Day 12: Feeling full

It's Friday night and as per last week I'm at home and not out boozing or having a boogie.

I'm now in my twelfth day of trying to be more healthy and active. Today however has been my first 'cheat day'. We had a 'working lunch' at work today which I knew would involve eating more fattening food.

On the one hand I had a couple of things in my favour - some people had been on a night out and others are on medicine as they're not well, so nobody was drinking alcohol. Maybe I won't consume too much calorie-wise after all, I mistakenly thought.

Two hours later when we finished our session and I was (very slowly) walking back to the office, I realised I was wrong.

Lunch was lovely we had mixed breads with oil and vinegar and marinated olives. Then we picked our own main courses - I went for pork belly. It was so nice, but obviously very calorific. Pork belly with celeriac purée, caramelised apple, roasted baby beetroot and carrots. If you ever go to The Luxe in Spitalfields I can recommend it.

Yes I left my crackling but the pork belly itself was fatty enough! The meal was lovely but nearly five hours later I was still uncomfortably full.

In fact, tonight I'd planned to do a 5k in the gym. I was dreading it, I felt so full and on the train home I felt more like sleeping! However I forced myself to do it (I actually felt sick at more than one point).

Now lying on my sofa relaxing after my gym visit and a nice hot shower and over 7 hours after eating said meal I am still full up! Surely my stomach can't have shrunk this quickly?!

I'm looking forward to this weekend, a chance to relax and do some hard thinking (long story!)

I've now done four days straight at the gym (three lots of 5k and one set of 60 mins spinning). The plan is to do spin tomorrow for an hour and then see how I feel Sunday.

I'm still feeling unwell and haven't shifted this bad throat and germs so I'm wary of pushing myself too much. Plus my poor boyfriend seems to have caught the germs now!

I'd ideally like to achieve six days of exercise like last week if I can, but want to enjoy some time to relax and get things sorted in my flat too. Plus me and my Mum are off shopping tomorrow afternoon/evening so who knows I may well be all shopped out!!

Treadmill tunes

Something happened to me today. I woke up and then spent an hour reading in bed, before falling back to sleep. As a result I felt quite lethargic when it came to getting up and must admit I was expecting to find today's gym workout pretty hard going.

We didn't get to the gym until midday, which in a way was nice as it wasn't too busy. I'd only had one weetabix and a cup of coffee (I normally have two before the gym, but there was only one left).

So we set out on the treadmill, on day 13 now of this healthy eating/exercise. My boyfriend informed me he was going for 40 minutes or so on there, but I expected to do around 20 minutes or so.

Anyways, as I said something happened to me. After a five minute warm up walk I then went into a run. Around ten minutes into the running I felt my triband starting to hurt and I was tiring (I normally only do about 15 minutes running). However, I decided to push on with it and managed a 20 minute run - thanks to The Saturdays, Maroon 5 and Rihanna!

I then went for a brisk steep hill walk and rather than feeling tired out I actually felt another bit of energy coming back. So I switched on the Foo's Pretender and managed to do more running and at a faster speed. I felt great.

I therefore ended up with a 45 minute session on the treadmill, then moved on to the bike. Again I seemed to get a huge burst of energy return, which increased once I had some garage tunes playing in my ears. After 20 minutes I did a brief 5 minutes on the rower but again managed to push myself harder and faster there too.

The power of music in exercise truly is amazing. I've had this before though and at one point found a couple of new Take That songs made me run faster (odd I know!)

However, I have never had such bursts of energy like I did today. I don't know am I just getting fitter, did that extra bit of sleep help me out or was it just a new selection of music? I'm back in the gym again tomorrow, so we shall see.

The weird thing is that I'm also always starving after a gym session, today though I didn't feel hungry. I've had a low fat soup and ryvitas and don't get me wrong it was nice, but I still didn't feel that hungry or that I needed it.

I really don't know what's come over me. Fingers crossed I'm getting fitter and getting used to eating less. Either that or music is even more powerful than I thought and helps curb your appetite too!!