The Craving Challenge!

So here's my first weekly challenge! I feel like mini goals to changing my exercise/diet routine will help a lot more than trying to change everything at once. 

This weeks challenge is simple. I'm going to keep a craving diary. I've realised on this journey that my biggest problem is late night cravings, where I'm too tired to fight them so I just cave in. I'm going to be keeping a craving diary, and writing down the craving and what sort of time. Then I'm going to research what these cravings can mean, and try and find a healthy alternative for them! I'm awful at just ignoring cravings so a healthy alternative is the next best thing for me. Next Thursday, I'll post how it went and what alternatives I've come up with!

Lots of love to you guys!

J xo

What's for dinner? #2

Here's the second instalment of What's For Dinner! This time I loosely followed a recipe and it's a great meal for a family, or a dish that can last a few nights.

Pumpkin & Ginger Pasta Bake

This was a recipe I tweaked from the internet in an attempt to not waste any of my pumpkin from the
Halloween carving. A delicious pasta dish, with no cheese! Of course you could add cheese if you wanted to.

Ingredients:
12 oz wholewheat pasta
15 oz pure pumpkin, either fresh or canned
1-2 medium onions, diced
2 garlic cloves, either crushed or chopped finely
1/2 courgette, chopped width-ways into circles and then cut into quarters
1/2 cup water, kept after boiling the pasta
A small amount of ginger, grated - a little goes a long way!




Recipe:
Preheat the oven at 200 degrees Celsius.
Boil pasta for it's allotted time minus two minutes. While the pasta is cooking, sauté the the onions and garlic until soft with a little oil (I use the one calorie spray). Once the onions and garlic is soft, add the courgette and sauté further. Add the pumpkin into the frying pan, and toss all the ingredients together in the pan for a little while. Then add the pasta and the 1/2 cup of water to the pan, mixing all the ingredients together for a couple of minutes, until the water has mostly evaporated.

Once this is done, all you need to do is put all the ingredients into your tray, I used an 11"x6" glass casserole dish. I then added the ginger and mix it in to the dish with the other ingredients. You can also sauté the ginger with the ingredients in the pan if you want to, but I didn't decide to add ginger until it was too late.

All you need to do then is put the dish into the oven and bake for 10-15 minutes, and it's done! It's a super duper easy recipe, I did it late at night (when I probably should have been sleeping) but it was a very quick preparation and cooking time, and it was definitely delicious!

I really enjoyed writing this recipe and I hope you guys enjoyed it too! Let me know if you tried this recipe out and if you tweaked it in any way.

Welcome to my journey!

Hey guys!

Welcome to this blog. If you haven't been able to tell, this is my blog for recording my weight loss journey. It's a journey to lose weight, improve my fitness and be more healthy overall. I hope to do a variety of posts to inspire anybody on this kind of journey, and especially anybody, like me, who does have a huge goal ahead. For me to be a healthy weight, I need to lose 70lbs. That's 5 stone, aka a third of my current weight. It's a huge goal, but I'm not doing this alone.

I will go into my routine more thoroughly once it's been established clearer for me, but for right now I'll just explain where I am right now, at my starting point.

Currently I've just started with a personal trainer in my gym. He's been great so far, and I'm just about to start my program with him. I'm going to be working with him mainly on weight training (This might sound crazy as I know a lot of women fear weight training because they think they're going to 'bulk up'. This won't happen, I'll explain this in another post). I'm going to do sessions with him every so often, beginning at once a week. Alongside these sessions, I'm hoping to go to the gym at least another one time a week just to repeat the circuits that my trainer and I come up with. Alongside my gym sessions, I'm planning on cycling 3 miles every five days to University, as well as 1 mile to work twice a week. It's going to be difficult I know, but so worth it :)

My diet is the next thing to be sorted out. It's all about being a lot more healthy, and this is something I've been working on for a while, and I will continue to work on it and track it here.

I can't wait to go on this journey, and I hope that some of you guys will come along with me!

Love always, J xo