The Weight is ON!

Happy New Year everyone! Erm, yeh, sorry for being a bit delayed with that, and for being rather quiet on the blogging front also.

I've been busy eating!

(Well, something like that.)

It's too belated now for a 2012 round-up and 2013 musing. But one thing I want to say is that I reached the end of the year one whole hefty stone heavier than I was at the start of the year – and this means Triumph!

Around the end of last year, I noticed that I was starting to veer too much towards underweightness. Not on the overly drastic side or anything, but I decided to actively try and get myself to a healthier-looking state.

But then I very quickly became daunted by the fact that there seems to be loads more help and advice readily available for healthy weight loss, rather than healthy weight gain. Not surprising of course, but the only conclusion I could come up with by the end of the month's challenge was to just eat more.

(Yep, that still sounds as stupid as it did last year.)

But as I thought about this more over the course of the year, it dawned on me where I'd gone a bit wrong.

A couple years ago I was training for a big run, so naturally, was running loads – almost every day for about 6 months. The same year I started Capoeira and also a new dance class, but was already doing Aikido and another dance class. So I'd quite heavily upped my active, er, activity.

The following year was when I wasn't eating properly following my jaw op, so that probably didn't help matters. And as I got back into the swing of things with the classes, I didn't realise that what was happening was that I was doing way more 'exercise' than what I was eating. Oop.

I do less exercise now anyway (one of the dance classes was discontinued, and stopped running ages ago) – but over the last year have consciously eaten more regularly during the day as well (ie mini meals inbetween breakfast, lunch and dinner).

So now having seen that I've finally gained some healthy weight, I'm going to keep at it – with a bit more focus around developing new dishes to boost pre- and post- fitness activity. This is where I fall down the most (not literally) – working out what to eat before and after training. That period after work and before an evening class is too short to wolf down a big meal – but too long to have just a small snack.

What this all means though is that there will hopefully be lots of new tasty savoury healthy dishes to share with you. But don't worry, there will still be plenty of cheeky cakes and pies!

Watch out, it's going to be an extra Hungry year...

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