What a beautiful day it has been! The sun has been shining and I’m feeling full of the joys of spring :-)

I was at the gym first thing for a speedy 45 minute workout – 10 minutes of HIITs on the bike, rowing machine and step machine followed by 15 minutes of abs and core exercises.

Breakfast was a fabulous green smoothie containing a whole 200g bag of spinach mix, frozen banana, 2 kiwis, frozen peach slices, vanilla sun warrior, hemp seeds, desiccated coconut, spirulina, maca, ground flax, water and the gums. I topped it with a coconut flour sauce swirl, rude health granola and more desiccated coconut and hemp seeds:

 

I had this bowl plus about another quarter bowl full it was that big! Really enjoying the hemp seeds – they add a lovely crunch and are so nutritious. This also kept me way fuller than yesterday’s cereal bowl. I’ve learned my lesson ;-)

Lunch was a bowl of barley miso and ginger soup, 6 nori wraps with cheesy avocado (1 small avocado mashed + juice of half a lemon + nutritional yeast flakes) carrot and cucumber, leftover carrot and cucumber, 2 delicious Clearspring sesame and tamari rice cakes and two plums:

Love nori wraps, especially with that easy cheesy filling!

Mid afternoon I snacked on last nights leftover tofu yoghurt with pomegranate seeds:

Dinner was some of my Thai Green Soya Bean Curry with mung bean noodles and steamed kale with ginger and shoyu:

I love mixing in noodles with Thai Green Curry, makes a nice change from rice!

Dessert was some Lindt Dark Chocolate with Sea Salt:

Still probably the best chocolate ever!

I really feel like Spring is beginning to kick in now. I love this time of year hearing the birds singing again, seeing the plants growing and the days getting longer. I like to freshen up things around the flat, not so much a spring clean, more of a de clutter – putting thick winter clothes away, changing cushions and things to be more spring like and sorting through my kitchen cupboards to see what’s past its best, what needs to be chucked out or used up and so on.

I have a couple of days off at the end of next week that I have put to one side to get everything done. I had been planning a trip to the Vitality Show with my best friend but we are both a little tight on funds so decided to give it a miss :-(

I can’t wait to make some budget friendly changes around the flat to bring the spring indoors. I plan on finding some new floral and patterned cushion covers for my living room. I saw these designs in Tesco of all places and love them:

Tesco Appliqué floral cushion, £10

Tesco Birds Appliqué cushion £9

I also want to change the patterned paper I have in my screen in the living room (this hides my gym equipment):

I’ve seen these beautiful papers in Paperchase (I snapped a pic of these on my phone) which will look fab:

I also want to change the pictures we have in these frames with something new, perhaps with some photographs I have taken myself:

I’m loving this new plant I bought last week for my bathroom and want to buy another one for my living room. Nothing says spring like yellow daffodils:

I also need to do a re stock of my kitchen cupboards with more tinned beans and nuts and other store cupboard items that have ran out. I think this time of year is good for checking the use buy dates on baking powders and flours and other store cupboard type ingredients. Nothing worse than getting the urge to bake and seeing that your flour is out of date!

Something else I fancy doing is ramping up the amount of raw foods I eat. I’m getting lots of cravings for green smoothies, big salads, raw wraps and so on. The benefits of eating more raw food are well described here. I never imagined in a million years I would actually crave greens! If I do eat more raw I will make a conscious effort to make sure that I’m getting the calories I need – no more apple binges! In fact today I feel like I’ve eaten really well, I feel satisfied in every way. That green smoothie really did set me up for the rest of the day!

So glad the weekend is here - I have a lovely relaxed one planned – off to town with James in the morning, then to visit to my parents and sis, I also have my best friend coming over and of course my weekend run and cooking session. Have you got plans for the weekend?

Do you have a spring clean? Do you mark the new season in any way? I love to bring the spring indoors with little plants and bright accessories!

Hope you have a great weekend!

Happy Wednesday everyone, and happy WIAW! This is actually what I did and ate on a Wednesday for a change, hence why this is a bit of a late post. Thanks again to Jenn for hosting the party!

When I got up I had the usual mug of warm water and lemon juice and then hit the gym. I did 5k of speed intervals on the treadmill, changing the pace every 0.25 miles. I did that in about 26 minutes then hopped on over to the step machine, bike and cross trainer for a further 30 minutes of HIITs to give me a great sweaty cardio workout all in under an hour!

Breakfast was something a bit special this morning, I surveyed the contents of my fridge and came up with this delicious Squash, Courgette, Banana Bread Smoothie!

It included spinach, 1/2 heaping cup of roast squash, 1 medium courgette, 1/2 frozen banana, 1 scoop vanilla sun warrior, maca powder, spirulina, 1 tsp black strap molasses, cinnamon, ginger, water, ice, gums and vanilla stevia. For toppings I added almond butter sauce, crunchy shoyu roasted squash seeds, dried cranberries, cinnamon and a drizzle of maple syrup. Heaven! This was so creamy, I loved the salty squash seeds with the sweet cranberries too. I also had a big mug of Tea Pigs Chilli Chai.

Lunch was a big salad containing romaine, red cabbage, carrot, cucumber, alfalfa sprouts, adzuki beans and a dressing made with tahini, sweet white miso, ume vinegar and black sesame seeds mixed with water, it was gorgeous! I also had a couple of satsumas:

For a mid afternoon snack I ate a pack of thai sweet chilli roasted chickpeas, raw kale chips and a pink lady apple accompanied by a giant mug of green tea:

Those chickpeas were amazing and so filling! I had fully expected to be raiding my snack drawer again but they kept me going until I finished work.

Dinner was from my frozen stash – Thai red curry with tofu and veggies along with some millet and steamed greens:

For dessert I had something really lush, Sweet Squash Dip with chopped apples:

I’ll share the recipe tomorrow as this is so good!

I thought I’d spice up this fairly dull WIAW post by sharing with you a few things I’m loving right now:

These Tumblr blogs:

• Fit Villains
• Blogilates
• Sarah Fit

As these are on Tumblr, posts tend to be short and frequent which I like. These three are awesome, excellent for inspiration, workouts to try, questions answered and tasty healthy foods. Check them out! You can also check out my tumblr page although I have neglected it a bit recently!

This little quote:

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Love that :-)

This cute hand warmer:

Topshop, £6.50

I have terrible cold hands in the winter, I’d love this to slip into my pockets!

The fig and tahini combo I blogged about yesterday – I’m dreaming about it!

Attempting to make my own cushion cover to finally finish the bedroom redecoration.

The mix CD James made for me that I’m listening to on repeat in the car – it includes tracks by Fleet Foxes, Laura Marling, Friendly Fires, Pete Yorn + Scarlett Johansson, Air and Zero 7. So in love with it, he’s such a sweet fella :-)

Simply enjoying the beautiful autumn – the weather, the clothes, the food, the trees – everything! I’m so excited for Halloween and Bonfire Night!

What are you loving right now?

I thought I'd better make it an early start this morning as I had loads I wanted to get done today, starting with my run. I had a hot water and lemon and this We Are Bear Peach Fruit Yoyo for a little bit of fuel before heading out. It was very tasty and reminded me of a sweet you would get in a mix up bag when you were a kid. Very retro!

I ran 5 miles and it was glorious! My knee is doing so well (I'm almost afraid to type that, I don't want to jinx it!) I did 5.03 miles in 49.04 with an average pace of 9.45, over a 10 second improvement since last week. It feels so good to be running again, bring on next weekend's 6 miles! I came home, stretched and used my wonderful foam roller then got to making breakfast.

I made a chocolate peanut butter smoothie (frozen banana, chocolate whey, teaspoon of cocoa powder, big tablespoon of smooth peanut butter and skim milk blended) then mixed in some oats and topped with a few grape nuts, cinnamon and a drizzle of maple syrup.

This was my 5 mile run celebration treat and it was oh so good!

I then spent the morning cleaning and tidying the flat, it was gross! Mid morning I snacked on an apple...

... then lunch was a tuna salad with mixed salad leaves, cucumber, red onion, sugar snap peas and balsamic dressing with a glass of fresh orange juice.

I also had a bowl of sweet strawberries.

I headed out to my best mates for a cuppa and a catch up and then on to my parents to say hi as well.

Mid afternoon I snacked on some veggies with salsa for dipping.

I had been planning on having a nakd bar or something but I'm proper craving veggies today!

For dinner I tried out my new spiralizer and made courgette 'pasta' with quorn mince in a tomato sauce with mushrooms, garlic and a side salad.

I'm over the moon with my spiralizer, I'm going to be using it for all sorts of things now!
Desert was something I've been dying to try out for ages - chocolate avocado pudding! I've never had avocado but I can safely say I'm now hooked. I had a try of it plain before making it into the pud and I'll definitely be using this in salads in the future. I used this recipe from Averie, but only used one avocado and didn't add the vanilla extract, to make it in to this beautiful bowl of chocolately heaven!

This tastes like, and has the texture of chocolate fudge cake icing, love it!

Other things I'm loving right now:

This cute necklace from Accessorize that I've had a while (don't worry I haven't been breaking my Big Budget Rules!) - I've been wearing it nearly everyday!

Flesh Tone by Kelis - I'm in love with this album at the moment and have been playing it constantly. Its also on my running playlist and really got me moving this morning!

Veggies - On my way home I popped into Lidl on the hunt for more bargains and picked up all these for £5.65

Mushrooms, brocolli, red, yellow and green peppers, red onion, spinach, italian salad, strawberries.

This Topshop make up cream blusher in Blush

My summer make up essential for making me look rosy!

...and Twitter!

I tend to fall in love with something - an album, song, piece of clothing, book or movie and then play, wear or watch it over and over! What are you loving right now?

- I'm still playing about with the design of the blog so the heading might change again! Should be sorted by Monday x

April has been a pretty good month, I have:

• Really focused on my running training including improving my speed and increasing my mileage from 8 miles to 10.5 miles
• Changed up my speeds and resistance levels for my cardio intervals on the gym equipment
• Maintained my weight
• Continued to focus on having a healthy mind set around fuelling myself properly

To be honest I think this month has been very much a case of things just ‘ticking along’ nicely which is always good. What I did plan to do this month and kind of failed on was refocusing on my push up goal and make good progress on my diet and nutrition advisor course. I did get one assignment completed but I really need to be doing more. 

Thoughts on weight maintenance

I wanted to write a little bit about the whole weight maintenance thing. I won’t go over the whole story in detail but for any new readers: I was over weight, I lost weight, I reached a plateau and was happy enough at that weight. Then I started loosing more, went vegetarian and lost even more and now I’m trying to maintain my weight without actually getting any smaller! Just for background info I’m 5’6 and a UK size 8 – 10, I do not want to get any smaller than this, as for me I feel I look scrawny and still want to hang on to a few curves! However that is where the fun starts, after literally years of dieting I have struggled with getting out of the ‘weight loss’ mind set and moving into the weight management / eating for optimum health mind set.

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This month I have maintained my weight and have only weighed myself once so I feel like I’m making good progress. I feel like I’ve been fuelling myself better and my general approach to eating for health rather than skinniness has really improved. I have a much more relaxed attitude to eating when I am hungry although I am still struggling with some demons that come out when I worry that I’m eating too much and will put weight on but I really feel that I’m better able to silence them. Overall I feel like I’m going in the right direction! I think that having more awareness of calories although without actually calorie counting every day has helped me to ensure that I’m eating enough. I’m tending to shoot for around 2000 cals a day as this seems to be right for my size and activity levels.

Goals for May

• Have an awesome time in NYC!
• Complete at least 4 assignments for my course
• Increase my maximum running distance from 10.5 miles to 12 miles
• Continue to work on my speed
• Work on my push up goal
• Stick to my new training plan:

Monday – AM gym based workout – speed intervals on treadmill 15 min, cardio intervals on gym equipment – 45 min (sticking at current levels), abs and core plus push up practice

Tuesday – AM Yoga, PM Body Pump class (if working late then 30 Day Shred DVD and Yoga before work)

Wednesday – AM run – around 6 miles / 10k mix of speed work, hills, recovery run depending on how I feel, abs and core

Thursday – AM – Yoga, PM gym based workout – 3,2,1, system for 1 hour including push up practice (if working late then 30 Day Shred DVD and Yoga before work)

Friday – AM gym workout – 3,2,1 system (working alternate muscles from Thursday workout) for 45 minutes OR at home yoga DVD

Weekend – REST DAY / Long run

Running training

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I’m going to start taking a more structured approach to my running as detailed above – 3 runs a week consisting of a short treadmill run working on speed, a mid distance run working on speed, hills or a recovery run and a long distance run. I have the Great North 10K in July and the Great North Run Half in September. I’m really aware of not wanting to aggravate my old knee problem which came up about this time in my training last year so I will be making sure I take it easy when needed, doing lots of stretching and yoga!

May Obsessions

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I am currently obsessed by Pinterest which I discovered via Sofia’s blog. For visual inspiration seekers like me it is amazing! Here’s my Pinterest page check it out!

I also spent some time today sorting through my old magazines, now that is an obsession! I love my magazines :-) I like to go through old ones and tear out pages with recipes, workouts, style ideas or anything inspirational. I have 4 files full now!

Loving this Orange Blossom Flower water too:

I added it to yoghurt for breakfast the other day and I’ve been popping a few drops in glasses of plain iced water for a little flavour, so good!

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I am crazy about strawberries right now! I can’t help buying up several boxes when they are on offer they are just delicious. One of my most vibrant food memories is going strawberry picking with my aunt and uncle down south and eating sun warmed strawberries straight from the plant, fabulous!

…and obviously:

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5 days and counting!

May Sponsors

Just a quick shout out to my May Sponsors, Viva Pure, Nakd and The Raw Chocolate Company. I have an awesome May Sponsor giveaway coming up so keep checking out the blog for more details to come! I have sponsors lined up for June but anyone interested in becoming a blog sponsor for July drop me an email at laura@keepinghealthygettingstylish.com

Have you had a good April? What are your goals for May? Any current obsessions you’d like to share?