A new look for the blog again! What do you guys think? :) I really liked the old one, but it was really broken code wise and I couldn't get things to work. This one should also be a bit more user friendly if you're browsing on a tablet / small screen.

I'm really starting to be bad at finding the motivation to go to uni! I mean, I do work at home but showing my face at uni every now and then wouldn't hurt. We've only really got a few weeks left of this year, so I really feel like I can achieve the same things at home I would by going into the studio.


To pump up my energy towards uni work, I wanted to take advantage of the incredible weather and go for a quick walk earlier. I was trying to decide whether or not I should take a hoodie with me, and I'm really glad I did in the end. Despite it being really sunny, the wind at the seafront was awful! Even the seagulls were side stepping to avoid falling over!



My weekend is going to be incredibly busy with work. The resort is having an adult only weekend, meaning late night venues, lots of hen/stag parties and so on. And in turn it means that us photographers need to be present with cameras, capturing all those memories for people. :) Should be a fun weekend! Also going out with the team tomorrow night after work.


Oh and our trip to Holland is fast approaching! Heading over to the land of Dutchies next Friday. :) I'm so excited about this trip, I haven't seen this bunch of people for such a long time (since last October in fact!), it'll be great to get together again and have a fantastic weekend together. These friends really make me feel like I belong to a group of some kind, so I'm determined to make the most of our weekend away.

Routines bring me a certain kind of comfort. I do like to know that I've got the same things happening on a daily / weekly basis, and I even plan exactly what to do at the gym on certain days every week (cardio on Wednesday, upper body on Thursday and lower body on Friday). Having to mix things around just doesn't play well and it feels like that it'll have a knock on effect on the following week and so on!

Following the Body By Vi challenge does definitely give me some routines as well. I start my morning with a shake and a cup of coffee, then I have another shake for lunch. Having something liquid for breakfast is such a brilliant idea for me, as I never eat breakfast normally. Maybe it's something I'll carry on doing even when I'm done with the challenge.

Do you have any routines you can't 'live without'? Does it throw your entire day off track if some of your routines don't happen?

Oh and by the way, I lost a massive 700g during my first week on the challenge!

Morning routine - Body By Vi shake, a cup of coffee and lots of water.

Wednesday is my cardio day at the gym, but I decided against going for a run indoors, when the weather was so nice! Who'd miss out on a bit of sunshine?! It's feeling like spring already, the sun feels really warm on your skin when it's not windy and a lot of bushes and trees are starting to sprout leaves already! I'm so ready for the warm weather again after such a miserable winter!

It's funny actually, when it started getting cold last autumn I was saying exactly the opposite - I was so fed up with the boiling hot summer we had last year. Just never happy, eh. :) 

Clear skies, sunshine and low tide. Perfection.

Now that I'm only eating one big meal a day, I really seem to be putting so much more effort into cooking every night. It's like my dinner is my most precious posession and I need to make sure it gets the most attention it can, hah.

Tonight I made sausages, green pepper & onion gravy and sweet potato mash. As I've probably mentioned before, I'm not a fan of pork. The texture and taste of it just doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. The only exception to this is sausages, but then again sausages are all the leftover bits of the animal, not just a straight cut of meat. And they really do like to flavour sausages over here with all kinds of things! The most bizarre mix I've seen so far is dark chocolate & red chilli.

Anyways. To me it's so important to cook as fresh as possible. With the exception of baked beans, everything I used was fresh produce. It makes me happy to know, that I'm providing my body with all the good stuff without a load of added chemicals and preservatives. Yum.

Oh it's been so nice to get hold of my usual routine again - both exercise and diet wise.

We spent our New Year's eve at home. We kept thinking about going out to watch some fireworks but we never figured out who's organised it around here and on top of that it was raining all day, so that did dampen the party mood a bit. And we've never actually gone out for New Year's before, why break that tradition eh? ;) Instead we subscribed to Netflix, watched Hunger Games and a few episodes of Rome. Was a very chilled way to end the year and I loved it! I prefer to stay in instead of going out to drink, such a blessing when it comes to trying to stick to your healthy diet.

I mean don't get me wrong, I do like to have a few drinks every now and then to relax. I just don't agree with going out to drink just for the fun of it and get completely off your trolley. It's just not me and I'm quite glad about it. Saving both money and my liver.


It's been really nice to go back to normal cooking after the holidays. I'm just so packed with motivation and energy to get back to it all and it shows! My menu has looked quite lovely so far; salmon cakes with sweet potato chips (+ a few potato chips I cooked for my other half), salmon with quinoa and veg, red pepper and onion omelette.. Yum! 


My foam roller has been in good use so far as well! I've started rolling after every walk and workout I do and it really seems to help with recovery. I also got rid of some shoulder tension last night but oh my god did it hurt!! My muscles and joints kept crunching as I rolled away, at times I felt like I was going to pass out when I went over a sore spot! But it's so worth it, I feel a lot more... nimble now. ;) I think I need to go over my shoulders again today though, just to make sure all the knots are gone.

And the sides of my thighs are incredibly sore, I can't actually roll them for too long because it does get quite painful after a while. Just need to do them a little at a time until I get rid of all the tension. It's weird how you never actually realise that you have all these painful spots in your body until you really go over them with a roller or during a massage. I believe that your general wellbeing has a lot to do with knowing how to listen to your body, both physically and mentally.


The very first thing I did this morning was go for a walk (didn't even have coffee when I got out of bed!). I knew the weather was going to take a turn for the worse again today and I thought that it was best to take advantage of the brief period of sunshine we had this morning and go for a walk. I decided against running as I did a leg & bum workout last night, better to let my muscles rest a bit.

As I love going to the seafront when I go for my walks, I couldn't resist going over there for a bit of fresh sea air. We've actually had weather warnings and they recommend you to stay away from the sea and I can see why! I have never seen the tide so high over here and the wind was insane, it actually made my eyes water as I was trying to get a nice picture of the waves! I can only imagine what the wind would do to a little toddler or a small dog. I hope people listen to these warnings instead of trying to be brave and see how close they can get!


Hopefully you all stay safe today and avoid all the damage to your houses, the wind is only going to get stronger from now on.

As we live quite close to each other, he gives me a lift to and from uni quite frequently. As a thanks I offered to make him lunch today and ended up making pancakes. I should've taken a few pictures but you know, you just get caught up with the conversation sometimes!

So I guess all I want to say is - thank you Chris. :) ♥

I also use music to process everything in my head. It doesn't matter if it's a happy or a sad thing, I do usually associate songs to those events and when I listen to the songs later on I pretty much always go back to those moments and think about them. For example meeting my WoW friends is very tied into Blame It on the Boogie, as it was one of the songs played during our very first meetup and we all learned the little dance you do with the chorus. :D It's not a good meeting without a bit of MJ!

And here's a few songs I've listenend to a lot the past few days. Not going to go into it too much, some songs might only have a very loose connection to everything and some songs have been there just to cheer me up. Enjoy. :)

I've started being really religious about tracking everything I eat and drink again. I just realised that I simply wasn't eating enough, some days I wouldn't even hit the 1200 kcal mark with the food I was consuming. I thought that I really need to start tracking it again, just to make sure that I'm eating enough in comparison to the amount of exercise I'm getting in.

And I've synced my UP app with MyFitnessPal now, as MFP takes the activity data from UP and moves it into it's own database. It then recalculates how many calories I still need to hit my budget (you can of course add your exercise to MFP manually but I just let my UP deal with that). As I only sync my UP band with the app roughly twice a day, I might think that "oh I haven't  exercised enough today for MFP to take it into account, I can stick to my 1380 calories today" and then later on in the day after syncing MFP just throws a new number at me. I seriously feel like I'm eating like a horse at the moment. I just don't feel hungry after having lunch and dinner, so eating some snacks just to hit my calories is such a task for me. I mean sure, I could go for more calorie dense options at lunch and dinner, but I'm far too concious about the fat, sugar and salt in everything to do that on a regular basis.


Just look at this! I tracked my dinner like usual and was all happy about myself, just thinking that I only need about 300 calories to hit my budget. Then I synced my UP with the app and MFP fetched that data instantly. Well, my calorie budget has gone up by 300 calories. Now I need to figure out what to eat to consume another 637 calories tonight. I honestly feel like I'm eating way too much right now, but I'm really trying to git the budget this week to see, if that changes anything for my weekly weigh in. I've been under my budget for a very long time and my body is probably preparing to plateau because of it, so I feel like it's really important to mix things up and see how it goes. Fingers crossed.


Other than that, it's been another productive day for me. Despite only needing to be at uni 13:15 today, I got up before 8am (without an alarm clock!), did some housework, watched Biggest Loser and went for a lovely, chilled walk. It's been quite a gray day today, but there was just something so stunning about it. In a way it just made the sea look like it wasn't even there and made everything look nearly black and white. I swear I have not retouched this pic at all, that's just how gray it really was today! You can really tell that it's finally the end of summer over here, which in all honesty I'm happy about. :) We had a wonderful, long and warm summer so it's about time for autumn to make it's way in.

Apologies for the long gap between posts. Real life has it's ways of interfering with things. :)

I've really been able to find some kind of serenity by the sea in the middle of everything that's been going on. I've just automatically gone to the beach instead of somewhere else when I've gone for a walk. It's just so beautiful and quiet over there.


I've had a bit of a hair crisis for a while now. The colour just didn't turn out to be as even as I wanted it when I coloured last time (a month ago?), my fringe ended up being two shades darker than the rest and I had this layer of red mixed in with the brunette. So I had a master plan of buying hair colour stripper and a hair colour a few shades lighter than what I have currently. The stripper worked wonders like it always has before, but unfortunately I didn't have time to add the new colour (and I also ran out of hot water...) before going to the gym. So I went to the gym looking like a carrot!! Was a bit embarrassed, but had no other option than to suck it up and focus on my workout instead of worrying about my hair. :p

It was my better half's 25th birthday today! It has been a very wonderful day, I got to spend the entire day with him doing various things. :)

Ever since going to pick those strawberries and gooseberries, we've been planning on going back there to get some more berries. This time I planned my outfit a bit better, didn't have to hold on to my skirt all the time when we were out in the fields.. It was so nice, it's kinda therapeutic in a way. And being a farm girl my brain seems to be programmed for fruit and berry picking, I just know which berries are ripe and which ones to leave behind.. Please don't ask how I know that stuff, it just comes to me automatically... :D


Our plan was to just get strawberries for the cake I made today, but ended up coming home with a box of loganberries, raspberries and strawberries. Oh yum. Can't wait to dig into those. :D Shame I'm going away tomorrow, I can't really take any with me unless I put them in my big suitcase. And that will only end badly I think, I'm pretty sure I'd just have smushed berries by the time I'd get to them.


And this masterpiece is the cake I made for my other half for his birthday. It was a very simple strawberry cake recipe with butter cream icing. Shame it didn't turn out quite as pink as it is in the recipe, I should've used some food colouring! Oh well, it still tastes absolutely delicious. :D I've never been good at spreading icing on cakes so it doesn't look quite as pretty as it may look in the picture. Other half was chuffed with it so I think I did well.


Anyways, food! We went to TGI Friday's, it's probably one of our favourite restaurants (I think the Angus Steakhouses in London beat everything 100-0 for my other half, he loves his steak) and we do go there a few times a year. It's a ~30 minute drive away so we don't really just pop in when we fancy it. There's one thing on their menu that makes me want to go back - the Jack Daniels Sesame Chicken Strips. I could just have that on it's own and be quite happy for the rest of the evening.

So yeah, chicken strips for starters and then a very lovely French Canadian burger with sweet potato fries as my main. The French Canadian has maple syrup basted chicken breast, melted French brie and bacon (which I always ask to be left out), served with a yummy garlic mayo on the side. And me being greedy and obsessed with their Jack Daniels sauce, I wanted an extra pot of it with the burger.



So yeah, Finland tomorrow! I'm god awful at packing, right now our bedroom looks like someone just went through my wardrobe and threw everything around the room. I've got my suitcase in there, all ready and waiting to be filled up, but instead I just piled all my stuff on our bed. :D I'm so organised though! Got plenty of clothes for exercising, more shoes than I'll probably need, even some jeans and a hoodie in case it gets cold (which I really doubt, it's so warm over there during the summer).. Prepared for everything!

I wanted to go and enjoy the wonderful sea air for the last time before I go. In a very funny way I will miss this so much even though it'll be even more peaceful over in Finland. Oh and climbing up the sea defences is a really fantastic workout, I should just spend an hour going up and down the rocks and see how exhausted I get.




Oh and since this is my progress check week, a small notice. I am doing an early weigh in tomorrow morning as I am not taking my scale with me, however I will not be doing a progress check. Why? Because I need to get up at 5:30 in the morning and I really won't be in the mood to take my measurements or anything (I really hate getting up early). And in a way it'll also keep me in check next week, that thought of a progress check after I come back haunting me every time I'm about to say 'yes please' to another plate of cake.. :D

I will not be posting quite as much during my holiday, I will try to keep in touch though! x

It's too hot! I know I really shouldn't complain because the English summer isn't that long, but still! Our office is like a furnace - small room with two computers and a TV that heats up (it's like a radiator..) + the sun heating up two outer walls all day. Ooft!


I've been doing low carb since Sunday. In the end it's quite simple, just lots of veg with any variety of meat I fancy at the time. I am running out of veg to use though! Need to pop to the shop around the corner tomorrow when I go walking, I'm just going through all of it so quickly now. I do quite like just eating salads at the moment though, I really don't like the thought of slaving away in the kitchen in this heat. Just stick some meat under the grill / in the oven, make a salad and that's it, minimum effort.

Today I had some premium beef burgers with roast peppers (with tons of garlic), cucumber and beetroots for lunch. The dressing on top is ranch dressing. And for dinner I cooked fajitas for everyone, I did end up eating them with the tortilla wraps though. 



I've noticed how I wait til late evening before stepping out of the house. If I can, I delay my walk until about 8pm. It's just so much nicer to go out when the sun isn't melting your flesh and there's less people around. And I got lucky with the tide being down as well, walking on the soft sand is absolutely wonderful. I really want to walk from end to end of this strip of beach one night when the tide is down, but I'd need to time it perfectly so I'd have enough time to do so.



Oh and on a more positive note, water weight has worked it's way out of me again. I really need to stop doing it to myself though, it really annoys me to see the water buildup every Sunday. I know exactly how it happens and I still do it. Stupid girl.

"Thank you for attending your interview. I am very pleased to confirm our offer to you for a place on the above course due to commence September 2013 at Chichester."

Yay!! I am SO happy! I was quite nervous about this actually, I just kept thinking that the tutor will reject me because of my back. I know he technically can't do it as it'd be discrimination against me but yeah, I kept thinking that what if he just says that there's no point in me starting this course this year if my back isn't fixed yet? Now all I need is to see the surgeon at the end of July to confirm my operation (hopefully I can influence it..) and I know for sure if I can get on this course. Exciting times!

Getting that letter today definitely cheered me up so much. It was so miserable for most of the day really, just really gray, foggy and dull. And on top of that it was raining slightly. I didn't want it to affect my exercise plans and went for a nice long walk anyways. I really should start finding new walking routes, I seem to go to the beach pretty much every other day lately. Despite it being really foggy it was still quite pretty, quite a mysterious atmosphere. Tide was down, it was quite warm and you could just feel the moisture in the air.



I've been struggling with my back since the op. The pain seems to be provoked a lot easier than it did before, and the type of pain has changed as well. I've gone from burning pain to a sting, the pain feels a lot more local now. I'm trying to do the same amount of housework every day but it's just getting more and more difficult. Ungh. Maybe I should try and reschedule my appointment with the surgeon.

Anyways! Mandatory food post time! My other half likes to be silly every day when I take pictures of my food and sticks his thumb in the way. Earlier he said "Oh if you don't put this picture up on your blog I'll comment!", guessing the comment wouldn't be too pleasant.. :D So here you go, lunch (wholewheat pasta with ground beef and a value veg mix from Tesco) and dinner (pork & sweet chilli sausages with a small dollop of mash + roasted carrots and peppers) with a goofy picture.