Sweet Enough Already - Why I'm Cutting My Sugar Intake

Last week I posted about my exercise goals. I had intended to follow it up fairly quickly with a post on what I am aiming for in terms of healthy eating but work got the better of me during the week and I'm only getting around to this post now!

Photo Cred

A couple of days before I started this blog, I watched a documentary on Netflix called "Fed Up". Believe me when I say that this documentary changed my life! Now, I have been known to exaggerate from time to time, but this is nothing short of the truth! Fed Up is a documentary on the obesity problem in the US, specifically among young children. They begin by comparing the level of obesity in American children today (1 in 5) to 40 years ago (1 in 20). The number of cases of type 2 diabetes in children in the US today (almost 60,000) was also compared to 40 years ago (0). They also showed a surprising link between the rise in the number of people joining gyms and the number of obese people. Surely if one goes up, the other must go down? This is slightly reminiscent of my own problems with losing weight in the past, that I spoke about in my first blog post - I was eating what I perceived to be healthy food and exercising so why wasn't I seeing a change? With people becoming increasingly interested in losing weight in the 70's and 80's, companies began to introduce more and more "low-fat" and "zero-calorie" products to the market. But, if you remove the fat from food you're also removing the flavour, and companies compensated for this by adding more sugar. 

Photo Cred

My Sister's Graduation Day

My little sister graduated from the University of Limerick with a degree in New Media and English during the week. I am so proud of her; she worked really hard, got a really good degree and will be starting a masters in UL in a couple of weeks. Myself, my mam and dad were at the ceremony, my boyfriend joined us after for pictures, and then more family joined later for dinner and drinks. We had such a fantastic day and most importantly my sister really enjoyed herself. I thought I would do a quick "what we wore" post with details of the outfit I wore and what my sister wore for her graduation day. 

Recipe: Baked Parmesan Chicken with Pasta

I absolutely love pasta....well any Italian food really!! My go-to dinner has always been chicken in a tomato sauce with pasta and it's not something I'm willing to give up! It's such a quick, easy and tasty dinner to make, why would you want to anyway? I used to fry the chicken and use a jar of ready-made pasta sauce, but now I have opted for a much healthier version. I have to say, it tastes absolutely amazing! I even prefer it to what I had been cooking for myself all along!!

Recipe

1 breast of chicken per person

Frylite

1 400g carton of passata (for 2-3 chicken breasts)

1 tsp paprika

2 tsp mustard powder

2 tsp of grated Parmesan per person

Salt, Pepper

Italian herbs - basil, oregano etc. (I usually just wing it with my Italian herbs mill I got in Aldi!)
Wholemeal Pasta

Method

Preheat the oven to 220 degrees Celsius. Spray each of the chicken breasts with some frylite and coat evenly with the paprika, mustard powder and Italian herbs. Place in an oven proof dish and season with salt and pepper. 

My exercise goals

So this week is going to be my first official week on my journey to a healthier and happier me (hopefully this new and improved me will also have a nice ass :D). In this post, I want to talk a little bit about the type of fitness routine that I've finally decided to take up now, that I've gotten rid of the misconceptions I had when I first started into an exercise regime. I will be posting details of the actual workouts I do, but this post is about my reasoning behind the types of exercises (cardio, weights and yoga) I will be doing.

Having the time and motivation for an effective fitness routine has always been a problem for me. This time around, I have the advantage of knowing where I fell down each time I gave up before. Working out for me was mostly based on running for as long and as far as I could; this always seemed to me to be the most important exercise as I wanted to lose weight. I couldn't have been more wrong! This was never going to work for me. I was getting bored while running and there was nothing to distract from how out of breath I was, so I would eventually end up walking. A steady state run is great for building endurance but will use a relatively small amount of energy only while you are running. I would have needed to be running for at least an hour to burn a significant amount of energy. It is important to include cardiovascular exercises in your exercise plan (whether that be running, cycling, rowing machine, dancing etc.), as cardio improves lung and heart function, does wonders for your mood and, of course, aids in weight loss. However, if you are interested in weight loss, high intensity intervals have been shown to be an effective workout for fat loss. This was seriously appealing to me as switching from high to low intensity during my run would mean better results and less time running! My idea is to try to be efficient and balanced with my run, so I will be mixing up my runs by adding intervals of lower and higher intensities. I'm hoping it will help to get more out of my workout and also stop me from getting bored!

Photo Credit

My Journey

This is my first blog post! I have to say it’s extremely daunting to actually put this online but it’s something I have thought about doing for a while and I’m going to give it a try! Honestly, I don’t expect anyone to read my blog but if someone does then great! I really hope you enjoy it!

There are two reasons why I decided to start a blog, the first being that I love to write and the second is that I really want to start looking after myself. At the moment I’m working as a research engineer and part of that involves writing papers to publish your findings. I complain a lot about this part of my work, but secretly I love it! I find that it helps me to understand my work so much more, you can’t write something down and then present it as fact without being 100% confident in it. So you end up spending an awful lot of time just reading around the topic to make certain that you know exactly what it is you’re talking about! This brings me on to the second reason for starting a blog – I really want to start looking after myself, but I haven’t a clue what I’m doing!! I want to lose some weight, get fit, eat right and take care of my skin and hair (who doesn’t?). A year ago, I had gotten very unfit and my clothes were either really tight or didn’t fit, my skin was starting to look dull, my hair…we won’t even go there… and I ended up being quite unhappy with myself. As well as that, I was often tired, had no energy and found it hard to concentrate. So, to try and make a change for a better me, I hopped right onto the health and fitness bandwagon and promptly fell right back off! I tried this a few times but it never seemed to stick and I couldn’t understand why. I blamed myself for having no will-power but this isn’t me; when I put my mind to something there’s usually no stopping me! So why couldn’t I get the results I wanted even though I was so determined? 

Photo cred: Sparkpeople