Wednesday 5 August 2009

Operation M-BOT - Four Week Fat Attack - Day 2

Okay, so posting a little late but yesterday was a bit hectic!

I got into work late because somebody decided to throw themselves under a train at Victoria Station. Now, whilst I have enormous sympathy for anyone who feels that life has got so desperate that they need to end it in such a devastating fashion... I can't help but feel anger towards them at the trauma they subsequently cause a) the poor train driver who has to helplessly witness someone hurling themselves in front of his/her carriage with the full knowledge that there is nothing they can do to prevent their demise. And b) any other commuters on the platform who are forced to watch someone perform such a horrific act of suicide - it can't be pretty!!

This took place before 10 am so it was still the rush hour, and Victoria is one of the busiest stations in London!

My heart goes out to their family and anyone who witnessed this awful event :-(

BUT it did mean I was very late for work, so had to work through lunch, which meant I didn't get to do my lower body workout FUME!

The boys and I went to see Chun Yi - The Legend of Kung Fu at the London Coliseum last night. Before we got there we had a quick bite to eat at Henry's in Covent Garden. I'd seen on their site that they had a special deal which entitled 2 people to a burger or pasta dish each, plus a bottle of wine to share, for just £20! Result!

So, Joe and the boy had burgers, the boy had a diet coke (a treat, he's very rarely allowed anything like that, I'm such a mean strict mum haha) and Joe and I shared a bottle of the house red which was actually the most delicious Malbec - my fave!

I was going to get steak and chips, sans chips, as I fancied a good steak and I'm a sirloin fan. However, they'd run out of sirloin (although they had enough for a steak sandwich, bizarre!), so I had to opt for the 12oz rump steak instead... even though I knew it was a fattier cut, and about £6 more expensive!! My main course was nearly as expensive as the boys' burger, chips and our bottle of wine!


(sorry for crap picture quality... and the huge mess that is my plate! But I suddenly thought to take a pic halfway into my steak - there was a lot more than that earlier on - much to the annoyance of my dinner companions!)

OMG it was sooo good! I have been trying to get a decent steak for weeks now. I was so disappointed by most of the steaks I had in France... especially on the last night when it was just basically ribbons of fat, grr.

This was lovely though, not much fat and it was almost exactly how I'd ordered! I always go for rare, with the knowledge that it won't ever be quite so - but the lovely chefs at Henry's got it pretty much spot on!

I swapped my chips for veg which meant I got some broccoli and carrots - nicely cooked too, nice and firm, as well as a pretty decent side salad too.

Only criticism was the splodge of what was advertised as 'garlic butter' but was in fact mayonnaise... perhaps with a little garlic in it? anyway, that got scraped aside and lashings of english mustard duly applied in its place :-)

After our delicious meal we legged it to the theatre only to arrive just as they were pulling across the cord over the door - so we couldn't get to our great stalls seats and were banished to the balcony for the first half. I was livid! Thankfully the Coliseum isn't as vast as the Theatre Royal where I once paid £5 for tickets to see The Producers and ended up spending the whole time squinting at the tiny dots on the stage and feeling sick from vertigo! (or whatever the realterm is for being afraid of heights).

So we weren't too far up and it did mean we got a good view of everything... unfortunately that included the trap-door on stage, which kinda ruined the 'magic', bahh

We reclaimed our seats in the stalls after the interval. It's worth noting that we didn't pay full price for our tickets... we got them as a special deal on Lastminute.com which is one of my most favourite sites of all time... I live on that website, that and Toptable.com ensure that I make the most of this wonderful city :-)

So, Chun Yi... well, I'm glad that I didn't pay top whack for those tickets or I'd have felt a little aggrieved to say the least!

I'm not sure what 'legend of kung fu' it was meant to be... I certainly didn't learn anything about that amazing martial art!

The story was the weakest, most paltry sappy thing ever. The 'young boy' who was accompanying the older Chun Yi while he narrated the whole thing was so obviously not singing the lovely high-pitched melody that kept being played at various intervals. For one, his voice had broken!!

So that was a bit insulting, they could have just played the song and not had him mouthing away as if it were him singing, just looked daft, even from the balcony my son could see he was miming!

Then there was Chun Yi himself... at first played by a young boy (the boys were excellent by the way, so flexible and agile, amazing!), then a young man. The thing is that they kept changing the man playing him, at one point Chun Yi looked like he'd piled on the pounds a bit!

All that aside, it was very entertaining and the dancing was absolutely amazing. I only went for that really, I wanted to see the Shaolin Monks when they were last here but Joe and I never managed to pull our fingers out and order tickets in time. I love martial arts, especially put to dance, it must be something in my blood - my Mum's a brown belt in Judo and a black belt in Aikido - maybe that's got something to do with it? ;-)

Went home, felt knackered, went to bed

The end :-)

Here's what I ate, drank etc... as you can see I knocked the booze back a bit, but countered it with yummy food so didn't feel too bad this morning ;-)

Meal 1: Mixed fruit and Promax Diet smoothie
M2: Nakd bar - Berry Cheeky - 30g
M3: low fat Boots chicken caesar salad, carrot sticks and sugar snap peas
M4: 150g very low fat cottage cheese
M5: Braeburn apple and 1 Babybel light
M6: Rib eye steak with mixed veg and salad

Drinks: at least 2l water, 1 cup of coffee
Alcohol: 1/2 pint Peroni, nearly 1/2 bottle red wine and 1 dark rum and diet coke
Fruit & Veg: 5.1

Calorie Profile for 04/08/2009

Total Cals: Total 1642.3 (would have been a lot less if it hadn't been for the booze!)

Carbohydrate: 101.3g (24.4%)
Protein: 119.8 (30.7%)
Fat: 37.2 (21.5%) (yowsers!!)
Alcohol: (6.5 units) 52.0g (23.4%)


I'll try and post later but I've got quite a busy day ahead. I'm leaving work at 2pm as I've got a mammogram and blood test later - scary! My great Aunt died of breast cancer and my Mum, who's very young still, had a very aggressive form of it a few years ago which ended up metastasising into her brain causing tumours and a terminal life sentence.

Amazingly, miraculously and thankfully she recovered... maybe more about that another time, she's currently writing her autobiography, it'll be an interesting read! She's living evidence of the power of the mind, and prayer, over the body :-)

Then I'm going to look a few places in East Dulwich with a good friend of mine. She's been living in Fulham for the past few years, which was very handy when I lived in Chelsea as she was only down the road! Now I'm in SE London it's a bit more difficult to see each other so if she moves to East Dulwich I'll be super super chuffed!!

Anyway, must get on, hope you all have a fabulous day.

TJx

10 comments:

  1. Nasty business about the train - it must be awful for the driver :(

    Sounds like you had a great night out and the play sounds hilarious!

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  2. Firstly, hi! (I followed your profile link from WLR and been avidly reading your journal for the last few updates)

    Do you find that the Promax Diet bars have an odd bitter taste to them at all? Compared with the "normal" Promax meal bars, I do and I was thinking about starting to add in a Promax Diet shake for breakfast but if they taste bitter too it's going to put me off. What do you find?

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  3. Hi! Thanks for following :-)

    I've never tried the normal promax meal bars, I've always gone for the diet ones because of the whopping 1.5g of conjugated linoleic acid. maybe it's the green tea that makes it taste bitter? I drink (well force down!) green tea and if you leave the bag in too long it stews into a horrid bitter taste, blergh :-(

    that's probably what gives it the aftertaste, not that I've really noticed it but I don't really like the dark choc flavour as much as the choc and orange and I'd assume it would have a bitter taste because it's dark chocolate and orange?

    I thought it might be because they'd put bitter orange peel (Citrus Aurantium6) in it like they do in the thermobol as it's meant to be a 'proven' weight loss accelerant, but I've scoured the ingredients on the bar and can't find it there...

    I'm quite tempted to try the normal promax meal bars now, maybe I could order some for my other half and nick a few, haha!

    the promax shakes don't taste bitter at all... well, I don't think they do! This morning I had a vanilla and chocolate shake and it was lush. Apart from the banana flavour I don't really like having one flavour on its own, can be a bit overpowering, but if you mix them together (a scoop of each) they taste superb. my favourites are banana and strawberry and vanilla and chocolate :-)

    why don't you order a mini tub and see? they're not that expensive if you go for the smaller size as I did just to make sure I actually liked the flavours, didn't want to be lumbered with a huge tub of powder I hated - like I did when I went nuts with slimfast and ended up with loads of icky syrupy sweet powder... went on the compost heap in the end!! :-D

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  4. Thanks for that; I've taken the plunge and ordered a couple of different flavours in mini tubs and I'll see how that goes (oddly, Amazon are selling Maximuscle stuff quite cheaply, so they'll arrive tomorrow! yay!). Not sure I'm mentally ready to swap my cereal for a liquid brekkie, but I'll give it a go on gym days at least and see how it pans out.

    Reckon you're probably right about the bitter taste in the Diet bars coming from the green tea and/or orange flavouring. I'm thinking there might be something else in those bars that either my body doesn't like or isn't used to as the day after my first one I was quite jittery - could be co-incidence as it was quite a stressful day, so we'll see how I am after today's post-gym one.

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  5. cool, let me know how you get on with your flavours! Make sure you use one of their shakers to get all the lumps out - unless you've got a blender?

    you don't really have to swap your brekkie - I only drink/eat promax diet for breakfast because I never ate breakfast before... and even now I'm still finding it hard to force myself to eat that early - in fact I'm just having my 'breakfast' shake now... at 10 to 11 - bad!! You could always have a low cal breakfast, then a promax diet shake as a snack at say 11?

    it's the caffeine in the bar that's making you jittery! make sure you don't take any promax diet products too close to bed time, they'll keep you awake!

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  6. My banana and chocolate just arrived and I was planning on having one later but there's no scoop! I kinda ssumed there's be a measuring scoop in the tub, but there isn't. Hm. So 60g is a portion and a tablespoon is approx 15g of dry things... I'll improvise with a tablespoon for today but seeing as I'll not be taking the tubs home (don't want hubby to know about is just yet) I'm a bit stuck as to how to measure with any accuracy (no scales at work either). How do you do it?

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  7. Oh I almost forgot, no jitters today so it must've been a co-incidence. Yay!

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  8. are you sure? the scoops are often buried deep in the powder as they get bumped about a bit during transit, so you have to have a dig around sometimes! :-)

    if one tub didn't have a scoop but the other did you could always use that?

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  9. Aha! Yes! Much rummaging around produced a scoop. Phew! Now I have crunchy bits under my fingernails :o) Aaaand banana and chocolate tastes pretty good! Yay!

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  10. oh cool! (about the taste, not the crunchy bits ;-) )

    my favourite flavour at the mo is vanilla and chocolate, I love banana and strawberry though... almost as much ;-)

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