Friday 10 May 2013

Back in the game!

I haven't posted for a while because I kind of lost...it.
I went away to Cambodia for 2 weeks (it was AWESOME!) and ate a lot of rice and drank a lot of cocktails and did no exercise. Before that, my boyfriend's parents were visiting and so I spent a lot of time sightseeing and not being in the gym much.
So now I'm back and working harder than ever to reach my goals!

I'm not doing too badly, either. Ras and I sat down on Sunday evening and each chose 3 lunches and 3 dinners to cook this week and so we've been eating really well. The good thing about cooking at home is that you know pretty much exactly what's gone into your meals, you can control the amount of salt and sugar, etc to a much larger degree than eating at a restaurant. It's working out really well; I'm sleeping better and finding I have far more energy. Before this I was basically nibbling throughout the day, eating quite a lot of carbs and general rubbish and it was really showing. Now I'm eating salad for lunch instead of a sandwich and we're eating more fish and quality meat with veg for dinner.

On the fitness thing, I'm not doing so well with the running. My race is in less than a month and I've basically done nothing to prepare. So this evening I'm heading to the gym to run as far as I can, to see where I'm at with that. Once I know, I can sort out a regime that'll hopefully get me running at least half of my 10k race, if not more. I'm kind of hoping a 'herd mentality' thing will kick in and I'll at least jog most of it, if not all of it. I'm not worried about placing, it's more a challenge to myself than a desire to beat other people in a race.
Strength-wise I'm doing alright. I was pleasantly surprised to find that 2 weeks off and 2 weeks very intermittent training hasn't done too much damage to my lifts. Sure, they feel harder, but I'm still able to finish my sets.
I've incorporated assisted pull ups into my routine with the aim of being able to eventually complete a set of unassisted pull ups and they're going well. Last week I was only able to do 3x5 assisted pull ups with assistance of 19lbs...yesterday I managed 2 sets of 10 and 1 set of 9 (don't laugh, I literally hung there for ages trying to get that last one out to absolutely no avail!). I'm feeling pretty good about that, I love it when I can see gains in my strength, it motivates me to work harder!

On a disappointing note, I did see an awful video of a celebrity workout (Gwyneth Paltrow) recently. It was a video of her showing her fans her workout routine, complete with celebrity personal trainer, Tracy Anderson. In this video,  the trainer said "Now we go onto using some resistance in our workout!",  or something to that effect.
I thought "Wow! Excellent, this will really get the message out there to women that lifting weights is a good thing! She then goes on to disappoint. The next thing to come out of her mouth was this:
"Get some 3lb weights, and ONLY 3lbs....no woman should be lifting more than 3lbs!"
Straight after that, a little note popped up on the screen saying "Tracy says: More weight = more bulk!".
I'm not even sure what I did at that point. I'm pretty sure I turned the video off, ranted about it to my boyfriend and did a lot of 'pffft' noises.
I honestly don't know where she learnt that but apparently she's one of the most popular trainers in Hollywood land.
It's such a shame that this myth is still so prevalent in the fitness-world. So many women are terrified of picking up a barbell because they don't want to get big or bulky and it seems no amount of women who lift heavy telling them that this is not the case will change that. It takes dedication to look like a body builder; if it were as easy as picking up a barbell a couple of times a week there wouldn't be international competitions for it!


I'm going to get angry if I keep talking about this, so here's a picture of a salad I made yesterday. Apparently people don't like the addition of strawberries, but I like strawberries and they needed to be eaten before they went off. And who says I can't put whatever the hell I want in my salads?


Bye! :)