Preparations are underway for my San Diego trip! I spent the weekend cleaning the house from top to bottom. I leave on Saturday morning so I won’t have time to clean next weekend and I know the bf won’t do anything when I’m gone other than throw out the trash and clean the bathrooms/kitchen.  It’s funny that I’m not even gone yet but I’m already thinking about when I get back,lol.

Everytime I workout I put a sticker on my calendar. This month my calendar looks so pitifull.I need to rectify this immediately.  Except that on Friday I slipped on some ice and hurt my ankle. It’s not sprained I don’t think but it really hurts when I walk on it. At lunch I did 1 round of the stairs with my workout buddy but it hurt too much to continue so we ended it there. When I came home I did do some abs and pilates so that’s something.   I am looking forward to working out in the hotel gym when I’m in San Diego though, I have some workout outfits packed already!

I’m still starting out my mornings the same way, I’ve been super lazy when it comes to food. Toast + Nutella. While this is delicious it’s also not the most bang for my buck nutrition-wise. When I get back I’m going to be changing my eating habits back up, but for now I’m going with it.

For dinners this is what I’ve had the last 4 nights..

Saturday was spag w/ homemade sauce & fresh parm & ghetto garlic bread. (lol @ the flyer in the photo!)

Sunday was Butter Chicken. DELISH! I just discovered this meal a few weeks ago and I love it! This time around I tried the President’s Choice sauce and it wasn’t as good as the previous one I’d bought which was V8 I think?

Last night was burgers. With real meat! These were so worth the stomach ache I had to deal with!

Tonight was homemade calzones. Just regular cheese, pepperoni, mushroom and orange pepper mixed with sauce. I forgot to take an inside pic, sorry.

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This morning went by ridiculously fast. This afternoon was painfully s l o w. Regardless, work is over and Friday has officially arrived! I cracked open a Pear Cider in celebration!

I only ever post breakfast & dinner because usually my lunches are the same old, sandwich or soup. But yes, I do eat lunch each and every day.

On Wednesday I started off my morning the same way as Monday & Tuesday.

For dinner we ordered in some Chinese food for my birthday. My plate is overfilled, I only ended up eating about half of this food and it kept me full all night.  We had some chicken fried rice, chicken balls & Cantonese Chow Mein. It was kind of disappointing, I think probably because I had my heart set on Thai and there’s not Thai place near where we live

My birthday was completely amazing, probably my best yet! I have a feeling that 28 is going to be a fantastic year!  I got SPOILED by the bf, the parents and my bff. The bf got me a heart rate monitor which I’ve played around with but haven’t had a chance to work out with yet. Tomorrow! 

Thursday was another Nutella bfast.  To change things up a bit I stuffed a banana w/ some chocolate pb.

For dinner I made some pizza. I picked up a flatbread, topped it w/ some pizza sauce, mushrooms, pepperoni, green pepper, olives and lots of cheese. This pizza was traditional but super tasty.

Breakfast today was toast again w/ Nutella but I totally forgot to take a pic.

For lunch I was actually out running errands and I missed Thai lunch with the girls at work. I was super sad about that but they’ve promised to do it again next Friday. I will finally get my Thai food fix   I ended up getting a chicken caesar salad from Costco and it was delish.

Dinner tonight was kind of thrown together last minute. I had a luna bar this afternoon and it just left me completly full.  I had asked the bf to thaw some salmon so I just threw on some makeshift bbq sauce mixed w/ spices, molasses & maple syrup and baked that until it was cooked. On the side we have some steamed carrots and some brown minute rice. Super boring but it was healthy and filling.  Plus, I still have a tiny piece of bday cake calling my name in the fridge

Tomorrow morning I’m going to meet the godchild to give him his xmas gifts and find out what he wants for his bday next month. I’m supposed to leave the house at 10 so I have to make sure to get up a bit earlier to at least get a run in. For the past few weeks I’ve pushed back my workout to when I get home and that just leads to me not doing anything. We have a weigh-in next week for the Biggest Loser at work and I do not want to pay again!

I need to update the weightloss page. I was doing SUPER WELL, but then stuff happened and let’s just say that last weigh-in I had to pay in some money for gaining!  I’m not totally discouraged by that though because it’s a certain time of the month and I’m sure the numbers will for the most part work themselves out next week.

Anyways. I need to go get a bit of cleaning and laundry out of the way. I hope you’re all doing well and on your way to having a fantastic weekend!

So this morning I got brought to a part of the office where a bunch of my coworkers had assembled to sing me happy birthday and present me with a birthday cake. I felt bad telling them my birthday is actually TOMORROW. lol, I was certainly surprised

So I have 2 days worth of eats to post. Sadly none of it is very interesting.

Yesterday’s breakfast was toast w. chocolate peanut butter & banana.

Dinner was veggie burgers.

This morning was toast w/ Nutella & banana [I loved this way more than the chocolate pb!]

Dinner was plain old tilapia and leftover veggie bake.

Clearly I’ve been in a cooking funk. I’m attributing this to the general getting older funk I’m currently going through but I’m making myself get over it after tomorrow. I promise   I have no idea what I’m eating for dinner tomorrow, I actually forgot it was my bday when I was planning the meals so I think I might go for take out and get my favorite Lebanese Schwarma. Idk.

Anyways, I have lots of studying to do before I can call it a night, I hope you are all doing fantastically well and I plan to play catchup on all your blogs in the morning. Why am I always playing catchup?  I need to manage my time better I suppose.

I was pretty completly unproductive though but I needed a down day like this. I did no homework at all this weekend but I’m sure I’ll catch up this week. At the moment I’m just finishing up the last of my laundry and I’m calling it a night!

I skipped breakfast this morning. Bad idea but my stomache was killing me and I couldn’t stand to eat anything. I drank lots of water and held off until lunch.  I had some leftover salmon and shrimp pie with some carrots and some chipotle spinach dip. The spinach dip is actually super gross   I also had 2 pieces of leftover baguette from last night and some m&m’s.  Am I the last to know they make them with dark chocolate now??  That’s not a good thing for me to know, lol!

I haven’t had red meat since I don’t know when so tonight I decided would be a deer meat night.  So I thawed a couple of steaked and threw together a harvest veggie bake and that consisted of dinner. Unfortunately, for some reason neither the bf or I were hungry so we finally made ourselves eat at 7:00pm.  The steak was great.  The veggie bake was amazing. I’d made this once before and really loved it. It’s some roasted sweet potato, cauliflour and carrots tossed in olive oil and thyme. Once they’re roasted I put them in a pyrex dish and top them with a mixture of cooked onions, tomato paste and chicken broth. Once the mixture has boiled I mix in some cheddar and pour it over the veggies and then on top of that I make a ‘crumble’ type topping of oatmeal, flour, walnuts and maple syrup. SO YUM.

Tomorrow is Family Day in Ontario.  It’s a provincial holiday but since I work for the Federal government it’s not recognized so I’m one of the few who has to work   I plan on spending the beggining part of my day reading all your lovely blogs. I hope you all had a great and relaxing weekend

I woke up with only about 15 minutes to go to get ready before leaving so I wasn’t able to have oatmeal for breakfast like I had hoped. Instead I grabbed a Praeventia bar and a fuji apple.  At the coffee place I had a large Chai tea. Black. This actually turned out to be a decent breakfast.

My goal today was to buy a Christmas present for my [almost 6 y/o] godchild. Yup, I still haven’t gotten him anything for Christmas. Whoops.  The thing is, I bought him a desktop computer this summer because he was about to start school and his mother couldn’t afford to buy it for him. THAT was his Christmas present. But I was informed via a family member that MORE was still expected of me. First of all, I still haven’t been thanked for the computer so I’m a little annoyed about that. The fact that I’m expected to buy gifts? Not cool! He’s my godchild and of course I want to spoil him, but I also don’t want to give him everything he wants when he wants it. I feel as if my cousin, his mom has these ridiculous expecations of me and I plan on discussing this with her next week when I go to drop off the gifts.

lol, sorry. I didn’t actually mean to vent but there you have it. This has actually been bothering me a lot lately so it’s nice to get it out   And for the record, I did find him a gift. I spent about $50 and I got him a pair of jeans, a couple of tops and this fun little fishing starter kit. He spends his summers where I spent my summers as a kid and there are some great fishing spots there he can go to with his granpa.

Anyways. For lunch mom and I hit up Tim Horton’s since it was already almost 2pm. I had a cream of brocoli soup [which was watery] and a 12 grain bagel and chai tea.  Nothing fancy but it hit the spot.  Over lunch mom and I discussed nutrition. She’s starting to really think about nutrition and her health and she wants to clean up her eating too, so she was asking me and products I buy and things that I eat. If our relatives can live to be over 70 years old by smoking and drinking and not paying attention to their diet, imagine the extra years we could potentially add on to our lives by improving a few things?

I know today is Valentines Day but it’s something that I actually don’t celebrate.  The bf and I used to exchange gifts on this day but this year I put an end to it. Our gifts were never  Valentines-y, they were books and dvds and other unromantic things so I said that this day would be like any other. The thing is, the bf’s bday is January 27th, just a short month after xmas. And then my bday is Feb 18th so having Valentines day so close just felt like too much.  I do hope everyone who does do something special has a wonderful time though.

So this is some of the loot that I brought home from the various stores I went to today,

I actually found Luna bars AND Clif bars at Loblaws! I never go there but they have an actually really great selection of products so I will for sure be going back!  These bars were 5/$5. I would have gotten more but they were almost out of all the flavors I was interested in.

For dinner I kind of threw a few things together. I had picked up this at Costco last night,

I also had a small brie stinking up the fridge so I blended some parsley, sundried tomatoes and garlic together, spread it over the brie and baked it for about a half hour. I had some of that spread over whole wheat baguette and then 3 pieces of sushi. All very random but filling and delicious too!

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Some background info, it was my great uncle who passed away. He was 73 years old and died of recently discovered lung cancer. He’s been a smoke his whole life. In a way he was fortunate that he didn’t suffer for very long.  While the funeral was sad it was also a great little family reunion. My uncle is from a family of 9, he’s the baby and he’s also the first to go.   In a way I see that as a positive thing, they were all able to live this long before having to lose one of their siblings, if I had any siblings of my own I would hope for the same thing.

Anyhow. Work has been kind of ridiculous what with year end and me being away. I’ve been pretty much running around like a chicken with its head cut off! And being that I wasn’t much home, the house has suffered also. This weekend I plan on getting everything back into place at home so I have at least 1 place that’s clean and inviting and where I want to be!

Dinner tonight was super simple, I boiled up some frozen cheese tortillini and then tossed it in a sauce made with lots of pepper, some milk and some cream cheese and a ham steak chopped up. It was very much a meal of the trashy persuasion which was a nice way to cap off my eats for this week.

Starting tomorrow morning, first thing I am back on track. Breakfast, lunch and dinner will be healthy options and not so much convenient, trashy options. My body is seriously needing it. I’ve been feeling blah and I know the lack of GOOD food and exercise is very much to blame!

Now I’m going to settle in with a nice tall glass of water, a handfull of m&m dark’s and catching up on your blogs, I’ve actually been looking forward to this all day

We had a death in the family last week which explains my absence. I’ve returned from the out of town funeral and intend to get back into the swing of things tomorrow.

I have missed reading everyone’s blogs and I look forward to catching up.

My eating has been pretty much hit or miss and not well documented so I’m just starting fresh again as of tomorrow.

See ya then!

So this evening I pulled out some veggie burgers from the freezer that I had bought a few weeks back.  EVO`s Veggieburst Burgers.  I was actually excited about these because of the ingredients list, Carrots, potatoes, onions, zucchini, romaine, chickpea flour, rice flour, salt, spices, non-hydrogenated canola oil for frying. 

Here`s the nutritional info -

Here`s what they looked like out of the box and into the pan.. they looked SO GOOD!

I cooked these for about 7 minutes per side which was what was suggested on the box. I threw it on a bun with a laughing cow wedge, some avocado, a slice of tomato, some caramelized onion chutney & some mustard. I had some carrots on the side.

The verdict?  It was like biting into a puck made of sawdust. Idk what went wrong, but for one the middle wasn’t heated through. I will try these one more time and cook them in the oven. I want to like them but attempt number 1 was a big let down.  I only ate about half of the burger and then it went in the trash

Since today is Wednesday that meant it was stairs day.  Neither myself or my stair buddy felt like going but we forced ourselves to go.  We didn’t go as fast as normal, it took us 40 minutes to do our run 3x as opposed to the regular 35 minutes. I’m glad we went though.  My muscles are all sore from pilates from yesterday though! I’m hurtin’!

So I’m at a point right now where my motivation to lose the weight and stay active is slowly getting away from me. Every other time that I’ve gone down this weightloss path this is right about the time where I abandon my new lifestyle and fall back into old habits. This time i’m hoping to avoid that. I’ve expressed how I feel to a few people close to me and they’re on board to help me stay on track. So between them and you guys I think I’ll be ok. In the past I think I never acknowledged this change but now that I recognize what’s happening I can be extra vigilent!

Anyhow, that’s about all I have for tonight. Lost is on but once again I won’t be staying up. I’m going to pvr it and watch tomorrow night.  For now I think, I’m going to go do some blog reading and a bit of homework done. There’s nothing like a parent nagging at you to to get your homework done.. my mother seriously just called and lectured me about putting off my homework! I’m almost 28! Ridiculous.

So a few months ago the bf and I got the pierogi pizza from Boston Pizza, and it was kind of awesome. I had some potatos hanging out that needed to be used up, as well as some Naan breads so I was inspired. I cooked & mashed the taters with some milk and lots of pepper. I then spread a layer onto the naan, added some crumbled bacon and shredded cheese and some ricotta. OMGYUM.  It was kind of plain but still tasty. On the side I had some bbq sauce for dipping. As a backup, in case these didn’t turn out I made a plain pizza which explains why one of the pieces on the plate doesn’t belong!

I forgot to take a pic of bfast this morning but it was the usual. Dinner tonight was the shrimp w/ feta, basil and orzo that I pretty much make evert week because it’s awesome and I love it.  I could probably eat shrimp every day I love them so much!

I was still a bit hungry after this so I made dessert. This is a classic case of me not knowing what I want! haha! I have a serving of mango & pineapple yoghurt, some Kashi, some carob chips, some cool whip and a Pirouline cookie. Idk what I was thinking but it was good and hit the spot! I`m loving this yoghurt I bought, I`m not normally a fan so to find one that I enjoy the taste of is a big win in my books!

I was planning on running tonight. Unfortunately, I forgot my shoes at work   I was actually super bummed about that because I had gotten myself excited about getting on the treadmill.  Instead I did about 20 minutes of pilates and called it a day. Tomorrow is at work we`re doing the stairs and as soon as we`re done the shoes are going in my bag so that I can run when I get home! 

I haven`t gotten around to updating my Jan weightloss stuff but I will do it at work tomorrow. All my stats are there and I forgot to bring those home too!

Anyways, I`m off to watch this week`s episode of Big Love. Last week`s kind of blew my mind, I love that show! I also need to delete stuff from my computer.. I`ve only got about 12mb of free space left which is kind of ridiculous!

I hope you`re all well

So I’m just popping in to post some pics that have accumulated on my camera. I’ve been skimping on the exercise which is driving me a bit nuts but the food choices have still been mostly good. Later on tonight or tomorrow I’m going to post my January progress for my weight loss, but until then here’s some pics of what I’ve been eating in the last few days. Sorry the breakfasts are so redundant, I typically find something I like and stick with it for a while

Organic mac&cheese, veggie 'chicken' nuggets topped w/ onion chutney & leftover stuffed shells.

Leftover turkey burger pattie w/ onion chutney, toast w/ laughing cow wedge and chutney

Lentil Taco Salad

w/ pasta and ‘garlic bread’”]

Leftover eggplant bake [prev. frozen