thing and ignored my hair / face in that last picture. Windswept is so not my look!

Other than visiting the donkeys, we also visited Bicton Botanical Gardens, Lyme Regis and lots of yummy food outlets. Food highlights for me include some ginormous scones with cream and jam and a scrummy fish based dinner at Neil’s Restaurant in Sidmouth. Neil’s gets busy so book your table as it’s only small but the food was fab, I’d highly recommend it.

Here are some more pics of our break:

This one is from Bicton

Stone balancing on the beach at Lyme Regis

The BF with one of the giant scones!

So that was my bank holiday getaway. A change really was as good as a rest; yes it was windy, yes we had to hide in a pub for a while on the first night because it was raining so hard but yes, we had a great time and holidaying in the UK can be really fun! My advice to you is to give it a try, the coastal parts of the UK are totally different in their atmosphere to the cities so it’s all the fun of the break with none of the stress 🙂 x