recipes for you!

Turkish Meatballs

-In a bowl, put 150g good quality beef or lamb mince with 2 teaspoons crushed garlic, 2 teaspoons ground cumin, 1 teaspoon hot paprika (you can use cayenne pepper or chili if preferred), 1/4 teaspoon cracked pepper, a dribble of worcestershire sauce and a generous squirt of tomato sauce. 

-Mix ingredients with your hands until thoroughly combined.

-Put half an inch of water in a frying pan and heat.

-Form the mince mixture into balls. A 1-inch diameter is preferable.

-When the water is bubbling, add the mince balls. Turn them every two minutes. The should take about 5 minutes to cook, depending on size. Cooking them in water extracts a lot of the fat while keeping the meat tender.

-Drain. They can be served hot or cold.

Tzatziki

-Finely grate 1 tablespoon of cucumber.

-Mix into 1/4 cup natural, unsweetened yoghurt.

-Serve with meatballs :)

Today is my first High Carb day on the carb rotation diet. yay! I had some weetbix and banana for breakfast (SO GOOD) before doing my workout, which is the first from week six of the Go Sleeveless program. I found the higher reps challenging, and scaled down my weights a little in the second set so I could keep good form. I was still sweating heavily and feeling exhausted by the end.

Right now I'm listening to old Danny Kaye songs and enjoying one of my favourite treats:

Feta Popcorn

1. Mash about a handful of feta cheese with about a tablespoon of caesar salad dressing to make a smooth paste.

2. Stir into about 4 cups air-popped popcorn, trying to distribute mixture evenly through popcorn.

3. Enjoy! this serves two, or a hungry one.

Danny Kaye - Wonderful Copenhagen

High Intensity Interval Training

Pros: 

-huge effect on fitness, fat loss and overall health. I'm much better at sprinting to catch buses now.

-you can use any equipment/cardio exercise you want.

-it's over quite quickly.

Cons:

-ugh boring. it's a pro that it's much LESS boring than long sessions of low-medium intensity cardio, but I never really bothered with that anyway so I can't compare.

-need a heart rate monitor to do it properly. Now, I do have a heart rate monitor which I got for $NZ50 ($US28) at a camping store's 50% off sale. it is... not the best. I realised this when I opened up the instructions and it said 'attach the transmitter beneath the pectoral muscle' and had no alternative for people with boobs. after practising with about a hundred different positions I find it works best with the electrodes at the back just beneath the shoulder blades, but even now it only works 50% of the time - perhaps this explains its discounted price.

-if you do it when you're hungry, you feel faint; if you do it after a meal, you feel sick. I find it alright because I am a slack student and have very little to do with my days, but scheduling it would make it troublesome for some people.

hooray for cooking skills

today's breakfast: cheesy omelette on 97% fat-free ham.

I've entered the Go Sleeveless Transformation Contest!

the details of the contest are here. 

I was already doing the exercise program from Go Sleeveless, and I start week 6 tomorrow. After that I plan to do the 'Results Booster' and 'Toning Accelerator' plans, each of which goes for 4 weeks, so they should take me through to the end of the contest. 

For my diet I think I will try carb cycling. I got the 'Carb Cycling Basics' ebook by Isaac Wilkins as part of the 12 Days of Fitness in 2008 (if I remember correctly). 

I've been trying carb cycling for the last two days, with yesterday being a no-carb day. I had been planning to have some fish for dinner - hoki fillets, steamed with lemon and pepper and garlic, then fried in coconut oil - but my father cooked the most fragrant beef roast. I went into my eating plan and looked at how a swap would work. I had been counting on the low fat and very high protein content of the fish, and in order to get the same protein from the beef I would have to consume too much fat for the day. So I did something foolish. I just got enough beef to equal the calories of the fish, disregarding the ratios of fat to protein. (you have to understand, the whole house smelled delicious from this roast!) I was not hungry when I went to bed (early, because of Earth Hour), but in the middle of the night I woke up ravenous. I was hoping it would be just before dawn, but it was half-past one (!) and I couldn't wait for breakfast; so I got up, went to the kitchen, and ate my first ever midnight snack: half a pear and weetbix with milk. Then I went back upstairs and slept like a baby for another eight hours. I'm counting the calories from the snack as belonging to today's allowance, and I'll certainly be more careful in future about having too little protein on a no-carb day.