WIAW: London Baby!

Yesterday's London post didn't happen as I was suffering from a touch of post-holiday blues (not helped by the fact that all my family are jetting off to the sun today - Mum & Colin to Sardinia, and my Dad and sisters to Spain...jealous!!) but I figured a WIAW post would be a good way to write about our first day in London...



Please note that I ate a lot more in London than I normally do - Liam was quite shocked/disgusted by how much I could fit in my belly - there were so many things I wanted to try! So this isn't how I normally eat at home, honest!! ;)

Our train left at 7.50am on Saturday, so all I had at home was an unpictured coffee. Once on the train however...

I had two pain au chocolats, a pot of fruit salad and water for breakfast...

and then spent the rest of the 3 hour journey reading my Kindle and painting my nails...

When we got to Waterloo we suffered a bit of culture shock - 30p to use the toilet??!! ;-O

After taking in our surroundings, we went underground to buy ourselves Oyster cards, and then got a tube from Waterloo to Covent Garden. I'd done a bit of advance research and knew exactly where we were heading - Christopher's Grill for brunch!

We started with a slice of bread each (walnut for me) while looking at the menus...

We were pleased to see that they had non-alcoholic cocktails...

I had a spring iced tea which was quite nice, but mainly tasted like orange juice...

and was nowhere near as amazing as Liam's apple & ginger No-jito!

I love looking at menus online before I go to restaurants, and I'd already narrowed my food choice down to either Huevos California or French toast. In the end I decided to go for Huevos California (a tortilla with salsa, avocado, fried eggs & cheese) as I thought if I started off eating sweet stuff I'd never stop!

This was really tasty, but pretty spicy. I needed something sweet to calm my mouth down (!) so when we saw a table near us have eggs for "main" and then share french toast after, we decided to do the same...

This was divine! French toast with roasted peaches, mascarpone and maple syrup...I mmmmed the whole way through eating my half!!

After brunch, we spent some time walking around Covent Garden, including a shop full of American sweets (we were quite restrained and just bought one thing each - a butterfinger for me, chocolate pretzels for Liam - both of which are currently in the kitchen calling to me!!)

 and then, once we'd made some room in our tummies, we went to a shop that we'd spotted when we first arrived in Covent Garden - The Icecreamists...

They did some amazing ice cream flavours, although Liam was a bit freaked out by the breastmilk ice cream - it took me a while to convince him that it would only be that one flavour that was made with breast milk!!

I had peanut butter and popcorn which were both fantastic although, surprisingly, if I had to pick one I think that popcorn was my favourite! Liam was really boring and had milk chocolate + white chocolate...no sense of adventure! ;) he did try my popcorn ice cream though and liked it!

After our ice cream, we got the tube to South Kensington to our hotel (as we weren't allowed to check in until 2pm). We stayed at the Eden Plaza. It was nice enough - good value for money and a great shower...

but the room itself was teeny tiny - barely enough space to walk past the bed!!

When we were walking from the tube station to the hotel, we'd got a little lost and on our long route to the hotel had stumbled upon a Hummingbird Bakery (with no queue!) - a very happy accident!! When we were back at the hotel room I enjoyed the carrot cupcake...

this was amazing, super soft sponge and gorgeous cream cheese frosting. Liam was still too full from brunch/ice cream to eat his red velvet cupcake (!!) so I can kind of understand why he was shocked that I also ate the macarons I'd bought from Laduree...told you I ate a lot this weekend!!

Lemon-lime, cherry blossom, 2x salted caramel

These were actually quite disappointing and tasted almost stale. As you will see when I write my other London posts, I had a different macaron each day, and the Laduree ones were actually the worst I had. So Hummingbird lived up to the hype, but Laduree, for me, did not.

After I'd finished snacking, we left the hotel and walked to Hyde Park.

Despite the weather reports it was gorgeously sunny, so we dozed on the grass for half an hour...

before walking around the park for another hour or so...

before heading to Harrods food hall!

I drooled over Lola's cupcakes and desserts...

but only ended up buying some Joe&Seph's popcorn (caramel, cinnamon & coconut - I haven't tried it yet but it sounds delicious!)

and a little bit of sushi as a pre-dinner snack (again, Liam didn't eat anything at this time...no wonder he thought I was a piggy!!)

The breaded things on the left were shitake mushrooms stuffed with cheese and sweetcorn, really good!

For dinner, we'd booked a table at Umami in South Kensington, only 4 minutes walk from the hotel.

The restaurant encourages sharing, and a lot of the dishes can either be ordered in a small or sharing size. To start, Liam and I shared the Gado Gado salad, which was fried tofu with warm vegetables (bean sprouts, pepper, green beans etc)...

and we also shared a Roti Canai which was lentil daal with delicious flatbread. I had three quarters of this as Liam also had a couple of skewers of chicken satay...no complaints from me!!

I also had a cocktail with lychee liqueur and vodka...

For my main course I opted for Pad Thai Jae which was rice noodles with fried tofu, broccoli, courgette and a sweet tamarind sauce...

This was good, although I did find that in both this and the Gado Gado salad, the tofu didn't have the best consistency - spongy rather than firm.

We didn't have dessert as Liam didn't like anything on the menu, plus he was full. I, however, stopped off at Tesco on the way back to the hotel for my 3rd and final solo-eating session of the day. A Millionaire Shortbread Krispy Kreme donut (wish we could buy these in Devon, I miss them!!) plus a salted caramel yoghurt...

After this I was well and truly full, so went to sleep to get myself ready to eat more again the next day! ;)

As you will see in the logo at the start of this post, What I Ate Wednesday is focusing on fitness as well as food this month. I didn't do any fitness other than lots of walking on Saturday, but I have been getting more into fitness classes recently. Last night I went to a spin class and I am really feeling it in my thighs today!! The instructor was injured so wasn't on a bike himself, which I think either made it harder or made me push myself more as I felt he was watching to check we were actually turning the resistance up, spinning fast etc. Maybe I pushed myself too much though as the instructor came over to my bike twice to turn the resistance down (cringe!) - both myself and my littlest sister go very very red when we exercise so I guess he was worried about my ability to breathe!! I do think I found the class a lot harder as a result of eating like the above all weekend though...happy to be slightly more back on track with my eating today.

Have you ever heard of breast milk icecream? Would you try it?? I'd heard of it before, but this was the first time I'd actually seen it being sold. With choices like peanut butter and popcorn instead, I definitely wasn't tempted (!!), but I suppose in some ways it's no weirder than eating cows breast milk??!! :-/

I survived!

I survived my first proper spin class last night, whoop!

I did end up going into Exeter during the day yesterday, and bought lots of new sports clothes from Sports Direct - 3 tops, 2 sports bras, a pair of padded cycle shorts and some trainer socks for less than £50 thanks to them having a sale on. I also need to buy another pair of capri pants but I didn't like any of the ones in Sports Direct and Debenhams didn't have any of the ones I usually buy in my size so I'll have to order online. Now I'm doing 3/4 classes a week (ha, go me!!) my one pair of decent trousers plus one pair I don't really like isn't enough!

After shopping we went for lunch at Herbies - a vegetarian restaurant in Exeter. The food is delicious but the portion sizes are huge! Each main course comes with either a trio of salads or potato wedges, so we got one of each but then took all the potato wedges home for Liam to take into work today...too much food. The trio of salads were delicious though - they are specials that change regularly and yesterday the salads were raw root salad, potato salad with cashews (which was much lighter than regular potato salad - loved it!) and green salad which had some kind of tasty dressing on it:

That's just half the salad - Mum had more on her plate too!

For my main, I had a filo pastry parcel with roasted veg, some kind of tomato sauce and feta cheese...

I also had some of Mum's spinach and mushroom lasagne but that has come out even more blurry than these ones! I took the photos on my phone and they did not come out well, but I wanted to share as the food was so delicious! Luckily the most important photo came out slightly better - even though Mum and I were both full, we really wanted to have a pudding. Something we've never managed to do before as the portion sizes are so huge. We decided to push are tummies to the limit though and get one dessert to share, and I'm so glad we did!

This was a ginger biscuit base topped with lemon and lime curd, served with natural yoghurt, but you could have also had clotted cream, ice cream or non-dairy yoghurt. This was one of the best desserts I've ever had in a restaurant. The base was divine but it was the topping that was really special - citrussy and sweet at the same time and super sticky...yum!!

After this we were more than full, so after a couple more shops we headed home to pick up Izzy from school. I then had a spin class at 7pm and, as usual, was worrying about if/what to eat. I wasn't hungry, indeed I was still full from lunch, but I seem to have this paranoia that I'm going to suddenly get overcome whilst exercising and not be able to continue! A little bit ridiculous considering the fact that I eat plenty every day, but still, I ended up having half a banana (leftover from Toby eating half that morning) smeared with some honey peanut butter at 5pm.

I chickened out of wearing just padded shorts to spin...sorry Lara! ;) I did wear them, but under my usual capris. Luckily they didn't show too much unless you were looking for them. I was walking to the gym so just felt more comfortable like this, plus being my first class I didn't know what to expect. There were a couple of people wearing just the padded shorts though so maybe next week. Either way I'm very glad I was wearing them - at one point we did some kind of pyramid sequence where we'd do 2 counts hovering then 2 counts seated, 4 hovering, 4 seated etc and at the end we just repeated lots of 2s so we were constantly bouncing on and off the seat again! The class went ok though. I didn't love it in the same way I do Body Pump, but as far as cardio goes it was alright - the class went relatively quickly which was a good thing in my book! My legs were super sore immediately afterwards, but are fine today, although I may not be saying that by the time I finish boot camp tonight!

I have woken up feeling really really tired today. I suppose, even though by most people's standards I'm not exercising a huge amount, I have gone from just Body Pump on Mondays (and not last week because of the bank holiday) and occasionally Boot Camp on Thursdays (but this will be my first class in about 3-4 weeks) to this week doing:

Monday: Taster Spin, then Body Pump
Tuesday: off
Wednesday: Spin (45 mins)
Thursday: Boot Camp

After tonight I haven't got any more exercise planned until next Monday Body Pump though so I'll be glad of the rest! I might fit in a daytime exercise into my week next week as I want to take Toby back to creche again, but that will either be swimming or possibly Body Balance if my friend wants to go, so it won't be as tiring as spin hopefully. I like not exercising at the weekends as we always have so much on anyway, but it does mean that I do end up doing quite a lot of classes during the week if I want to make the most of my membership. I don't know how some of you manage exercising most days, I'm exhausted!!

Today has been a nice easy day though - lots of coffee including a trip to Costa with my friend for lattes and toasted teacakes. We also went to the toy shop that has a ball pool in the back. Toby has been wanting to go there all week and dived straight in!!

I've also had another of the bars that Maria sent me...

It tasted like a sticky, slightly less sweet, Bounty bar. I really enjoyed it, will keep a look out to buy one of these again!

On the school run this afternoon it was slightly drizzling, so Izzy requested hot chocolates. Oh go on then...! ;)

Using the hot chocolate powder from my foodie penpal parcel, delicious. And of course the whipped cream on top is very important. I always eat it first with a spoon, but I resisted adding a 2nd helping of it today!

Despite eating the hot chocolate plus a handful of dried apricots at 4pm, my "I'm going to get hungry during exercise" paranoia kicked in just now so, just before my 5pm "deadline", I had a peach (my 2nd of the day, love them!) with some cashew butter...

Could not get a decent photo of these, ha, took photos in about 5 different areas of the kitchen!!

I love the combo of fresh fruit with nut butter, so tasty and it seems like the perfect, not too heavy but still slightly substantial, pre-exercise snack. Although, deep down I do know that the hot chocolate and apricots would have been enough "fuel", I guess I just like the extra excuse to eat! ;)

How many times do you exercise a week? And what is your favourite pre-exercise snack/meal? Part of me thinks I should be eating more of a meal before exercise, as when I come home I tend to eat something quick and easy for "dinner" (scrambled eggs on toast last night for example). I definitely need to add in some more vegetables - dinner on non-exercise tends to be when I eat most of my veg so I have definitely been lacking in greens this week.

First Time Spinning

Do many of you go spinning? My sister started going a few weeks ago and loves it, so last night Mum and I went to a taster spin session (that you could only go to if you'd never been spinning before) to see what it was like. Monday is also Body Pump day so we ended up going to spin 7-7.45pm and then Body Pump 8-9pm! Body Pump I, as always, loved...spinning I'm still not sure about. The instructor said to give it at least 3 classes before giving up on it, so I am booked in to go tomorrow, eek! All but two of the spinning classes at my gym are at 6pm or earlier, which doesn't suit me as Liam doesn't get home until 6.30pm, so I will be going to tomorrow's class on my own (ie not with Mum or my sister) as they can't do Wednesday and are doing the early Thursday class instead. Must be brave, must be brave. I woke up this morning with a bruised bum (!) so went and bought some padded cycling shorts today, but I need to try them on again tonight - I'm used to wearing 3/4 length capri trousers so feel uber self-conscious in the above-knee lycra shorts!

Anyway, I wasn't really sure what to do about my eating yesterday as I was going to be out the house from 6.30-9.30pm and wanted to make sure I didn't eat to close to the spin class.

I ended up having early lunch with Toby at 11.30am of yorkshire puddings, goats cheese and sweetcorn (slightly weird, but what I fancied!) Toby wasn't overly keen on this meal so I ended up eating most of his two yorkshires with cheese as well, yum, the type of food I used to eat when I was at uni!! :)

I then had "dinner" at 4.30pm. This was a bit repetitive - leftovers from lunch of goats cheese and sweetcorn + houmous that needed eating, in a pitta bread leftover from the weekend! Judging from the poor quality photo I was nonetheless in a hurry to eat this!

I had 5pm as the "deadline" for eating (2 hours before spin) so when that got close and I was still hungry, I had a big spoonful of new-to-me honey peanut butter:

Not as nice as Dark Chocolate Dreams in my opinion, but still tasty!

A couple of hours later, off to the gym I went! The taster spin session was with the lady who teaches the beach body boot camp I go to, and probably wasn't really any reflection of the pain I have let myself in for tomorrow!! It was a 45 minute class, but a lot of that time was spent getting the bikes set up right for us, and explaining what normally happens in a spin class (while just leisurely cycling). It still got me and Mum super sweaty, and as I said earlier, I'm still feeling a little sore today, so we shall see what tomorrow's class brings!!

Whilst I didn't want to eat close before spin, I didn't really have the same reservations about eating before Body Pump as it isn't heavy cardio in the same way. So I'd taken a bar in my bag in case I was hungry between classes. My first time ever trying a Luna bar - thanks Maria for sending me one!

I only ended up eating a few bites of this before Body Pump as everyone started setting up their weights early, but I ate the rest when I got home later. This wasn't at all what I was expecting, it was really good! For some reason I have it in my head that I "don't like protein bars" but I think what I actually mean is "I don't like Clif bars" as every other protein bar I've tried I've really enjoyed!! So thanks Maria, for sending me yummy food, and opening my taste buds to things I might not have tried otherwise! ;)

Back to Body Pump - loved it! It had moved to a smaller room in the sports centre as the instructor had got a new speaker system and wanted to try it in the small room to see if we could all hear him. The class had been held in the huge sports hall previously and no one apart from perhaps the front row had a chance of hearing the instructions! This did mean that last night we were all a bit more tightly packed, which wasn't ideal for triceps or abs, but apart from that it worked fine and meant we could hear much more clearly...including the instructor singing along to the tracks which, whilst causing us to a cringe, did also make us laugh which I suppose is a good thing!!

As I didn't get home until 9.30pm I was too tired to eat much more, so I just had plenty of water and finished off the Luna bar. I made up for it today though with a trip to Costa for breakfast, half of this cake for an afternoon snack (I saved the other half for Izzy, very impressed my willpower lasted until she got back from school!!)...

Rhubarb and strawberry crumble cake from the bakery...delicious! :)

And also a delicious quick dinner - Liam got stuck at work longer than usual so the children and I made the most of being able to have a "non-Liam friendly" dinner - mashed avocado with nutritional yeast on toast with a sprinkling of Munchy seeds...

Yum, so good! Izzy and I loved this, but Toby took one look at the green and turned his nose up, nooo!! ;)

So, padded shorts - yes or no?? And any other tips for surviving my first proper spin class? I tried the shorts on again a minute ago and they cut into my thighs too much for my liking, so I think I will be taking them back. I'm possibly going shopping in Exeter tomorrow though so I will see if I can find any other ones that fit me better. Still not convinced I'll feel comfortable wearing them without capri trousers over the top though...will have to see how confident I'm feeling tomorrow evening!!