Stepping up to the start line

During my visit to Meal Magic yesterday, I spent well over an hour talking to my friend Daniela, who is the head chef there. It was great because she's been so busy setting up the systems for Meal Magic, which only officially opened to the public this week, and we have a number of common interests.

One of the things we were talked about was my running progress. My fitness is now at a place where I physically can run a good distance, but often it's my mentality that limits me. Thoughts such as "I'm tired" or "I'm in the best shape I've ever been, so I'm already doing good... especially compared to lots of people out there who don't exercise at all, let alone regularly" start to creep into my brain at the 15-20min running mark. My current ideal running goal for a workout session is 30min and these very thoughts quite often keep me from not going the full 30min. I won't even talk about what happens if I start getting a stitch when I'm running!

That's when Dan suggested that I enter a race (as in a running race) - maybe a 5km or 7km one. She said that this would give me a goal to work towards and a solid incentive to increase my workout intensity.

I am scared and yet excited at the thought of entering a race. 18 months ago there is absolutely no way I would have considered entering a running race... I couldn't even run for two minutes back then! And now here I am, not just considering an entry, but actually going for it because tomorrow Dan is going to bring a list of upcoming races for us to look at and choose one together.

New levels, new devils... come get me, because I'm prepared to fight to fight the battle and win! I think... thank God for friends like Dan and a husband like James both of whom I know will play significant roles in encourging and pushing me to (and through) this next step!

Meal Magic

Thai Style Caramelised Pork Steaks
Lean and succulent pork medallions in a mild, sweet marinade with fragrant, steamed Jasmine rice.

This is what I made yesterday afternoon at Meal Magic.

If you want a healthier and cheaper alternative to fast food, I highly recommend that you check out their website and pay them a visit.

The head chef and creator of all the meals on the menu is my friend Daniela. I have experienced her incredible cooking first-hand at one of her dinner parties, so even though I have not yet tasted my pork medallions, I anticipate that they will be absolutely delicious. Dan is also very much against the use of anything unnatural, including preservatives and artificial sweeteners, so all the ingredients will be full of natural, wholesome nutrients.

The concept is simple ~ Meal Magic provides an alternative to takeaway food when you need a quick, easy meal. You choose from their menu, which changes regularly, and when you've selected the meals you want, you head to the relevant meal assembly stations. All the ingredients for your meal are pre-prepared and ready to go. You just have to follow the simple instructions at your station to put your meal together.

Your assembled meal then goes into a ziplock bag with easy to follow cooking instructions on the front and you then take your meals home and pop them in the freezer. The next time you are pressed for time you just pull out a meal, defrost, cook and serve it up. Like magic!

I'm already completely sold on the concept. James and I will taste our first meal this week and I've already decided that I will book us in to make some meals together. Whilst we wouldn't eat Meal Magic meals every day, due to our busy schedules we have to cook a heap of food every now and then and freeze it in preparation for days when we don't have time to cook. Meal Magic is great for us because of the variety of food choices on offer.

I know you're asking, "how much will this set me back?" Surprisingly, the meals are very affordable, and certainly cheaper per person than most fast foods. However, if you are on a tight budget, you need to plan ahead. The cost benefits are greater if you can buy more meals in one session, so you might end up paying something like $99 for three meals, which represents approx. 18 serves, or $5.50 per serve.

Also, the experience in itself is great. The staff are so friendly and helpful, and their aim is to not just provide easy, healthy, affordable meals, but to encourage you to have fun assembling them. They even have a place to sit and have some tea and coffee and sample some of their delicious food. So if you plan to go, don't just schedule in the time it will take you to make a meal, set aside some time to rest, relax, and be sure to bring a friend with you so you can enjoy the experience together!

Handy suggestion:
If you have less mouths to feed in your household, split your meal into the correct portion size before you freeze it. Have extra ziplock bags in your cupboard ready to do this.

Also, if you go, be prepared to head straight home or somewhere where there is a fridge or freezer to store it in until you go home. You can't go shopping with your girlfriends right after Meal Magic ~ where are you going to put your food?

An Early Morning Workout

This morning I took James to the airport. He's going to New Zealand until Saturday. When I got out of bed at 4am today to get ready for our 4.30 drive to the airport, it felt like I had not even been to sleep in the first place!

Last night I was trying to decide what to do with today. I had two options - return from the airport to my bed at home for another short sleep followed by a late morning start at work, or head straight from the airport to start my day early and finish work early. I chose option #2.

As a result, this morning I found myself going to the gym at 6.30! It should have been 6am but I won't go into an explanation of why I started half an hour later than intended.

As I approached the gym I began to reflect upon 6am gym-goers. Who are these people? Was I about to encounter a gym full of people who only fall into the "elite" fitness category? Were there even going to be any people at the gym? After all, it takes a lot of dedication and discipline to go to the gym at 6am. I struggle most days to make it by my ideal time of 8.30!

As I surmised the parking lot I could only deduce that there were, in fact, quite a few people at the gym. There even appeared to be more parked cars present than at my usual 8.30-9am start time. I suppose that makes sense; if only one or two people were going to the gym at 6am then surely the staff would open the gym later.

I hopped on the treadmill just after 6.30 for my run and was done by 7am. Per my typical Wednesday morning routine, I then headed upstairs for weight training. 7am is my usual waking time so you can imagine the sense of accomplishment I felt at having already completed my run. By 8.30 I was finished, showered, hair dried and off to the office.

Is the 6am atmosphere different to the 9am one?
For sure. 6am is a when those who want to exercise before work come. 9am is the when the Mums with the gorgeously cute little kiddies come because creche opens at 9am. I found the 6am crowd to be very focused but not particularly sociable, whereas the 9am crowd sometimes seem to come to the gym to work out their vocal chords more than their muscles.

Both times have their advantages and disadvantages. I can't say which I like better. I can, however, say for sure that I definitely prefer these times to the horribly busy peak hour, 5pm post-work time, when all the machines are in high demand so that you have to factor waiting time into your workout if you don't want to be late for dinner, and the place stinks because there are so many sweaty people everywhere!

If I were more disciplined and focused, perhaps I would try more often for an early morning workout. I mean, it's 11.30am right now and i feel like my day is more than half over when it's nowhere near!

However, between my love of sleep and my desire to put God first such that it is imperative I spend time with Him before I head to the gym every day, regular 6am starts will not be a reality in my life. At least not until I figure out how to get to bed by 8pm! Not impossible, but highly unlikely.

In the meantime, I'll just wait for the next 4am drive to the airport.

Three Simple Things...

The beauty of food, fitness and friendship is that you can mix and match them in any sort of combination to achieve many wonderful things.

For example, today James had his first law exam for this semester. So in the morning I decided to spoil him a little with some feel-good food... pancakes! That, my friends, is food and friendship combined.

Now the combination of food and friendship is quite common ~ we all like to catch up over lunch or dinner, coffee or cake. It's an essential relationship-building skill to be able to combine the two.

But there are more ways to combine food with friendship than just eating or drinking together. How about making a meal together? On Friday, my friend Tatenda and I are going to Meal Magic to trial making a meal at their facility. Something new to try and we'll have some pretty awesome food to show for it! Tonight, James and I are making pies together. I will post updates and photos on both of these.

What about combining friendship with fitness? I've recently started going beyond my treadmill sessions and getting out into the real world for a run around the neighbourhood with James. I used to have a hard time keeping up with James and even though now he still runs a bit slower than he normally does, I'm doing better each time. Better yet, we are getting two for one - quality time together and getting fit!

What creative ways can you think of to combine food, fitness & friendship?

I LOVE GOOGLE!

I absolutely love Google. I know they have a reputation of trying to take over the Internet and maybe that's why some people don't like them to much. But as a consumer, I must say that if they continue to churn out products as fabulous as what they already have then they deserve it.

Disclaimer: Google is in no way paying me to write this post. Maybe they should! I just want to reflect on how wonderful Google's products are and show my support through word of mouth advertising to you, my friends.

James loves to laugh at me when I get excited about new products, be it a Google product, an advertisement I see on television or a new catalog in the mail. According to him, I'm a "marketing company's dream consumer". I can quote TV and radio advertisements from memory far more easily than historical facts and scientific figures. For example, according to the radio, you can buy good wine cheap (not cheap wine) at stores in Forest Hill and Carlton.

The google products I use:

1. Google search engine
This is where the journey began for me and probably for you too. Did you know that "Google" is now an official verb in the Oxford English dictionary? Can't remember where I heard that, but I checked out some sources online which confirm that it was added as a draft in June 2006, although I am not sure whether this draft was accepted or not but can't imagine why it would not be. A company who is able to make their name into a dictionary word is what I would deem to be successful. I wonder if I'll be able to do that one day!

2. Gmail
When I found out that Google provides an email service, of course I was sold. Looking for an alternative to my junk-mail infested Hotmail account, I made the switch. I had 1GB of storage space allocated to me when i first signed up. But it gets better ~ this has since increased to almost 3GB ~ and counting (yes that's right, there is a storage space meter on the gmail login page that goes up every second).

3. Blogger
In a world where blogging is becoming very much the norm of the current generation, this was of course the next logical step to take, although at the time I had no idea blogger was part of what I like to call "the google group". This one's pretty self-explanatory ~ after all, you are reading my blog right now!

4. Beta Blogger
However, what you may not know is that this blog, unlike my others, is done in beta blogger which ROCKS. Better features, easier page customisation, and it's getting better every day! I eagerly anticipate the day that I can transfer all my other blogs to this version.

5. Picasa
A wonderful photo editing program which is idiot-proof. By this I mean that if you edit your photos in Picasa and hit the 'save' button, your original photo remains unchanged. You need to actually export your edited photo out to a new file to get a photo with the edits on it. For anyone who has accidentally hit 'save' rather than 'save as' like I've done many times, this could be very welcome information!

6. Picasa Web Album
Of course this is the next natural progression from Picasa. It's an online photo album with 250MB free storage which can be upgraded for a fee. This is still in 'test' version having only recently been launched but I anticipate more features will be added as the wonderful, wonderful google developers continue to work on it. You can check mine out too if you haven't already!

7. Google Reader
This is a must-get for anyone who checks friends' blogs or online news or both regularly. I have had it for 2 weeks now and loving it. Google Reader informs me of updates to any blogs, hence I don't waste time checking blogs with no new posts. Furthermore, I am more up-to-date than ever with my friends' lives whereas previously I would have to wait for a couple hours' free time to scan the Internet for all my friends' blogs.

8. Google Calendar
My newest toy! If you get one, let me know. The great thing about this is you can also see friends' Google calendars if they let you, thus comparing schedules to find times to hook up. There is also a function that enables you to send invitations to events from the calendar to anyone who has an email address and they can RSVP to your calendar so you know who's coming and who isn't.

9. Froogle
I also have a Froogle wish-list out in cyberspace somewhere but I haven't quite figured out how to use this thing yet, although I figured it bore mentioning because this service does exist. I think you can look mine up using my email address, although it's pretty sparse. I welcome anyone who has it figured out and can help me with it. I do like presents, "gifts" is my primary love language. :) How was that for a completely un-subtle hint? LOL.

Bench Presses

I'm bench pressing 30kgs now! This might not sound like much compared to what males can do but it's over half my own weight so I'm pretty proud of myself.

Of course, by 30kg I mean I'm benching 10kg plus the bar which the gym staff tell me weighs about 20kg, so I should really say I'm doing 10kg but that just doesn't sound anywhere near as impressive!

I wonder how much I could bench press if I keep training. I want to find out!

Blue Fire Restaurant

Tuesday is date night. Last night we went a restaurant at Melbourne Central called Blue Fire.

Blue Fire's feature dinner is the Churrascaria ~ 7 different kinds of meat are grilled on massive skewers. Waiters than bring these skewers to your table and carved you a serving of meat. And it's all-you-can-eat. However, I don't think too many people would be able to get through more than one round of each kind of meat. But if you should choose to rise to that challenged and succeed please let me know!

Blue Fire offers a great deal on Tuesdays ~ if you order the Churrascaria plus either an entree or a dessert item, you food bill is halved. So James and I ate lots of meat, dessert and also enjoyed a drink each for only $70 (note: the Churrascaria usually costs $49 per person). We were also provided bread with dips, vegetables and potatoes, so there was plenty of food.

The service was fantastic ~ all the waiters were very friendly an attentive. I highly recommend a visit!

Thanks Tatenda for telling us about this, and I still definitely want to go with you sometime!



Enjoying our pre-dinner breads with dips.

If I go back again I'll probably skip this portion because after all that meat plus the required dessert, I was so full my stomach hurt.

However the capsicum and cream cheese dip was really good!







Olives... yum!













My dessert ~ lemon meringue tart accompanied by homemade ice cream and a berry compote.
Unfortunately I didn't remember to take a photo of this wonderful dish until I'd already eaten half of it!






I wore this skirt that night.

Okay so the photo is quite irrelevant, it was just a great excuse to show it off because I'd recently bought it and I love it a lot.

The photo doesn't do it justice.

The Outcome....

If you're wondering about the outcome of my discussion with my gym manager, it's coming I promise. I haven't forgotten about posting it, promise. I've just been quite busy at work. Stay tuned...

How to make a run fun

Today at the gym I went for a run... on the treadmill. Okay, I haven't worked myself up to going on substantial runs in the real world just yet (although I do run for 15-20 minutes around the neighbourhood with James sometimes), but I am able to clock 30 minutes at a decent-paced jog on the treadmill. So I'm getting there. Yay!

Prior to my run today, I decided I would do a full 30 minutes. On a typical day, when I hit the 23-25 minute mark I have to push past a psychological barrier. I know it's purely psychological because if I can run for 23 minutes without stopping then why not go to 30, right?

Today I almost stopped at that barrier. And you know what got me through that last five minutes? A fast, energetic, pumping song came up on my mp3 player. It was inspiring. Two minutes left and the song ended so I backtracked to play the same song again.

I'm telling you, music can make all the difference.

The Biggest Loser

This is one of my favourite TV shows! I just finished watching it tonight. I find it inspiring to see so many people make the decision to change their lives. I love following them on their journey through pain, tears, and plain, hard work! It would be so awesome to be a Biggest Loser Trainer one day!

Toasted Muesli

In July at a student retreat, my friend Daniela taught me how to toast muesli. If you toast it yourself, you can put whatever ingredients you want into your muesli! To do this you need raw oats, honey and any other ingredients you want such as dried coconut and sultanas. Dan gave me some leftover muesli to try toasting it on my own at home:
Dan's toasted muesli is on the left, mine (on the right, in case you weren't sure) is a little... overdone.

However in my defense, the leftover untoasted muesli Dan gave me from the camp already had the sultanas and coconut mixed in to the oats. You're supposed to toast the oats with the honey first and then add the coconut and sultanas later.

I gallantly picked out every sultana from the mixture, but have you EVER tried to pick desiccated coconut out of a coconut-and-oats mixture?

Trail Mix and Apricot Yoghurt Balls

My two new favourite snacks!

Trail mix is a mixture of various nuts and dried fruit including almonds, cashews, pine nuts, pumpkin seeds, Brazil nuts, dried apple, sultanas and really just about anything you want to put in there. The nuts are typically raw and unsalted (as opposed to roasted and salted). I love it because it's so healthy, so when I get hungry between meals and snack on handfuls of this stuff I don't actually feel guilty the way I would snacking on chocolate or lollies.

I discovered Apricot Yoghurt Balls because, funnily enough, my friend Olivia feeds them to her 2 and 3 year old children as snacks. No it's not baby food but it is yummy! Basically it's dried sweetened apricot covered by yoghurt and it's ball-shaped.

Enough said. If you're after healthy snacks these delicious foods can be found in the health food section of any good supermarket.

Dream in the Making

It would probably help to know what my dream even is, huh?

I want to become a fitness instructor. Maybe even a personal trainer. Hey, one day I may even open my own gym, or a whole franchise of them! I'm a bit of an ideas woman, so trust me when I say that I have plenty of ideas swimming around in my head.

Why fitness?

I see a huge need for fitness professionals, especially in a country like Australia where obesity and related diseases such as heart problems and type II diabetes are increasing at alarming rates. I want to play a part in serving people in this area of need. People who know me today would say I'm fit and healthy. They know I enjoy my exercise and go to the gym regularly. They know that I'm an advocate of eating a healthy, balanced diet. But I remember myself as a teenager, being the "chubby girl". Secretly consuming sweet snacks because of the momentary good feeling I got as I ate them. Being told repeatedly by my parents that I need to exercise more, but not really knowing how to do this and not even knowing that I could actually do it. I want to show people that they can be fit and healthy ~ exercise is hard work but it's possible to enjoy hard work! Food does not have to control us, we can control it!

I remember when I first started going to aerobics classes. I was 18 years old and in my first year at university. I really enjoyed them and thought to myself, "wouldn't it be cool to be an aerobics instructor?" Of course like most thoughts we have, I dismissed this and continued pursuing my studies in an area that I thought I should be studying - Biomedical Science. I went on to complete this degree with honours, only to discover during my honours year that I passionately disliked the day-to-day job of scientific research.

Upon learning about what I want to do with my life, the initial reaction of many of my friends and family is typically, "that's SO different from what you do now!". Which just goes to show how much we define ourselves and one another by our jobs or careers. Many of my more recent friends and acquaintances do not even know that I was never formally trained in accounting and that I actually studied medical science, of all things!

But anyway, enough of the background stuff. I have some exciting news: tomorrow afternoon I meet with the manager of the gym that I am a member of. I spoke to him two weeks ago to ask about his professional opinion on the many training schools in Melbourne. He told me he's about to book some of his staff in for training and would be happy to book me in with them if this is something I am interested in.

Tomorrow we are going to talk more about this, but also about the prospect of employment for me with the gym. So I am truly excited.

The Perfect Breakfast

I know what you're thinking - Where's the cereal? Where's the toast? Is Fiona becoming some sort of diet freak?

Let me put this breakfast into context: every morning I eat my breakfast whilst doing my quality time with God (okay, actually I eat the orange first then drink my tea whilst doing my QT because I don't want orange juice drippings on my bible!). After that I head to the gym for a workout.

I have tried all sorts of before-workout breakfasts from no breakfast at all to a small bowl of cereal. The former leaves me too hungry to work out properly and the latter never fails to give me a stitch ~ my stomach's way of complaining that it is trying to digest food and how dare I try to divert some of it's much-needed blood flow to my other muscles!

But oranges and a cup of tea does the trick - providing me with enough energy to get a good workout each morning, but not enough of a full belly to give me a stitch. Hence The Perfect Breakfast!

Someone should really make a movie out of that title, LOL.

Of course there was another reason I wanted to showcase my breakfast. The way the sun rays were shining across it in those morning hours made me decide that this photo had to be posted in my blog!