A bit nutty

Yeah okay I did it again.  Sorry!

I was surprised by how many of you managed to find the protein carrot bar recipes - wow!  If you did come across that post, how did you find me?  This ole blog has been neglected by me for a while so it was very surprising to see so many of you commenting on that post.  Nice, but surprising!

So what have I been up to for the last few months?

I initially started on the LiveFit trainer program but that was too hard to follow while living at home.  My Mum would complain to no end about the excessive amount of eggs and number of vegetables around.  The other thing that happened is that when I started on LiveFit trainer, I had to have a couple of my Wisdom Teeth taken out, and the healing process was about 3 weeks.

I also started off LiveFit on the assumption that I wasn't teaching my group fitness classes.  I did have a brief period of time without the classes, but now I'm teaching again, making following the program harder.  So for now, I've parked LiveFit until I'm in a better place to be able to commit to it.

I've been trying some other healthy recipes in the meantime though, and one thing I've discovered is that making your own nut milk at home is really easy!

But first... Nut milk... why even bother?

There's a cafe not too far from my work called Little Bird that make 100% raw, vegan, gluten free, sugar free dishes.  I'm not intending to be 100% raw, or vegan, but I'd like to try to incorporate more of that into my diet.

Firstly, I fell in love with raw desserts.

I mean just look at them.  Don't they look amazing?

That there is a raw cacao and hazelnut tart. No refined sugar, no dairy, no gluten.  It tasted amazing, and you felt amazing after eating it.  Also, raw, which means it hasn't been heated to any higher than 75 degrees celsius.

Check out this gorgeous fresh fig and ginger tart.

Note, it's a little worse for wear after travelling around in my handbag between the cafe and my office, but that doesn't mean it tasted any less delicious.

After trying the raw desserts, it opened my perspective to what other raw dishes are around.  I've eaten two meals there, a Raw Pad Thai which was delightful, but, I've had the Raw Mexican Plate twice as it has been absolutely to DIE for.

I believe the tacos would've been dehydrated - they were beautiful and crisp and the rest of the dish was fresh and vibrant.

Whenever I was at this place, I noticed a lot of people sitting around with iced coffee - a double walled glass with a massive mound of ice cubes, and a small beaker of milk, and a small beaker of coffee.

Curiousity got the better of me, and I tried it.

I initially added half of the milk that I was given, and then added all of it in.  The milk wasn't normal cows milk, it was hazelnut milk, and WOW.  It was at that moment that I understood what the fuss about nut milk was.  My previous tastes of nut milk were commercially produced, full of sugar and laden with vegetable oils and additives, so I was less than impressed.  THIS however, was absolutely delicious.

The cold dripped coffee is not heated above 75 degrees celsius, meaning it is also raw, but I'm not so bothered about that.  I just wanted a way to be able to replicate this at home.

Then somehow, in an incredibly timely fashion, one of the news providers here published an article on how to make almond milk at home.  The article said to push the nuts through a fine mesh sieve, but more research around the wares lead me to The Rawtarian's very similar recipe, which mentioned using a nut milk bag instead of a sieve.  I'd seen them at Little Bird and made a note to get one.

I waited for a special on almonds, and stocked up, and got to work.

I doubled the recipe and ended up with well over a litre of fresh, beautiful almond milk:

Using the nut milk bag was super easy, and once I'd strained the almonds I stood back and was like "... You mean that's it?"

Initially, I wasn't used to the flavour of it and had to add honey for some sweetness, but now I love that gorgeous nutty flavour.  I still season with a bit of cinnamon, ground ginger and nutmeg.

What was left though, was a massive amount of leftover ground almonds.  Given how much almonds cost, I wanted to try to find a use for them.  A few searches on the internet suggested making a grain-free muesli with the leftover almonds.

I figured, why not.  My Mum makes traditional toasted muesli which is so much better than store bought, and if she can do that, then I knew I could do this.

I used the almond pulp, some dessicated coconut, sunflower seeds, frozen raspberries and grated apple, then left it in the oven for a few hours at a low temperature.

I absolutely loved the net result.

I also stirred through a good hit of ground ginger, cinnamon nutmeg and clove.

I can't even begin to tell you how delicious this was.  And how filling it was!  I have both the milk and the muesli at work and I don't need to eat much of it to be satisfied.

I get the feeling that I'm going to love making and making more almond milk and almond muesli.  I can't wait to experiment with other nuts too - I've so far tried cashew milk as well (DELISH!) and I of course want once again to experience that amazing hazelnut milk flavour.

I've since made another batch of muesli, and this time it's with apple, citrus fruits (orange and grapefruit) and grapes.  I reckon there's loads of fun that you can have with this.

If you're afraid of making your own nut milk, don't be!  It's super easy, and well worth it.

Carrot Gold

... I apologise for that awful blog post title, I know you're all mortified by the awfulness of that pun.

I promise, that's the last one.

So I'm actually moving forward with the plan I mentioned in my last post, and I kinda dived into it without any preparation - so for the first three days, as far as food goes, it was pretty repetitive.  I am only just finishing day 3 and I am already so over separating egg whites. *snore*

Tonight I had a day off from the gym (not in the plan, but I am taking it since I had to donate blood this morning), and decided to give a recipe for carrot cake protein bars a go.

JAMIE EASON'S CARROT CAKE PROTEIN BARS - Yield: 16 squares

Ingredients

• 1 cup oat flour - I took 1 cup of oats and blended it until it was a fine powder
• 2 scoops vanilla whey protein
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/8 tsp allspice - I didn't have all spice so upped the cinnamon and nutmeg, and added some ground clove
• 1/8 tsp nutmeg
• 4 egg whites
• 3/4 cup Splenda, Truvia, or Ideal - I used coconut sugar instead
• 8 oz baby food carrots - I boiled and blended 4 large carrots to form a puree
• 4 oz water

Directions

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees - I set my oven to 160 degrees celsius, fan bake
• Mix flour, whey protein, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, baking soda and salt together in a bowl.
• Mix egg whites, Splenda, baby food carrots and water (optional) in a bowl.
• Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and mix together.
• Spray glass pyrex dish with non-stick butter spray - I used coconut oil to grease a silicone cake pan
• Pour ingredients into dish.
• Bake 20-30 minutes.

I tried making protein cookies yonks ago and they turned out awful, so I was a bit worried about moving forward with these, but I liked the look of the recipe as it seemed pretty straight forward (and now, I've got a bit more baking experience under my hat!)

The recipe calls for 8oz (225g) of baby food carrots.  Instead of doing that, I boiled some carrots and then puréed them in my blender.  Even just that purée on its own, I could've eaten by the bucketful, I did not expect it to taste so amaze.  I did 4 large carrots which ended up being more than 225g, and chucked it all in (because I was lazy and didn't want to put the remaining purée into another container)

I also added in ground ginger for a bit of zing.  I put it in my oven at fan bake on 160 degrees celsius and they were done in 20 minutes.

The other thing I didn't do was use Splenda, Truvia or Ideal as a sweetener (I haven't even heard of Truvia or Ideal, can anyone enlighten me?) I used coconut sugar instead, which is produced from the sap of the cut coconut blossom.

How did they turn out?

*Beautiful*.  I was so impressed by this recipe!  Next time I will up the ginger and reduce the coconut sugar, since it was on the sweet side for my palate.  I'm so happy that I finally got a protein recipe that works, and I'm keen to try some 'on plan' twists with it.  The texture was very much like a cake - it didn't rise too much so it looks more like a slice, but it is fluffy and moist.  I suspect that these ones may have come out a bit more moist because of the extra carrots I put in, but I actually really like them that way.

If you're wondering how I got the ripple like effect on the top of the squares... that's just the bottom of my pan, I used a square Wiltshire silicone pan that I got cheap off NZSale or 1-Day (can't recall which one exactly), so there's no skill involved there.

I'll be blogging a bit more about the plan as I go along... I'm even tracking how I'm feeling each day so you might get an 'ominbus' for the week, but we'll see how we go, that might be a bit ambitious :)

I can tell you also that I am SORE from the weights!  Good work clearly is being done there :D

Oh would you look at the year.

It's 2013, how the heck did that happen?!

I'm personally quite thrilled to see the back of 2012 - it ended particularly badly and I'd rather not dwell on that.

In fact, I'm not even going to review the goals I set for 2012, since I know that the year was full of twists and turns and I'm just happy that it's over and I can move on.

I start 2013 in a position that I haven't found myself in for a while... being completely and utterly focused on myself, rather than having a responsibility to someone else.  I need that to trickle over into my goals too.

I know the biggest, most important thing that I need to focus on for at least the first part of 2013 is lifting weights and strength training.  I'm thinking of trying the LiveFit Trainer program by Jamie Eason just to get myself into the habit of going to the gym and training with weights, and then once that's done, talking to a personal trainer about some more specific goals (and I already know the personal trainer who is going to help me, and I'm so excited to be able to work with him).

The part that actually scares me is no cardio for the first few weeks.  I tend to do 16+ hours of cardio per week because I love it (not because I'm like OMG I MUST DO CARDIO TO BURN TEH CALORIES), so naturally, cutting out something I love is something I'm very nervous about.

In the past I've done running goals, and it's taken me a long time to admit... hey, I'm actually not the hugest fan of running.  I'd much rather do something else - go for a swim, get into an RPM class or a BODYCOMBAT class, so enough of torturing myself and forcing myself to love something that I only think is 'okay'.  I loved the euphoria of participating in a race, but it pales in comparison to the euphoria I feel from doing a class, and even moreso, teaching a class.

Now one problem that I had in 2012 that has particularly gotten worse in the last couple of months is eating. Not too much, not even poorly, I've been forgetting to eat.  So I will really need to make an effort to remember to eat.  Sometimes I will actually have to take a moment and think about the last proper meal I ate, and it will have been a day or more.  I'm generally better at work than I am at home, though this is something I really do need to sort out.  I can't be going days without eating.

And! Even if I'm tasting cake creations, THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS EATING. (I'm yelling at myself, FYI, not you guys.  I love you guys, I would never yell at you.  Unless you were annoying me.)

Finally, more sleep.  I need to organise myself better and not be running off 1 hour of sleep because I've been up making cupcakes after teaching a class.

Three major goals for 2013:

1. Lift Weight
2. Remember to Eat
3. Get Some Sleep

I'll keep you posted if I do move forward with the LiveFit trainer - I think the main thing I need to do is convince the people whose classes I'm going to for training that I won't be in them for a while because I'm following the program - and that's a hard ask; I know if one of the members in one of my classes said that they weren't going to come to my classes for a while because of something that 'some trainer' had told them, I'd be annoyed at said trainer as our livelihood depends on people coming to our classes and continuously coming to our classes.

I've also been thinking of a few minor goals - to help me save money and get better nutrition.  In a way, some of the minor goals are resolving the crux which prevents a major goal from being achieved.

The first one is regarding buying coffee.  Initially, I just bought it as a treat once a week after a Wednesday morning RPM class.  Now, I'm buying it way more than that.  I honed that in by saying 'the mornings I teach are the mornings I can buy coffee'.  That was fine when I was teaching twice a week, but there were some weeks where I was teaching four times a week.  Now, I'm not teaching any mornings but I'm still buying the coffee!  Argh.  Not only do I need to buy less coffee, but I need to change what I order.

So my first minor goal is Latte is the new Mocha - instead of ordering a Mochaccinos with the chocolate syrup or powder in it, I should switch it for a Latte.

I'm going to try and integrate this with the major goal of lifting weight.  Before I was allowing myself to get a coffee on the days I taught.  Now I'll allow myself a coffee on the days I weight train - kind of like a Pump Iron, Get Coffee type system. I don't really want this to be viewed as 'rewarding myself with food', but rather, just a way of controlling my spending.  If I end up doing a large number of weights sessions, then again I'll need to revise this system.

And the final one. NO MORE NOODLES.  When I'm at work, I generally eat better (and remember to eat!), but at home, when the majority of the day has gone by, I will tend to think "Crap I need to eat something... umm... I'll just make some noodles."  Not a good habit.  Gotta sort that out.

Three minor goals for 2013:

1. Latte is the new Mocha
2. Pump Iron, Get Coffee
3. No More Noodles

We'll see how I go.

Where have all the cakes gone?

Oh hai there!

Yes, I am still around.  Yes, I know I should blog more.

Part of the reason why I haven't been blogging as much as I've become a bit more involved in a completely new facet of my life - something which has kinda sprung out of nowhere and has left me scratching my head a bit.  At the moment I'm running with it and seeing how it goes.  If it becomes successful, then yay.  If not, then at least I had fun for a while.

The area that I'm talking about is cupcakes.  Which as someone who is a fitness instructor certainly sounds utterly conflicting.  I did a few decorating courses at the beginning of the year and got completely hooked.  Now I can't stop.

It's not even about the cupcake itself anymore, it's about creating something which is a blend of flavour, texture, structural engineering, geometry, and art.  If you're thinking, 'structural engineering, WTF', yes, some of the designs I've put together I've had to seriously think about the structure and how it's going to be put together so that it holds up.  A lot of the time it's not as simple as just 'sticking it on there'.

Here are some of what I've come up with.

But with new challenges come new prejudices.

I've had firstly, friends complaining whenever I upload a picture saying 'STOP showing me images like this, you're ruining my diet!'.  Little bit of a slap in the face, but I can understand what they're saying.  To me I don't see a unhealthy food item, I see the output of hours of effort.

The main thing that I find myself experiencing though is people assuming that I'm eating all of these things I'm making.

Why the hell would I eat all of it?!  Heck, why would I eat ANY of it??  I may taste the batter just to verify that the balance of flavours is right, but if I'm trying to maximise the ingredients, I'm always making something to pass on to someone else. I'm *NOT* eating my own product.  That's just a waste.

If I want to eat a cupcake, first of all, it will likely be a small amount.  1 cupcake, 2 at most.  Also, I don't want to go through the effort of baking it and decorating it for myself.  I'd BUY the damn cupcake if I wanted it.  All of these things I'm making are for when OTHER PEOPLE want it.

One problem in fact that I have in my house is when I'm making and sculpting cake, is that there's a whole lot of offcuts.  My parents hover around the offcuts and while I tell them clearly "Do NOT eat those, I want to make them into Cake Pops.", they still start gobbling it.  Then I turn around and go "... Where the hell are my offcuts?!"  Then they blame ME for their sore stomach afterwards.

I'll always have extra which I'll be flogging off to people since I don't want to eat it myself.  Sometimes it's a case of when it's done I'm like "Get these things out of my sight, I've spent enough time on them."  Various friends and work colleagues are happy to devour them, though I try not to give them to the same friends all of the time so that the same people are not overexposed to the cupcakes.

Even so, it has absolutely bewildered me that so many people that know me, and know me well all assumed that I was eating what I was baking.  Jeez.  So do you assume that all of the chefs in restaurants eat EVERY MEAL that they create too?  They taste every meal, but they don't need to consume an entire dish every time the dish is made to have confidence that it's a goodun.

I shouldn't have to justify myself to anyone, and in some cases I've actually stopped speaking to people since they started telling me that I shouldn't be eating all of these cupcakes - these people used to be good friends too.

If any of you are interesting me in making some cupcakes for you, have a look at my Facebook page - Rai Rai's Cupcakes.  Just know that if I do end up making the cupcakes, that is all I'll be doing.

If the cupcakes are gone, someone else was doing the eating.

It was probably them, in the corner over there.

*points*
 

Under Pressure

So my family have been through some interesting times of late. My Dad in particular, has been through the mill, losing both his mother and his father in a short space of time. His mother died due to poorly managed diabetes - she knew about having diabetes, but since she lived remotely she didn't manage it at all. That lack of management and lack of awareness of her condition is what inevitably lead to her death. His father, he died of a sudden heart attack.

Then, my Dad's brother had a heart attack not long after my Dad had come back to New Zealand after his father's funeral. What particular shook my Dad was that this is is younger brother. I think it would be incredibly challenging for a parent or a sibling to watch their child, or their younger sibling go through some sort of sedentary lifestyle based illness.

My Mum's side of the family isn't exactly fortunate either, with several family members having diabetes and heart related conditions. My Mum herself went through a phase of having high blood pressure - I don't think I was as supportive as I could have been because she kept using it as a crux. "I can't make healthy food, I have high blood pressure." "I can't go for a walk, I have high blood pressure." "I can't drink water, I have high blood pressure."

Me on the other hand, I've had a few 'episodes' where my blood pressure has gotten too low, and my blood sugar has gotten too low. It happened mostly when I was teaching too much too often. I have fainted a few times, and I see it happening to other people in the group fitness industry too. One of my good friends felt incredibly weak onstage and he went to his parents house where they have a personal blood pressure monitor, just to check that his blood pressure wasn't too low. I thought "... oh! Maybe I should look at getting one of those for our house."

Recently, I saw on GrabOne a deal for a Blood Pressure monitor. I jumped on the deal, and it got delivered to our home not too long ago. Normally, whenever I bring home a new health-related item, it gets shunned, because of course, to them, how on earth could I be seen as the healthy one when I'm the largest person in the house. If I present them an interesting concept due to a new study, or new article, or new journal, it gets dismissed. Meanwhile, if the same concept is presented several months later by my uncle, or by one of their colleagues, or one of their family friends, it becomes an obsession in our household. It causes a lot of headdesking on my part.

But this time, when I walked in with the blood pressure monitor, everyone in my family all huddled around it, kept wrestling it off each other, eager to see what kind of reading they would get. The monitor lights up in several colours - green if your blood pressure is in the normal or optimal range, orange if it's on the high side, and red if it's dangerously high. My Mum and Dad kept getting amber readings and kept asking me to re-take their readings because they didn't really want to believe what they were seeing.  Then they wanted to see what my blood pressure was, and my first reading came back green.  They didn't believe that, so asked me to take it again, and again, and again.  They all came back green, it started to elevate a bit because they were stressing me out (haha) but it was really interesting to see the disbelief.  They just didn't want to accept that my blood pressure was good, and theirs was not.

Shortly after that, my Dad went to the doctor to validate whether the little blood pressure monitor was right, and in fact, the situation was much more serious.  He's currently in a prediabetic state, the 'grey area' between normal, and diabetic blood sugar.  After losing both of his parents, a near miss with his brother, and his parents-in-law both plagued with diabetes and heart related conditions, this was obviously hard news to hear.

So much of what my family does has been image based - to the point where my brother worryingly has been taking 'fat burning pills' (of which he knows NOTHING about - he can't name the active ingredient, he doesn't know what they're called, they're just some pills that his mate has hooked him up with).  To his credit, he has improved his eating and he's exercising really well, I just feel uncomfortable with the pills, I don't think he needs them.

My Dad's shift in focus poses some interesting times ahead for my family.  It's been less of clutching at body parts and hearing 'I hate this, I just want to get rid of this', and more of 'I only do one session of cardio per week.  I need to do more, can we go for a walk?'

We'll see what happens.  I support them wholly, and I hope they do make some good progress.  They are my family after all.  I love them, and I don't want them gone before their time.

Whoops

If those of you in feed readers saw the last blog post I published, my apologies, that was supposed to go up on the exercise blog C&E.

My bad!

Manning Up

Could you imagine being 5 years old and running barefoot for an hour to get to school - eyes wide and elated to be learning in a language you didn't understand? Or being given the all-clear after your chemo to have a future with your children? Really - could you? Then why not stop blaming everyone else for your being overweight? Have some discipline, get to a class and make the right choices. Yours are easy ones. Man up.

I saw this on Facebook published as a status from an instructor overseas. While I don't agree with her manner of delivery, and her presumption that being overweight is simply a 'lack of discipline' (in some cases that may be true, though I also know several thin people who are equally lacking discipline in maintaining a healthy lifestyle), she is right in that being overweight is a smaller problem to be overweight than it is to go through chemo, than to live in poverty, so forth.

However. Numerous surveys have shown that children would rather lose a parent, live through nuclear war, get cancer, go blind, than be fat. A brief look on the internet exposes you to pro-ana sites that proudly state that they would rather die of anorexic behaviour to be thin than live a life being fat.

When I was a kid I know I several times contemplated picking up a knife and slicing off a chunk of my stomach. Heck, even into my late teens and early 20s I would grab hold of my stomach and say "I wish I could just slice this off...". I don't know how many people thought this way, and I certainly am not speaking for everyone. I know though that I thought for a large portion of my life seriously did think that being fat was the worst thing that could happen to me. If I had cancer, or if I was blind, or whatever else, at least people would have sympathy for me.

For why I was fat as a kid, yes, I can probably point the finger of blame at my mother. She was the one responsible for making sure I was exposed to good nutrition - which, in hindsight, I wasn't. Now I am, though even though I am doing everything right, I am still fat. Telling me now to have some discipline, get to a class and make the right choices... yeah probably not the most helpful thing you can say.

Do not worry, I happen to not give a damn. I happen to now think that I'd rather be fat than lose a parent. I happen to now think that I'd rather be fat than to lose my sight. I happen to now think I'd rather be fat than to get cancer, or live through a nuclear war.

I also would much rather be fat than have a lack of perception and assume that overweight = sedentary.

If you are sedentary, that could be due to a lack of discipline. Overweight? That is a bit more complicated.

You don't know the story of every overweight person out there, so don't go around pretending you know what will 'fix' them. If you're not in their shoes, you have no idea what choices they are making and you have no idea of the life that they are living. Man up, and shut up.