Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! 

Hopefully you all had a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year. Mine was actually really laid back and chilled out, spent playing computer games with the family. 

Now it's the 1st Jan and I am putting those resolutions into action. I'm not back at work until the 4th and I'm not really going anywhere until then but this morning I got up and put some make up on even though nobody will see me but my husband and son (and they couldn't care less what I look like). Nothing special just some concealer and mascara plus a bit of lip balm, and some Body Shop coconut body spray, but I felt nice. I also put on a bracelet because I'm trying to get used to wearing more jewellery.

I also weighed myself. Once the scales had finished shrieking in alarm and I'd got over the shock I recorded it on my apps - I'm going to be using the Fitbit app and MyFitnessPal. I weigh 9 stone and 12 pounds. This isn't a whole lot considering there's people on the TV who weigh over 600 pounds and can't even get out of bed, whereas here I am still technically within the normal BMI range, but it's quite a lot for me as my best healthy weight is 8 stone and 7 pounds and my current weight is the heaviest I've been in years. 8 stone 7 is the weight where my joints stop playing me up so that's what I will be aiming for: a loss of 19 pounds. I've also taken my measurements and recorded those on another app; this is the first time I've done this so it will be interesting to see how my measurements change as I get healthier.

Luckily one side effect of all the junk I've been eating over the festive season is that I'm actually pretty sick of junk and my body is craving something healthier, so today was day 1 of eating decent food.

I started by having this for lunch:

'Mediterranean Quinoa' from Aldi, with some tomatoes and cucumber.

I've decided to start using the Happy Herbivore plant based meal plans again; I've used them a few times in the past and always found them pretty easy and tasty, filling enough that I'm not left feeling deprived, and, importantly, not expensive!! They work really well for me because I'm the only plant based eater in our family and it takes all the thought and most of the effort out of what to cook for myself, and all the meals can be cooked in advance at the weekend and just reheated later. Normally by the time I've cooked other stuff for the other 3 people I can't be bothered to do something fancy for myself so I usually end up getting a sandwich or some quick oven-junk food instead, but this way if I batch cook at the weekend I can guarantee a zero effort meal for myself all week long. You can get them in a 4 person menu, or a smaller 2 person version which is ideal for me as I can use one portion for dinner and use the second portion for lunch the next day. This is a 'Buffalodilla' which I had for dinner today and it was delicious. Excuse the presentation, I was starving and couldn't wait to eat!

In addition to quinoa it contains wheatberries, olives and some other stuff and because it cooks in the microwave in 1 minute it's my usual fallback for 'quick and easy whilst still reasonably healthy' lunch food. I often have this for work lunches but I am going to try and start having something a bit cheaper and home made. This was just to tide me over a bit whilst I got cooking on the other things I had planned...