We have run into owning your own house challenge do it yourself no 3 (first was plumbing in the toilet, second was changing out the sink faucet when it started leaking) Now we gotta change out the belt in the tumble dryer. Sunday night it died on the first load, I will never under appreciate soft clothes again. We hung everything up and dried it the old fashioned way. So now it's all kinda crunchy..

Oh and that just topped off a bad end to the week on Friday when our mail server died at work and I spent 12 hours rebuilding it :(

Here's to a better end of the week, so far it is improving slowly :)

Workout's are going great, I made it to Sat morning's Gorilla fitness class although I skipped ladies class afterwards as I didn't have time to wash my Gi friday night. Wish I had as I might have discovered the broken tumble dryer when we have had more time to fix it on Saturday. On a good note I hadn't put the bed linen in :) We really do have to get a second set one of these days.

Nara (her name got shortened) is kinda of settling down, she is alternately bullying and being bullied. She is becoming cute with us though.

Food choices have been much better this past week. The stew I made was awesome :) Will definitely have to make that again. Still seem to have trouble controlling the chronic munchies at the weekends though. Still managed not to do too much damage :) Hanging tight at 174 right now which is awesome considering recent months ups and downs.

life

Hmm, lets see...

Mike absolutely killed us in Gorilla Fitness on Saturday morning, I haven't been that sore in a long time. Followed by a good ladies class an hour later and I was almost ready to take a nap saturday afternoon. Thankfully lots of coffee shored me up for a day of playing warhammer online. :)

I think my week of 'relaxed' eating ended up being a carboholics dream, upshot was weight went back up too. Monday weigh in was 178.6, tuesday morning after starting my fast at lunch on monday was 175.6 so I think it was mostly water but still I didn't lose any weight either so obviously not making that good of choices. I dunno what it is about D&D but I always have the most serious munchies throughout the session, perhaps it is cause we play in the dining room which is pretty much open to the kitchen.

Definitely too many taco nights and pasta lunches etc. I was also finishing the foccacia loaf I bought the previous weekend. I am not going to go back to too much of a low carb but I am going to try and limit them a bit better. My veggie intake probably fell in direct correlation to the starchy carb increase. So this week we are making better choices, I made a huge beef stew at the weekend, Beef, carrots, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, sweetcorn and instead of potatoes which would be my normal addition I threw in two cans of black beans. I really wasn't sure how it was gonna turn out with that but I was pleasantly surprised. So I have a nice fibrous and tasty lunch for this week. I normally like stew thick enough to stand your spoon up in which involves a crap load of corn starch but I decided to view it as meaty soup and discovered it is just fine without the extra corn starch. Just goes to show what creatures of habit we are.

Well time to get to class, most of my stiffness has gone so should be a bit easier than last nights ladies class. Rolling with the boys tonight unless one of the other ladies shows up.

This is the perfect example of why we can't have any open boxes of tissues or toilet paper out in the open in our house. This happened when I mistakenly left the kitchen towel roll in sight of Willow. She can do that in about 3 seconds flat.

All our regular house guests now know to look in the second drawer down when they use the bathroom.

In other news Red Dwarf is making a comeback! yay

Sugar Rant

There has been a lot of fuss about High Fructose Corn Syrup being the devil recently. It's blamed for the obesity epidemic amongst other nefarious things. The corn industry is fighting back with adverts saying it's natural and no different from sugar.

I do try and avoid it personally but I think people are missing the point. The problem isn't so much the HFCS, it's the fact its in bloody everything. Americans are fat because they are jacked up on sugar. I realised the other night why everyone claims English food is so bland. I think its cause we don't put sugar in everything.

I just went to an Italian restaurant for lunch where I had some spaghetti bolognese. It was pretty obvious there was sugar in the sauce. Another 'famous' Italian restaurant makes a big deal about their 'sweet' sauce. Personally I find it unpalatable these days, I like to taste tomatoes not sugar.

The recipe for meatloaf my mother in law gave me has a tomato sauce spread across the top that is tomato ketchup mixed with an ungodly amount of brown sugar.

Pizza crusts here along with bread in general has sugar added. Plain white bread is almost cakelike.

You cannot buy pre-packaged fruit these days that does not have sugar added. I got excited when I saw no-sugar added mandarins on the shelf, till I picked up the package and saw 'sweetened with splenda' on the side. For goodness sake, mandarins, peaches.. shoot almost any fruit is just fine on it's own. It does not need frickin sugar added to it.

So buy fresh fruit I hear you say.. yeah I do, but there is something nice and convenient about a pre-sized cup of fruit in juice though. I can keep it in the fridge indefinitely. Whenever I buy peaches I usually manage to miss that sweet spot where they taste great and end up letting them over ripen and some end up getting wasted.

The point being that if normal supposedly savory foods had less, preferably no sugar in and the already sweet stuff wasn't additionally sweetend with more I don't think there would be such a problem.

We were offered another kitten last night, sadly I had to refuse. She does look absolutely adorable as you can see but crazy cat lady in training I might be but I am also a snobby crazy cat lady and I refuse to feed my kids crappy catfood. Thus I have to set a limit on mouths to feed as they are getting expensive. Especially as three of them have a definite preference for wet food.

If you're interested we are using a holistic cat food from Wellness. No grains, human grade meat (not ground up chicken feet), and no crappy fillers. Good stuff and comes in lots of varieties to give them something different each day. :)

Jiu-Jitsu was great last night, learned some cool arm locks. I also found one of my training partners is one of the first people not to think I'm crazy for fasting. She has done it herself last year and loved it. After our conversation I think she is going to start again. She is pretty fit so she is just doing it once a week to maintain weight. Nice to have a warm body to talk to that understands though.

Did my circuit training last night, was a rep workout which is cool but not as much running as normal. Was feeling decidedly peculier afterwards so not sure I have quite thrown off this infection. I get the feeling it is just lurking.

At least that is my excuse for pulling a total girly on the way home. I had to stop and get gas(petrol) and the stupid machine was being petulant about giving me a receipt so apparantly I was a bit distracted. On the way home I was making fun of this idiot cause he kept honking his horn at every stoplight. Wasn't till a bit further on I went to change lanes and on looking in my side mirror realised my petrol cap was open.. *sigh* I pulled in to the advance auto parts store parking lot as I had a sneaking suspicion that the crappy bit of plastic that holds the cap was not enough to withstand 40 mph traffic. Sure enough it was completely missing. So withdrawing rude insults at aforemention not so much idiot I went into the store and admitted my own idiocy to the nice chap behind the counter. He hooked me up with a new cap and we had a good chat about cultural differences. Having a british accent is sometime's a blessing and a curse. I get some interesting conversations sometimes.. and others that leave me going .. Huh?

Lady: Where are you from?
Me: England, just north of London. Moved here 3 years ago. (this was a while back now)
Lady: Oh cool.. So did you speak English when you moved here?
Me: Uhh... M'am.. I am English.
Lady: Yeah.. but did you speak it?

The mind boggles.. I made my excuses and left fast.. I still wonder what on earth she is under the impression that English people speak if it isn't English.

Weirdness

So I missed last nights bjj class because by 5pm I was exhibiting all the signs of an oncoming respiratory infection which plague me now and then. Cold, dizzy, slight fever, headache, sinus ache, ears popping and all those other wonderful symptoms. So instead of trying to go to class I just went and bought more catfood and headed home. By the time I went to bed I felt fine, this morning I feel fine.

How does one get sick and throw it off in the span of 8 hours? I love my constitution, really I do, but that is just weird.


Speaking of weird, more cat stories for you. We, like most people, used to keep a cup by the sink in the bathroom. Our eldest, Mune, decided one day that this was going to be her drinking container of preference. She never did like her water dish. Put a glass of water down and within 3 seconds you could guarantee she'd have her head in it drinking your water like she hadn't had any for a week. As we gained more cats they saw this trick and thought it was a good idea. In the end we had three cats fighting over the cup in the bathroom while you were trying to clean your teeth. So my hubby took away the cup declaring that they needed to learn to use their own water dish. That was about 6 months ago.

Kai in the mean time became a faucet kitty and would curl up in the sink and wait for you to turn the tap on. Willow would go so far as to lick up any toothpaste leavings in the sink if she got to it before Kai curled up in it.

This morning hubby walked in to clean his teeth this morning to Kai in the sink, Willow sitting beside her and Mune on her old perch on the back of the toilet (where we would usually put the cup for her). They were all looking at him expectantly. He finally relented and went and got their cup.

I in the mean time was feeding Anya and Inara. Anya seems to think the world is coming to an end in the morning and that she is starving to death. I've never seen a cat who is free fed (they have dry food down all the time) dive into their food so bad, she is such a greedy little bugger. She'll growl at anyone who comes near the bowl, even puts her paw over the bowl so they can't get a nose in the edge and then proceeds to try and bury whats left when she has had enough, kinda hard on ceramic tile, she trys hard though.

Inara is definitely coming out of her shell and even joined us for breakfast of her own accord. Still growling at everyone else though.

Gotta love em :)

My Kids

Probably one of my favourite pics. Such a lazy bunch. From left to right, Mune, Kai, Willow and Anya.

Inara still to follow.

BreakFast

I broke my fast today after 22 hours when hubby called me to go to lunch. We went to O'Charlies and I got the Bistro chicken. Grilled chicken breast on top of parmesan encrusted potatoes with a bistro salad (oil and vinager dressing). Was pretty tasty, not too filling and I got some healthy greens in. The salad was actually a pretty decent mix of greens. Not just crappy romaine or iceburg.

Definitely better than the breaded chicken tenders and fries that were tempting me. :)

Life.. I do actually have one!

I guess its not really life o' limey without some actual life outside my workouts. I'm not a complete health nut.

My cats are my kids and on Friday we got #5. When she stops hiding I will get some pictures she is pretty cute though. She is actually Anya's litter sister. The lady that adopted her had 2 18 year old cats. The kitten just wants to play and her elders just want to sleep so she was driving the poor things batty, thus her former owner offered her to us knowing that we would give her a great home.

She, now named Inara, spent the first couple days cowering in corners so I put her in her own room for a while until she despazzed, got used to the new smells somewhat and didn't have to run the gauntlet to get to the litter box and food. She is now wandering the house although still hissing at anyone who comes too close. I am extremely surprised at how unconcerned the other cats are. Kai is fascinated with her (as I expected) and has been following her around sitting about 3 feet away and looking bored and unimpressed at the hissing fits. I figure another day or two and they will be playing quite happily.

Mune, my eldest, I was sure was gonna leave home but she seems the most unconcerned of the bunch, I think she has finally got past caring what strays we bring in :) She has been cuddly and fairly 'normal' for her. With her that means hating everyone except me and my husband. She'll accept strokes from people when she is outside and will do the leg rub to people inside but try and touch her inside and she'll more than likely leave you with scars. When we got Kai, and then Anya 3 months later she was even being vicious with us. Not a happy kitty to say the least.

On other notes we started Warhammer Online on Sunday. I am a video game geek too and love my MMO's. I am playing a Chaos Zealot at the moment although the Greenskin Squig Herder will be my alt for sure. The squigs are so cute and I have always loved pet classes. :) I normally hate PVP but am actually finding the pvp scenario's a lot of fun.

Had to cut that a bit short when some friends came over for D&D. We are playing 4th edition right now. The combat is definitely so much more interesting now. We had a one shot Sunday as one of the main players was missing so I rolled up an Eladrin Ranger. My char for the main campaign we are doing is a Dwarven Fighter. Loving both right now.

Oops, lunch break over :) Back to work...

New Month, New Plan, Finally Results

There is a reason that my prior attempt at blogging trailed off. OCD, or more accurately OCE, Obsessive Compulsive Eating.

This is a term coined by Brad Pilon, my new favourite hero. He is the author of Eat Stop Eat. I've seen his book floating around for a long time but in my perceived superior knowledge I had dismissed it as another fad diet. That was my biggest mistake.

I finally saw Craig Ballentyne, another favourite trainer of mine, recommend this book and the results of the latest Turbulance Training Challenge. One lady's results were phenomonal, actualy they were all phenomonal results, but hers stood out as she seriously looked 20 years younger. She had used Eat Stop Eat as had the rest I believe.

So I shelled out some money and read Brads science on Intermittant Fasting. It made sense, a lot of sense. I started my first 24 hour fast that very next day.

My monday morning weigh in was 179.8, This morning (1 week later) after 2 fasts (Mon and Thurs) and a very relaxed eating plan, three meals a day, not watching carbs or proteins or fats or calories I weighed in at 175.8. That works for me. I actually weighed in Saturday morning at 174.4 which I haven't seen since prior to last thanksgiving.

I feel so free, so relieved. Something is finally working. And all I have to do is not eat for 24 hours twice a week and keep up my resistance training. The latter is continuing to be done via my jiu-jitsu and circuit training.

I will still continue to eat 'healthy', plenty of veggies, healthy fats, lean proteins etc but I won't shy away from the bread basket, nor will I gorge myself on it either. Sensible eating is still the key, I don't have to stay absolutely 100% on plan with a carefully detailed macro percentage calorie based plan to make any progress however. All that does is make me go crazy.