The 12 Week "Dietary Clean-up" Challenge

It's been a while since I've embarked upon a challenge. To be completely honest I haven't been in the right frame of mind for it for the last few months. I lost the usual Eggy zest as I hit a bit of an emotional dip and am only just starting to recover from what has seemed like the longest bout of insomnia ever. Over this time my physical activity levels dropped dramatically, comfort eating rose up and reigned over healthy choices and I felt highly stressed in general. I ended up feeling a bit like a big, fraught, tired, unhealthy blob. There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel.

What To Do When You Don't Finish

It was mental torment. From mile 4 my knee was niggling with the odd sharp twinge. My throat was still sore from a dirty virus that's been sitting in it and I just wasn't feeling my normal energetic self. Despite doing my best to ignore all of that, my mind was playing games; I couldn't decide if I was being a total wuss and needed to give myself a good talking to or if I should just stop before I make any of it any worse.

Stoptober

The Stoptober campaign begins today, “a new, exciting 28 day challenge to stop smoking”. When I first read about it, I immediately had a couple of issues. First and foremost, presuming that it is in fact playing on the name of the month “October” and that isn’t just a very strange coincidence, it appears to be missing three days. Furthermore, surely if it was that easy to just stop, everyone would do it, wouldn’t they?

A Balanced Diet

Hypothetically, if you have one day that is a super, super healthy day where you fill up on vegetables and good, nutritious food and don't eat as much as a sesame seed over what you need, then the next day you have a bacon breakfast, four bits of cake, a packet of cookies and a curry with all the trimmings (and all the stuff everybody else can't finish) for dinner.. does that good/bad actually create balance in the grand scheme of things?

Unnecessary Eating

Yesterday I had a bit of a blip. A wonderfully light and crumbly, home-baked scone made by a brilliantly talented office buddy had left a sweet taste in my mouth. I was walking home past Waitrose and decided to go in and torture myself. I started out well; perused the bakery aisle, oogled the cakes and the freshly-baked, chewy, chocolately cookies. I spent some time in the baking aisle and briefly daydreamed, realising I was surrounded by world of limitless, delightful possibilities.


The biscuit and confectionary aisles called out to me. In Waitrose the force in these aisles is stronger than other supermarkets because there are some seriously scrumptious and exclusive products to tantalize the taste buds. I scrutinised the posh biscuits and managed to tear myself away only to be faced with an enormous range of biscuits for cheese! I stood and imagined a smearing a thick layer of Boursain atop a salted and cracked black pepper thin or a slicing a well-softened brie onto a hovis digestive...


More mental agony occured in the frozen section as I ran the tips of my fingers over the cool, frosted tops of many a luring and luscious flavour of ice cream.

Epic Lent Fail

At the moment weight loss is not one of my official goals. I keep an eye on it and so long as I stay a few pounds below my 9 stone limit, I am happy. Obviously I would love be closer to 8 stone but I'm not going to go on a crazy diet to make this happen. I actually started to get closer in the last couple of weeks without even really trying; my weight plateau was broken a remarkably simple combination of sensible eating and sensible training - it really does work!


So on Friday last week I hit a new lowest weight ever and was sitting at just under 8 and a half stone, I felt fantastic! Then, I began the "carb-loading" for the race. Sadly all my sensibleness went out the window and I used this as an excuse to satisfy my inner gluttonous instincts.


I won't tell you everything I ate because there is a limit as to how many words a person can read before they fall asleep, but believe me when I say it was really quite a lot. I visited relatives on Friday night and it would have been rude to say no to cake and biscuits. I could have stopped at one portion of cake, or one biscuit.. but I didn't.


On Saturday I ate not one, but two easter eggs (massive fail!) and all the associated yummies that come with it. In my head I justified this with it being fuel for race day, but in reality I know I slipped up. I ate pizza and ice creams (note; plural) because this is pretty much all I ate before my first triathlon and it seemed to really work for me. 


Basically out of everything I gave up for Lent, I pretty much managed to have a bit.. or a lot.. of all of them!


What a lot of people would do now is to say "Right, I've failed, it's over!", but this is where you should take your inspiration from and start afresh. It's very easy to get back into old habits but the real trick is just accepting that you messed up, letting it go, and getting yourself back on the straight and narrow.

Ode to Lent (for health, not for Jesus)

With so many of us out here watching our weight,
This day can save us from our unhealthy fate.


Now is the the time to give up the treats,
For a whole forty days it is quite a feat.


But choose something naughty, give it up, take the leap,
In forty days time, what benefits you'll reap!


Be it chocolate or booze or smoking or cake,
Whatever it is, what a difference it'll make.


Get your friends to support you or make them join in,
Hell, throw a party and chuck the treats in the bin!


Don't leave it 'til tomorrow or 'after the weekend'
Stop now, today, that's what I recommend!

Challenge your willpower, challenge yourself,

Think of your body, think of your health.

Okay so we shouldn't need an excuse like Lent to make us give up stuff, we shouldn't need New Year to make new resolutions either but these events are there and they do help inspire us to make a change. 

Loads of my friends and colleagues are taking on 'Challenge Lent' this year, so I'm officially wishing everyone good luck and happy willpower. Don't give up, you'll feel awesome in forty days time!

Coughing Up Ideas For Lent

Mid-morning snackage

Resting when you're ill is so bloomin' boring! I've been keeping myself entertained in between sleeping and coughing fits with power watching Glee and copious trips to the kitchen; feed a cold and all that. 


Even though I have probably eaten marginally more than I would have on a normal day, I have actually - surprisingly - made some very good, healthy choices. After a porridge and prune breakfast, I made a cracking fruit salad to munch on throughout the rest of the morning. 


I think possibly the main reason I made such healthy choices could be something to do with the fact that I ate all the chocolate and sweets I had in the house on Sunday and since then I've felt too poorly to leave the house, so I've had to be more inventive. Nonetheless I felt extremely righteous with my fruit salad and this inspired me to start thinking about Lent and  how I can use it in the war against unhealthiness!


I did say at the start of the year that I was going to veto giving up stuff in favour of taking the "everything in moderation" approach, but it's the challenge of Lent that I love. It's also a great excuse for a major detox! 


So in true 'Egg Goes Healthy' fashion (i.e. if you're gona do it, do it all guns blazing..) I am going to give up a whole host of unhealthy stuff from tomorrow until Easter Sunday:


Cake - I haven't been too bad recently but with lots of long rides coming up, tea shop breaks with be inevitable.
Biscuits and Cookies - My classic gorging items, and by having biscuits, cookies and cakes that means that I can't get away with Jaffa Cakes either, however I choose to define them!
Takeaways - Again not something I have very often at all but I'm going to throw it in the mix to encourage more home-cooking.
Wine - Yes family, that's right. Stop coercing me you tinkers!
Sweets (except Jelly Babies on the bike) - I have to include sweets because if I give up all the other treats I have loads of then sweets become the naughty, sneaky back-up. But Jelly Babies are absolutely necessary for long bike rides.
Chocolate bars and eggs - I feel like I always eat more chocolate eggs on the lead up to Easter than I do at Easter itself. What is it about chocolate in an egg shape that makes it so much more appealing?! I have specified bars and eggs because on the last 'all chocolate products' ban I didn't like not having my chocolatey protein recovery shakes and I feel that the healthiness of those outweighs the unhealthiness of the chocolate. Not that I need to justify myself. Not at all.


So, that is a pretty thorough list I think. Cue more late-night trance-like amblings up and down the supermarket aisles dribbling at all the stuff I can't have! 


Now to just get through the rest of the day without a Chinese, five Easter eggs, a bag of liquorice allsorts, a toffee cheesecake and a triple pack of jaffas...

Mental Battling in January

January is a bizarre time of year where you're not really fully back in the swing of things after Christmas and yet you are trying to set all your goals out for the rest of the year, follow your resolutions etc etc.

For me it has all been a bit hectic, and health-wise, a month of serious ups and downs. Work has been busy (which isn't a bad thing) and mentally taxing as I've been doing a lot of learning in a new department, college has also been quite full on and will continue to be up until June, with lots of assignments to get through, there seems to be more social occasions popping up than there was in December and I have daily mental battles over what needs to take priority: training, assignments, socialising, work deadlines or locating and consuming new and exciting Easter treats. I'm sure you can guess what has come first...

Last weekend I went away for a girly weekend to a lovely place in Kent, right by the sea. In my head I had envisaged runs along the waterfront, a bit of time in the afternoon for study followed by making healthy choices for our lunches and dinners out. In reality what happened was copious amounts of wine and laughter running parallel to an almost permanent state of snacking on anything and everything. The "healthy choice" I made on Saturday night was the largest, meatiest pizza on the menu. It was of course, completely worth it, one of the best pizzas have ever eaten. Once I had demolished that I finished my sister's dinner, ate what was left of mum's mixed grill and decided a chocolate fondant would also be necessary in order to clear the palette.

Suffice to say I was horrified when I stepped on the scales and went out to buy salad to sustain me for the coming week.

On the upside my arm and hand are well on the road to recovery and I've been back on the weight training for a week. A tricep dip has never felt so good. The swimming is also slowly getting back to full throttle, running has been short but regular and I just need to ease myself off the turbo and onto the road to complete the set. But if I'm honest I'm a bit scared and don't want to somehow injure myself again.

I also have a confession. Before I confess though I should say that on Thursday I started to get a sore throat and when I woke up yesterday I was in a world of pain. Cool soup and mashed banana (not together..) were the only things I could get down. That was until I bought a pot of nutella, and ate the whole thing! Oops..

I now really do need to have a healthy week. I'm off skiing next weekend and I have salopettes to squeeze my nutella-filled ass into. I have even prepared for my sweet cravings by making jelly, so I clearly mean business..

Birthday Blow-out

This weekend - after 5 weeks of being awe-inspiringly healthy - I indulged. I mean really indulged. My sister and her husband made, at my request, a "mega roast". We do have a tendency in my family to make slightly too much food so had I requested just a normal roast I am quite sure this would have sufficed, but I was mentally prepared for a guttural blow-out and mega was what I wanted. They didn't disappoint; a joint of beef bigger than my torso and two chickens cooked over a winter blanket of vegetables, the most deliciously sweet honey-roasted parsnips, enough roast potatoes - complete with their mouth-wateringly crispy shells - to feed the village, a selection of gravy etc etc. There was no messing about either, this was all cooked with no-holds-barred.. even the carrot and swede mash had cream in it.


We finished with Kezza's "healthy carrot cake" but all healthiness was lost by the fact that we doubled it up with dad's home-made apple crumble and custard.


I won't even tell you about breakfast..


Not only did we eat lots of glorious food but we also consumed quite a respectable amount of booze too, as is customary on these family occasions. I was actually glad to get back home and enjoy a relaxed evening of tea and cakes without a drop of booze in sight.


Something happened when I started to make the cakes for my mini tea party; a sort of baking craze took over me and I couldn't stop making wondrous goodies. I baked triple chocolate brownies, and a marbled chocolate and vanilla cheesecake to go with the peanut butter and chocolate cheesecake we'd made at my sister's. Then I made a massive amount of tiffin to use up all the excess chocolate.



Then as a few friends arrived we had Hugo's marvellous millionaire shortbread (with the smoothest, most impressive chocolate top I have ever seen), Lianna's lemon cupcakes, Maz's cappucino cupcakes, AJ's white chocolate and chocolate chip enormous cake and Laura's orange squash cakes! This all added up to a lot of cake. A lot of cake.


Sadly that aforementioned marbled cheesecake wasn't even ready in time, so it's been sat in my fridge since I put in in to cool on Sunday evening. I just took the first slice, moments ago. It is heaven. I can't even describe in words the sheer pleasure I derived from putting it in my mouth. Wow. 


Now I'm hoping that people pop around to share the calories with me or else this is going to be one very fat week indeed!

Lent in November?!

Abingdon - just for the record - is uphill from Salisbury. In a very unusual turn of events it turns out that Salisbury is also uphill from Abingdon. Despite this elevation perplexity, my weekend cycling adventure was absolutely marvellous. Fresh, cool, clear autumn days made the journey through North Wiltshire and the Cotswolds a joy, even with all the uphill.

On the way up there on Friday I discovered the Pewsey Hill, which a little bird named Sarah had warned me about. I was nervously anticipating something horrific as I approached and after an extended but very friendly gradient of climb into Pewsey I was almost a little disappointed at the lack of effort I'd had to put in. I thought maybe I'd had a tailwind or something that had made it easier, or maybe Sarah was just a massive wuss?!

A mile or so later and my heart sunk as I realised it wasn't the climb into Pewsey, it was the climb out. It isn't a regular occurance for my face to bead with sweat when out cycling but good grief this was a climb and a half, made all the worse by a ridiculous set of roadworks that had me wobbling into a traffic cone in front of a line of traffic as I attempted a steep hill start.

After this hill however, the rest of the journey was fantastic. I left the smooth, tree-lined A4 early and got myself lost in some fantastic single-track roads through the Cotswolds. Thankfully I didn't meet any traffic. In fact, both my journeys were surprisingly car free - wonderful!

We celebrated my safe arrival with curry and wine, which I definitely felt was justified after 65 miles and 2200ft of elevation gain. With that cycle on Friday and my slightly shorter, more direct journey back today, I'm feeling a lot more confident about tackling the Exmoor Beast next weekend!

The other news to report is that in a crazed moment of excitement, I was sucked into a bonkers pact with Liz to give up chocolate and all chocolate-related products. It was all her idea and she barely gave me a chance to agree before she had written it (in ink, no less) on the calendar. She wanted to go until the end of November but as my birthday falls on the last weekend on November I managed to negotiate going to the 26th. In the midst of this negotiation we managed to egg each other on and added in cake, puddings and biscuits! So basically no treats for just over a month. No happy eating days. She even hid my chocolate horlicks.

I'm going to try and embrace this unseasonal lent in the spirit of Egg Goes Healthy of course but it's going to be tough. Now I'm off to hide something Liz loves before she gets home..

Starve a fever, feed a cold

It appears that when I am poorly, I lose the little willpower I have and very easily cave in to the philosophy that eating will cure me. Perhaps it's true, a few days rest and some excellent nourishment would help to get the body back on track, the body is a temple and all that.. Well, right now my body isn't so much a temple, it's more of a prison that I have stuffed full of baddies. Whilst I have consumed the customary chicken soup and eaten loads of orangery for my vitamin C, I have also packed this particular facility with almost every foodie criminal known to man.

The thing is, the more you overfill your cells with these calorific convicts, the more dilapidated the place becomes. Then when it really starts falling apart they'll all escape and spread their vandalistic crimes throughout the outer wings of the prison. In simpler terms, I eat and I'm still poorly, but just fatter.

These crazy metaphors have probably come from me being feverish and delusional, but keeping with the prison theme.. I think it could be time to send in the big green guards...

The silver lining here I suppose is that the last time I was poorly it gave me an enormous motivation to kick start my whole healthy lifestyle in the first place. Now that I've been unable to do any form of exercise for a few days on account of feeling so rough, I've never felt more determined to get going again!

As soon as I'm feeling better I shall be back on a strict regime. Until then, I need to stop letting so many of these very desirable undesirables in!

August Blues

I have been very aware over the last few weeks that my training and healthy living regime has dwindled. What with moving house and all the stuff that comes with it, sorting out my new job, getting generally sorted career-wise and being very sociable, the Egg-Goes-Healthy motivation has been put on the back-burner. A friend of mine very sensibly said yesterday "Egg, it's called 'life' and that's ok".. wise words indeed.

However, I'm not sure it is just life. I think I have discovered what the problem really is, and it's been sneaking up on me like a ninja in the shadows.

Wine.

You see I've been doing a lot of celebrating in August. The month started with a very heavy week and I don't think I've fully recovered since then. It was as I scoffed down a curry with all the trimmings last night and polished off a bottle of wine that I realised what I'd been doing. From being almost teetotal for a couple of months I've somehow gone on a wine binge without even noticing it was happening. Maybe this is how alcoholism starts?!

Luckily now I have spotted the problem and will cease all my celebratory activities with immediate effect. Maybe that's a bit too harsh, maybe I'll just continue to celebrate but do it with some lovely fresh juice instead - much better idea. I'm not even sure what I'm celebrating to be honest. Maybe tonight I shall celebrate not drinking wine.

In addition to the wine I will also make a confession. I have been a the cookies. I've had maybe four packets throughout the month thus far, Tesco keep putting their Finest range on offer and I am merely a weak-willed cookie-munching monster. Today I picked some up on the way to the fruit section, then I realised they were a very unneccessary addition to my shopping basket, so I put them back. Then the whole way round the supermarket my mind kept drifting back to Belgian chocolate chunks. I caved and had to go back and get some. I hid them under the nectarines.

My current goals have gone by the wayside a bit. I put this down to not running at first but I can't keep using that as an excuse. I am chuffed to bits with the 5k I did last weekend at the Relays, not quite the sub 24-minute I was aiming for but a good time nonetheless considering I have done no running in the past few weeks. The 400m swim time is getting there, I managed an 8:33 in the lake yesterday morning but the real test will be in the pool. Eating and sleeping-wise I have really been slack, but now that I am in my new place I can really start putting these into action.

What I need to do is write August off completely. Start afresh. I will be going away with a friend on Monday to walk the 101 miles of the South Downs Way in four days, whilst carrying hefty rucksacks. This is the perfect fresh start I need and I shall return in September to my new house, start my new job and get into a new routine. Lovely.

Might start celebrating my fresh start!