Monday 16 May 2011

Hidden Bananas...

Today, my Mum and I encouraged each other to stick to our personal eating goals. The aim: only eat 4 times (plus a coffee mid-morning) and stick to healthy, clean (ish) foods. The result: a success! For today anyway, hopefully I'll be able to keep it up for the next 6 weeks or so til my wedding :)

Despite keeping "on track" with my eating, I've really enjoyed all my food today, perhaps even more so than usual.

Breakfast was my favourite green smoothie, and lots of it at that. Banana, spinach, pineapple, milk & xanthan gum. As the pineapple was from the fridge rather than the freezer, I also added some ice. Turns out ice = huge smoothie!


I love this flavour, especially as it doesn't need any extra sugar - the pineapple makes it sweet enough even for me!


This was great, although the extra volume did leave my tummy feeling a bit heavy for an hour or so.

Late-morning, my Grandma came round so I made myself a skinny latte - can't drink plain black coffee like she does! Then it was time for lunch. I fancied something cooked, and had some veggies that needed using up. So I roasted a pepper and a courgette in a little coconut oil (with some basil tofu added in at the end to bump up the calories and protein) served with quinoa...


this was just what I wanted, warm, tasty, filling and healthy!


Yum, I love quinoa, I love roast veggies and I love smoked tofu - I'm in a very "loving everything I eat" mood today it seems!!

As I was going to circuits this evening, I planned to eat something quite big about 4.30pm to keep me going through the exercise. I ended up having a great snack I haven't had in ages - Averie's Microwave Blueberry Banana Oat Cake. I took a photo before turning it out of the bowl as I didn't trust myself not to break it!


I was right to as it fell apart majorly!! Peanut butter makes everything better though right?!


This is sooo good...I must remember to make it more often! :) Just checked back and I hadn't had it in over 2 months. It seemed to hold together better back then though!. It seemed to hold together back then though!


Yum, perfect pre-exercise snack! I think next time I will try cooking it for a bit longer to see if it holds together better. I'd written it down as 3.5 minutes cooking time, but looking back just now, I see Averie says 3.5-4.5 minutes so maybe that'll help mine to look as pretty as hers!!

Circuits was better this week than last week. Well harder work anyway. As we knew the exercises we were on the go constantly rather than waiting for things to be explained to us. Good to actually feel like I've done exercise! :)

Back home, I decided to have my 3rd banana of the day. Hence the title "Hidden Bananas" - I do love blending/mashing bananas into things to provide texture and/or sweetness. I hardly ever eat bananas on their own, unless covered in peanut butter! So my 3rd banana concoction of the day - Banana Sweet "Cream". I actually weighed the ingredients this time, and reduced the amount of peanut butter and honey to 20g each. It still tasted just as good :)


Yum. This was thicker than last time too, no doubt as a result of less peanut butter and honey. I wasn't too hungry after circuits, so this is a great way of getting some calories and protein in me without too much bulk. Pretty much the opposite of the, considerably lower in calories but hugely greater in volume, green smoothie I had this morning! Both delicious and both have a place in my "healthier" diet, yey!

Right, enough waffling! Time to give Liam his laptop back. I got a text on Friday saying my laptop had been fixed, but, despite the fact that when it broke they managed to pick it up the next day, they're not going to return it to me until this coming Friday!! Why does it take 7 days to return it?!! Grrr. I just hope it really is fixed when they do bring it back!

Finally, some advice... When you do exercise classes in the evening, what do you usually eat before/after? Circuits is 7pm-8pm and we usually eat at 6pm, so I was really hungry before we went (despite having microwave oat cake at 4.30pm) but by the time I got home I didn't really feel like eating anything. I think next week I might try to prepare something else before I go to circuits so I can just grab food from the fridge, but any other ideas would be appreciated!

3 comments:

  1. I love bananas in things but hardly ever have them on their own, even though I like them.
    With the gym- Tuesdays is my difficult day as aerobics is at 6.30, and it is a lot of leaping about, so I cant eat before. So I have a snack (I like seed stacked bars) before, and then dinner at about 8, but normally I am hungry! Body pump is at 7.15, and so I eat dinner (small pasta) at 6, and as body pump is no leaping about I am fine with that. Could you eat by 6 at the latest on this day? Or have 2 mini meals instead of one when you get back?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I know, there's just too many yummy recipes to put them in aren't there! I'm normally wary of eating too many bananas, and as I have one pretty much every day in a smoothie I don't want to have too many just on their own too!

    I like the idea of 2 mini meals (if you mean one before, one after exercise) - that's what I tried to do by having the microwave oat cake but I just couldn't motivate myself to cook something afterwards. Perhaps I'll try preparing a pasta dish or something that I can just heat up afterwards...don't really want to risk eating too much just before as with the sit ups, running, jumping around etc I'm a bit worried about how my stomach would take it!

    ReplyDelete
  3. So much amazing food in one post. If I exercise in the evening I make sure to have a substantial afternoon snack and then head home for dinmner afterwards. I don't tend to exercise too late though. The latest I have been home is 7.30pm so far.

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...