Hayfever, salads and personal trainers

Since moving house and getting over my cold, I haven’t been too brilliant at keeping up with my fitness regime over the last few weeks. I weighed myself this morning and I am the same as last week – which is good considering I only went to the gym once last week and we had a friend round so I drank more alcohol than I usually do and a few meals out.

I went to the gym this morning after a morning of feeling very itchy – my nose just wouldn’t stop itching and the skin on my hands, neck and face has come up in an itchy rash. I get this every summer, as soon as the sun comes out and I start taking antihistamines. So I think it has started now!

I had a great workout which lasted about 1 hour and 15 mins and I then had a lovely walk round town and did some food shopping for the week. I also checked out the gym near my new flat and found out it costs £35/month! That is £5 more than my current gym but I think I will save not having to use the bus there and back 3 times a week. One good thing about the new gym is that a personal trainer is included in the package – I get to have 1 hour with them every month and they set me a training programme – now that sounds great! I have wanted some proper instruction now for quite a while as I feel I might need to work other parts of my body.

Lunch was lovely today, I had one of my gorgeous salads with chicken, giant olives and crackers (see picture below):

I was so full and I am still now, so I will probably be able to hold out until my boyfriend gets home and we can eat dinner together – we have the choice of stir-fry salmon or soup…mmmmm….we’ll see what one he goes for!?

I am hoping to get to the gym 3 times this week, I really need to get back into my routine and lose some more weight in the next weigh-in, so fingers crossed!

It’s still all on track!

I am back online! Yes, the broadband has been connected and I am back on my laptop on the couch writing this! It’s bliss.

I couldn’t weigh myself this Monday, I was staying at my parents’ house and would you believe it…they don’t own a working weighing machine! I also forgot to weight myself on Tuesday morning before I went to work, so a few days late, the results are in, I have lost about 1lbs/0.5kg which I am ecstatic about! I really thought with all my eating halva, biscuits, icecream and drinking beer last week I would have put weight on, but luckily I managed to keep moving and behaving myself with food portions. I also only went to the gym once as I was extremely busy, so it is a relief to know that I can still lose weight even if I’m not on top form.

Managed to get to the gym this morning, I had an excellent workout. I started on the bike and did 10 minutes warm up on the aerobics trainer workout and then did 5 minutes of fast rowing on the machine. Moved over to the weights section and worked my way through all the muscle groups doing reps of 20-30 x 3. It was excellent because I was really working my muscles throughout the weight training section and I had worked up quite a sweat throughout. I then moved over to the step machine and trained on the ‘fat burn’ workout for 15 minutes whilst watching a Poker tournament on tv and listening to some brilliant music on my ipod. The time just flew by as I was totally engrossed in the poker tournament because my brothers taught me how to play over the weekend. I love it!

The weekend went well…I went to a Tapas bar with my family and we ate loads of gorgeous spanish food and I had a scrumptious desert which I shared with my brothers and my parents. This is new for me as desert was only ever mine! I can’t believe I did it really but the thought process in my head was that I was still a bit peckish after the tapas and one of the chocolate and fudge ice cream deserts was screaming out at me so I ordered it and then I asked for extra spoons for everyone! Not bad aye!?

I am hoping to get to the gym on friday although my boyfriend has the day off and one of our friends is down from Norwich so I may be distracted.

I am going to cook a gorgeous roast chicken tonight with oven roasted carrots and  potatoes.

New Flat – New Fitness Regime!

Catch-up from last week and weekend:

Well, since I blogged last week, we managed to successfully move house (not without the help of our two families consisting of two big/strong brothers, two mums and a very organised dad/driver). I didn’t manage to go the gym all last week as I had a terrible cold and had difficulty just breathing on a day to day basis let alone whilst running on the treadmill. I did however manage to make up for all that with all the packing, cleaning and lifting for the move and on the day, I really worked up a sweat running up and down 3 flights of stairs with heavy boxes and bags.

We are now very settled in the new flat and enjoying the cosiness of it. Although, I must say, when we went back to the old flat to give the keys back I realised how lucky we really were to have a flat so big! Anyways, this way we can hopefully save money on heating bills as the old flat had terrible insulation problems. There is a gym just a few minutes walk away from our new flat that I am thinking about joining. The old gym is just too far away to walk there and back and I would be spending time and money getting there and back every week. I think I’ll pop in tomorrow and see what the new gym has to offer and how much it costs. One advantage of swapping gyms is that I can hopefully get away from a few men at my current gym that seem to have taken a shine to me, P in particular, who even asked me to go Salsa dancing with him!

As you can see in my weekly stats section, I lost another kilo last week! I am over the moon! I have finally moved into the 14 Stone category now and will enjoy working off more lbs to the next stone! I was quite surprised actually because I hadn’t been to the gym at all last week and I also had a few days of bad eating surrounding the move and the few days off we had whilst unpacking. We had an indian takeaway one night and I had about 4 small bottles of larger throughout the weekend to celebrate the successful move. Oh and a glass of bubbly! I also gave into temptation twice this week as it was Iranian New Year (Aide Norouz) and I had our parents round for a meal and we had lots of cutely decorated eggs and some gorgeous Iranian sweeties and some mini easter chocolate eggs and I just couldn’t resist. We did do alot of Iranian dancing though and we worked up quite a sweat. I also had a few truffle seashells last night (mmm…yummy) as I was feeling particularly peckish and fancied something sweet with my cuppa. So I am fully focused again now…I promise!

Here is a picture of our ‘Haft Sin’ table for Iranian New Year (Aide Norouz). Haft = seven and Sin = the letter ‘S’, we always have dress the table with at least 7 ‘S’ objects for good luck in the new year. Can you guess what things on the table begin with the Iranian ‘S’?

See Wikipedia for more information on Iranian New Year: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_new_year

In terms of weight loss and exercise, let’s see how this week goes!? I went to the gym this morning and did about an hours work out and then went to Sainsburys and did a bit of food shopping. Stocked up on lots of olives and lettuce for my lunchtime salads. My broadband still hasn’t been installed so I am on dial-up this week. We really missed having the internet over the weekend, it felt so strange not being able to just check things out when we needed to and I also really missed blogging and reading everyone elses blogs.

I have started to get a great response from readers on my blog and I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has contacted me. I am so glad that I am motivating people to exercise and live healthily. I really appreciate all comments and encouragement. I even got my first blog review this week! http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/fit-firm-and-fly.html

The Countdown is Over – It’s the Moving Weekend!

I have been so busy this week that I haven’t had time to write my blog. Regular readers will know that I am moving this weekend! Yes, the weekend when gales and even snow is forecast for London! Can you believe our luck!? The weather has been so amazing over the last week and I have been so busy packing and blowing my nose (yes, I have another cold!) that I haven’t been out enjoying the glorious sunshine as much as I would have liked.

I have been totally unproductive in terms of fitness this week. I haven’t been to the gym at all! Now that is a first for me in a long time! I have had this awful cold for a week now and my throat has been killing me. I only have to walk to the local shops as back and I am out of breath. My chest felt very wheezy and tight. So I thought it was best to not gym it this week. I have however been packing, sorting and cleaning furiously, so hopefully that might make up some of my fitness regime this week. Lifting all those heavy boxes and walking clothes, books and CDs to the charity shop must be doing wonders for my biceps!

As a consequence of our moving house, we are going to be without broadband for at least a week and most likely 10 days. 10 days without the internet! I don’t know what I am going to do!? I’m really not looking forward to it. I can’t believe with today’s technology it takes so long to re-direct broadband!?!?!?!

So I hope you all stay fit and eat well and I will hopefully be back before too long, unless the gales blow me away to a beach somewhere in the sun where I will be sipping cocktails and will have my laptop connected to wifi…Wow, that would be a miracle!

Breathe with me

I have a very important interview tomorrow so I won’t be able to make it to the gym so I went today instead. I was considering the yoga class but thought that I may need to do more cardio and weight training so was my normal gym session. Although, it didn’t feel the same. The gym was so hot. The windows were all steamy and I just couldn’t breathe.
I was hoping for some fresh air. But as a result, I sweat more and my weight training seemed more effective.

Anyways, I’ve got my fingers (and toes) crossed for tomorrow, I hope it all goes well.

This track is always good for jogging!

The Prodigy – Breathe

She bangs, she bangs…

I feel so great today, I have had a great start to the day. What better way than to start it by dancing to Ricky Martin!?! After a dodgy night last night of feeling a little ill, I thought I wouldn’t be fit enough to go to the gym today but I noticed that they had a ’salsaerobics’ class on so I had to go.

It was great. We started warming up and then we got into a full salsaerobics dance routine with the ‘cha cha cha’ and ‘cuban breaks’. The instructor made some good choices in the music, I really started jumping when Ricky Martin’s ‘She Bangs’ came on…it was brilliant and so fun! It felt like I was dancing rather than working out. I love dancing and almost everyday have a little dance at home to my favourite songs. Was a great change to me usual gym workout and I worked up quite a good sweat. The class lasted an hour and we went through several different dance routines whilst incorporating squats and jumps and using our arms throughout. Some of the moves were a bit confusing but I think I’ll get the hang of it after a couple of weeks.

Ricky Martin – She Bangs

When I got home, I got a phone call from the Barbican saying that I had won £200 worth of Virgin vouchers in a competition I entered a couple of weeks ago! I was so surprised! I have a big smile on my face this morning and keep singing ‘She Bangs’! I have my boyfriends parents round for dinner tonight so I have to give the house a quick clean and get cooking…I think I will be singing my way through the day! And its lovely weather in London today. Hope you are all having a good week! Keep dancing!

Like a Rolling Stone

I have just got back from the gym after a great workout. My weigh-in wasn’t that brilliant today, I lost 0.5kg/1lbs which is better than nothing but at least I am now on the 15 Stone mark! After weighing myself this morning, I felt a bit down, after my success the last few weeks and having gone to the gym 3 times last week, I expected a better result. I know that I still need to cut down my portions at dinner time, I am usually so hungry by the time we eat dinner, I eat too much. So I still need to work on my portion sizes and I also need to find some healthy meals to cook throughout the week to keep the weight loss working.

I have also been thinking that as I usually do a mixture of cardio and weight training in the gym, I may be building muscle which is heavier than fat. So if this is the case, in time, I should gain from having more muscle as it increases my metabolic rate and I will need more energy to to everyday things and in turn lose more weight! So, I can definitely feel my thigh muscles getting more defined and my calves. After the weigh-in this morning, I checked several websites to see what it says about gaining muscle and weight loss and they confirmed what I was thinking. Now I just need to work on different muscles in my body and make sure I use them all otherwise I could injure myself. I think I need to buy a book or find a website with information on the right way to weight train. Any ideas anyone?

I cam across this website this morning whilst looking at weight training and understanding how muscles work. I found this ‘Muscle Game’ quite fun: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/index_interactivebody.shtml

I am finding it quite hard to be happy today as I really did expect a larger weight loss – but I keep thinking about how well I’ve done and how proud I am going to be once I’ve reached my target weight (which I haven’t set yet). I was listening to Bob Dylan on the way back from the gym and the lyrics to his song ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ made me think, in particular the section below:

“When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?”

And that is how I feel, I have got nothing to lose by carrying on this healthy lifestyle and I have started to share my thoughts and feelings online here with you all and I would have so much to lose if I gave up and went back to how I was 5 weeks ago…so I will keep going and will do my best to make sure I lose a bit more weight next week!

Bob Dylan – Like a Rolling Stone

__________

20 minutes fast walk to the gym

10 minutes on bike

40 minutes weight training

15 minutes cross trainer

5 minutes stretching

10 minutes walk with heavy shopping home

Total: 1hr 40mins

Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours…

I’m sitting here trying to ignore the great sense of satisfaction I’ve just got from ruining our neighbours’ party. I’ve just watched 5 of them pile into a taxi and the noise levels seem to have decreased. Now this may sound slightly nasty of me or you may think that I am one of those horrible neighbours but this is a real triumph. We have been living in this flat for 14 months and when we first moved in, we soon realised what we had let ourselves in for. We are on the top floor of a set of 3 flats. The ground floor is occupied by a family of 4 and they seem like really nice, quiet people, they keep themselves to themselves and smile whenever we see them. The 1st floor however is a completely different story altogether, it is occupied by 3 single guys who have a strange love for Elton John and The Killers. They have monthly parties that start at 12.30am and they load their flat with loud, singing, dancing, smoking, ignorant people who don’t find it slightly irrational at this time of night to be playing their music as loud as possible and then playing the drums and electric guitar over it whilst singing at the top of their lungs. As if this wasn’t enough, they all seem to jump and slam doors at regular intervals.

Anyways, the reason why I am sitting here at 02:06 on Sunday morning is that they have decided to have yet another party. I was relaxing in the bath reading ‘Northern Lights’ (a book that has been recommended to me so many times I thought I’d better read it) and my boyfriend was sound asleep in bed after a hard day of packing and sorting the house out for the impending move. Then I heard that dreadful noise. The noise which is usually followed by hordes of bellowing animals…the party animals had arrived. Thoroughly engrossed in my book, I thought I would spend he rest of the night, until the party was over, reading my book (yes, yes, I am already enjoying the book and I am only on page 36) but my boyfriend walked in fuming and complaining about the ridiculous level of noise right under our bedroom. We did think that as we are moving in 13 days we might get away with not having to put up with another one of these awful parties, but no.

Well my boyfriend went downstairs and complained about the sound twice and both times after being asked to turn the music down, they just said ‘yeah’ and slammed the door shut. We were fuming! We have never, ever complained before, mostly because I didn’t want to start any arguments with them and have a bad relationship with them. But tonight it was just too much. After complaining the third time, they seemed to turn the music down and then 5 of them piled into a cab home. After their immediate departure, we were relieved and thought about actually getting some sleep after a hard day of packing, sorting and lifting. But it seems like the party is still going on as they are shouting along to a U2 concert and seem to enjoying waking up the whole street. As if having to listen to U2 wasn’t bad enough, we have to listen to them shouting along to it as well! Oh well, my sense of satisfaction seems to be short lived and we are now going to settle down and watch ‘Bride of Chucky’ with a very annoying soundtrack.

The one thing I really don’t understand about them is how they can be so inconsiderate especially as there are 2 small children living beneath them!?

Watch Max, Harold and David from Neighbours start a noise band:

The Moving House Workout

I am moving house in 17 days and we haven’t started packing yet. My plan is to get the house nice and tidy first, Spring clean, and then mess it all up again with boxes, boxes and more boxes as well as some bags full of stuff. Cleaning our current flat is always a workout in itself as our vacuum cleaner has started to play up. As if hoovering wasn’t hard enough, I now have to yank at the power cord every few seconds just to move around a room. As Thursday’s are usually my day off from the gym I thought that cleaning the house and possibly starting to pack would keep me active and give me an allover body workout.

It’s funny how I see everyday things now as adding to my weight loss mission. My boyfriend and I have loads of books and we simply can’t move all of them with us again so we sat down the other night and started to decisively choose between which books we really wanted to keep and which ones we were going to give to the local charity shop. Anyways, I ended up taking big bags of heavy books with me on my way to the gym and dropping them off at the local charity shop, it’s amazing how easy I found lugging these heavy bags of books since I started working out at the gym. Let’s hope actually moving house will be as easy – wish me luck!

Photos

I am going to start trying to take some photos and brighten up this blog a bit. So watch this space!