Maintenance Week Eight

Maintenance Week Eight included Easter Weekend, during which I did nothing but feast!  It started on Thursday evening with a gorgeous, gorgeous meal (and Prosecco, and nibbles, and red wine!) at Nikki's house.  Nikki baked lamb with rosemary and garlic and served it with a beautiful red wine gravy, new potatoes and a cabbage and purple sprouting broccoli mix.  She did something very simple I've never ever thought to do which lifted the whole meal - drizzled a bit of lemon juice over the greens.  It was really tasty against the richness of the lamb.  I contributed white chocolate and cranberry cookies for dessert. 

Alastair and I then did a brilliant walk on the North York Moors - knee high snowdrifts still in some places! - which left our legs feeling pleasantly sore and which was followed by an Easter feast at my mother-in-law's house.  It was one of those amazing meals where everything is laid out on the table and you take a bit of everything...I had cold roast chicken, delicious potato salad and lots of salad veg.  And trifle AND simnel cake for pudding!  Alastair's Auntie Avril makes an amazing simnel cake and I just couldn't resist.  I tell you, whoever thought of putting marzipan inside fruit cakes was a genius!  I also ate some rather nice litle nibbles from M&S before dinner - cocktail sausages, mini-Scotch eggs and the like - and a LOT of Easter chocolates, courtesy of a gorgeous parcel from Jules, before and after dinner, and in the evening, and at intervals throughout the weekend!

To make up for all this feasting I did at least do some exercise over the weekend and the following week - our walk was really good exercise, and I also did an hour's weeding and digging in the garden (gardening gets activity points, how cool is that?!).  Monday was a stressy day at work so I took myself off for a run after cycling home.  It was officially my first 10k training run - I'm using the Race for Life plan - and I was meant to do 5 mins easy run, 5 mins walk, 5 mins easy run, 5 mins walk, 5 mins easy run, 5 mins walk, repeat twice, but I cheated and only did 1 minute walk breaks (it was cold!).  I think I covered about 5k in about 40 minutes.  I think I'm going to have to be very flexible with my 10k training though, depending on how much my knees hurt and how tough cycling is at any time - it was really cold and windy this week so having worn myself out with a run on Monday all I did for the rest of the week was slog it out on the bike in the cold wind!  I missed strength training, and am contemplating a quick arm and core circuit as I type this...maybe!  The next official entry on my plan is 3 mins fast run, 2 mins walk, repeat twice so I can knock that out quickly after work one night.  Incidentally, I've just realised writing this that the first official entry on my plan was actually easy run 5mins, walk 5mins repeat twice - I did 45 minutes instead of 15!  Ooh, I feel quite smug now! 

Anyway, even with the exercise I did last week, after all the aforementioned feasting it was not a surprise that I ate all my daily points, weekly points AND activity points throughout the week - so I was very surprised and pleased to weigh in at 8st 13lbs on Thursday evening!  BMI 21.6, body fat percentage 26.9 this week (I found out that it fluctuates due to hydration levels).  Let's hope the price of my indulgence isn't lying in wait for me next week!