When Grandmothers Come to Visit.

Sausage meat pie, Roasties and Sweetcorn

It is known among most of us, how awkward it can be to say “no!” to that extra potato your grandmother is trying to put on your plate or the sandwiches and cake between lunch and dinner and the eight O’ clock supper of soup and bread. You feel guilty for stuffing down those extra large portions, all the tea and biscuits you would consume in a week and a flurry of tid-bits she keeps bringing to you but really, we all love it. There is nothing like a grandmother’s cooking to make you feel happy and content like a little pig in the sun. It must be the way it tastes; not particularly spectacular or stunningly presented but full of a warming homeliness that makes you feel young and safe. It is almost like the feeling you get opening a present on Christmas day; ultimately irresistible to even the most miserable of adults. It is only when she leaves after that long weekend you start to notice the bloating of your stomach and the pangs of hunger visiting you every hour on the hour. You immediately crave anything green and juicy and foods of a brown or beige hue offend. However, once you have returned to your limited routine and food doesn’t just find its way into your mouth, you start to wish you had Nana’s magical meals back in the house again and more importantly, her there to make it taste great.

Recipe of the Day: Rice Salad

My sister is always whinging about being hungry and as we are often in the house alone I get roped into cooking things for us. One of my favourite dishes to prepare is a simple rice salad. There are a number of variations including an Asian style salad but because of what was in the fridge I stuck to a more Mediterranean  style.

Ingredients (Serves 6)

2 cups of white Rice
2 cloves of Garlic
1 White onion
100g Sun dried tomatoes
1 large Courgette
100g Green olives with pimentos
100g Roast chicken
Spinach
Olive oil

Put two small cups of rice on the boil. Whilst this is cooking chop the garlic and onion finely. Slice your olives and tomatoes and cut the courgette into small chunks. Put the courgette into a bowl, drizzle with olive oil and microwave for one and a half minutes. Chop up some roast chicken if you have some or leave it out. It still tastes good. When the rice is ready, drain it then run some cold water over the rice to cool it slightly. Add the spinach leaves and stir them in so they wilt. Add all of the other ingredients, drizzle with olive oil and season well with salt and pepper. You could also add some chives and basil if you are feeling posh 🙂 Once the rice gets to room temperature it is ready to eat.

It is a lovely snack for any veg you might have lying in the fridge that needs to be used up. Hope you enjoy!

First Day Back at the Gym.

I am quite tired after going to the gym today. My sister and I decided it was about time especially as we had pigged out on cheesy pasta for lunch and I haven’t been since holiday which was about a month ago! I almost forgot about the jam doughnut we had. My Nana brought some back from the bakery today and it really was sinfully delicious and it was even more incentive to get gyming.

I have decided to set myself a target so I don’t just gradually stop going which is a 20k run. I managed to do 5k today in half an hour which I would really like to improve. I also attacked the thighs with some light weights to tone but I really would like to do more activity to get rid of that pesky fat on my thighs. Any advice?

Holly and I have decided we are really going to focus on healthy eating next week as well as lots and lots of gyming. I really want to up the intensity and feel the burn! 😉
I know you fitness experts are out there. Help me say goodbye to fat thighs.

cheesy pasta from Sainsbury’s mmm!!

Recipe of the Day: Tomato Bruschetta

Sometimes the most simple recipes can be the most satisfying and this is definitely one of my summer favourites. I made it for my boyfriend and I in Tenerife for dinner one night and I can honestly say it was delicious. The soft tomatoes, tangy onions and crunchy bread offered a range of beautiful textures combined with the smooth richness of the extra virgin olive oil. We had it with some Serrano ham and brie; an unlikely combination of European flavours but it is just what we fancied at the time.

Recipe:

2 Beef tomatoes
1 medium sized red onion
2 cloves of fresh garlic
High quality extra virgin olive oil
two small baguettes or bruschetta

We cut the tomatoes into chunks and sliced the red onion into small pieces. We then added finely chopped garlic and added a few lugs of olive oil and mixed it together with a little salt and cracked black pepper. You can add some chopped basil as an optional extra for a deeper flavour. We then cut the baguettes in half and drizzled them with olive oil, rubbed freh garlic over the soft bread and then popped them under a high grill for five minutes. Once the bread is nice and crunchy, take it out and serve with your delicious tomato mixture.

So satisfying, so tasty and so healthy! The only bad thing is that when you end up eating so much of it the bread becomes a little abrasive and you really feel it with those acidic tomatoes and onions. Oh well, it’s not stopping me 🙂

A bit about me.

 

 

 

This is my sister Holly (left) and I at one of my cousin’s birthdays. Even from this young, I really loved my food even if this photo seems to show my sister enjoying it more. I used to triumph over eating the most or finishing my plate of food first and then getting seconds! I blamed my current weight on this for a while but that is really a total lie…. I used to swim. Despite being terrible at almost every other sport and hating it too, swimming was the exception. Before secondary school I would swim something like forty lengths a day minimum just to see how many i could do but that all stopped when I was about thirteen. I grew very self conscious of my body and started taking the “you’re ugly”/”fat” kind of comments from boys seriously and gave up swimming all together. Of course, I carried on eating a lot as if I was swimming every day and so it was not long before I filled out and not in a sexy curves kind of way. 

This was me in 2008. I am the fat one on the left with the bad hair cut, off colour top and wearing flip flops and jeans. I had just finished year 10 or grade 9, 5ft5 and I was about 12st, size 16. I know, Ouch. We were in Padstow, Cornwall in this picture at a karate event. I had started practicing Seido Karate with my step mother Tracy, (right) in the Fulham dojo about a year before the trip and as we progressed through the grades the exercise became more intense. We had an amazing Kyoshi who was so committed and so inspiring that I wanted to try hard just to make him and all of the senpais (or black belts) proud. I was going to karate twice a week and it felt good to get my fitness back once again and lose some of that horrible weight I had gained from lazing about and eating bags and bags of crisps. I finished college in 2011 at about 11st7, size 14 on top 16 on bottom. I promised myself I would lose weight over summer before I went to uni. “I can’t possibly make any friends at my weight.” I thought. I had to compensate with a hot body as my face was definitely not up to the job of distracting away from the rolls. So I went through a series of horrible crash diets ranging from only eating salad every day to a more well known, milkshake diet. BAD IDEA!!

I can’t say enough how horrible and awful crash diets are not to mention terrible for your health and ineffective especially in the long term.

I didn’t really lose much weight apart from a few pounds and went to the University of Portsmouth 11st4. 

 

These are my flat mates and I. The girl on the left had to be a beautiful slim blonde so it really was hard for me to compete with her but we were friend never the less. My weight issues didn’t take over my whole life I promise! The boy on the far right is Tom, my current boyfriend (yes, yes I broke the rule of never dating your flat mates but it worked for me!), a cycling fanatic and the other one is a sports science student with a six pack so you can understand how I may have felt a little bit balloonish. 

Despite the huge amounts of alcohol we were consuming regularly, I manged to lose about half a stone by Christmas because I “couldn’t afford” luxuries like crisps, chocolate and junk food. I cooked all my meals from scratch and generally improved my eating habits. I had also been walking everywhere and going out a lot which meant I was dancing about for two or three hours twice a week. Just this little bit of activity caused me to drop to a size 14 all over and all my family noticed when I came home but I still wanted to lose a little more weight. 

I joined the University of Portsmouth Hockey Club in September 2012 in my second year of uni. I really joined for the social side because I had heard they were a wild, outgoing society. I had no idea I would really get into the sport so much. Even though my history of sport is terrible and I have no co-ordination I really enjoyed being part of a team and competing (I am still terrible at hockey though :P) We trained twice a week as well as our games on a Wednesday. It was this that showed me real exercise will give you results and I will definitely be joining the society again when I go back in September. I am now a healthy 10st5, size 12-14 and finally out of the over weight section of the BMI chart. 

So! The moral of this post seems to be: I could never have done this without leaving home for University. I learned that you don’t have to eat mountains of crap all of the time and exercise feels so good! My 5ft8, size 8 sister can eat what she likes, do no exercise and not gain weight. For those unlucky ones like me who can’t rely on a metabolism, listen and find a sport, any sport, for any reason and participate! Even if you only do one hour a week you will see a difference just like I did. 

 

I like food.

I like food. I like food a lot. I like it so much that when I wake up in the morning I plan my day around when and what I’m going to eat. Breakfast could be a fried eggs and brown toast or porridge, for lunch delicious salads and sandwiches and dinner baked chicken and mash, sausages or a take away. I’m really not a fussy eater. I love EVERYTHING Give me all the veg that grows and any piece of fruit on offer, cover everything is cheese, chocolate and butter and I am in heaven! And so, I thought why not blog about something I love? However, there is one thing messing up my love affair and that is my desire to lose weight. It may seem like an old record coming from a young girl but the way I see it, if I’m not going to get into physical exercise now then I definitely won’t when my rubbish metabolism doesn’t exist any more. I am not, what I would consider as fat but compared with your average 20 year old I could definitely lose a couple of pounds here or thighs or there or thighs again. So welcome to my blog dedicated to fatness, foodness and fitness. Enjoy!