Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Cinnamon Caramel Bake



Ok yum, this was really good.  This weekend Alex and I were dedicated to relaxing around the house.  We went for our first run of the year together, and to celebrate I baked this.  I messed up the recipe and used 2 whole sticks of butter (I compensated for this by adding more of everything), but it is worth the guilt.  Especially since it uses almond flour instead of grain.  I made almond flour for the first time since Trader Joe's was out of their almond meal.  It was fun to decimate the blanched and sliced almonds that I bought, and the texture was better since there weren't flakes of almond skin everywhere that you would find in almond meal.

Recipe is here

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Working on my Fitness

Over the past couple of weeks my interest in fitness has picked up again.  I had been doing yoga, which even though I will continue to use it as a tool to relax, it just doesn't kick my ass enough.  Instead I've decided to revisit pilates, which is what I used to do in college and I had good results with it.  The only reason that I stopped is because Netflix stopped streaming my favorite pilates workouts.  Instead I've been utilizing YouTube for channels such as Blogilates.

Anyway, Alex and I have been having good results with our modified diet.  We still have cheat days where we are too lazy to make dinner so we buy a frozen pizza.  I'm going to try to cut down on these for myself personally and make easy salads instead since it's just food and I shouldn't be a slave to unhealthy food when I have so many tasty alternatives.

One of co-workers at the hospital came up to me earlier this week and told me how great I look.  He is really into diet and fitness, and he guessed that I had lost ~20 pounds.  I refuse to buy a scale for this house and I honestly don't know how much weight that I've lost, but I promise that I did not drop that much.  What I do know is that my face is more sucked in, I had to buy new pants a size smaller, that my arms and stomach have less pooch to grab onto, and that my boobs have shrunk.  I don't think all of that happened just from two weeks of pilates, so I attribute it to having an extremely low grain and sugar diet.

Instead of weight, I'm going to start measuring my achievements through measurements so here we go!

As of 2/20

Bicep 10.5"
Waist 27"
Abs 31"
Hips 38.5"
Thigh 22"