Day 47 - Back from Boston with a few pleasant surprises

So back from Boston for my brother's wedding. It was a fun event, with a mix of Chinese and Western activities including door games, tea ceremony, reception and picnic. Greenie and I tried to stay on diet, but a few little hurdles, or distractions from the strict diet:

1.) No scales for any public events - some of my sister-in-law's friends in the past have had eating disorders, and she was afraid that the use of scales by people such as Greenie and myself who are already relatively thin may cause them to go into relapse. I explained that scales were for regulating to make sure we ate enough just as much as to regulate that we weren't overeating, but also respected that it was their wedding - so no scales.

2.) You gotta eat the cake! - no need for explanation. Hey! It's my brother's wedding! The cake was massive! A triple-decker almond flavoured cake smothered with almond icing and bridges made of chocolate. Mm-mM! After the +100 dinner banquet, I think less than 1/3 of the cake was eaten (it barely looked touched), I had a slice then, and I had a slice at the picnic the next day. Oh... I also slipped in a couple glasses of wine during the wedding reception.

Despite these two hurdles, we managed to eat relatively healthy and eye-balled most of our food. I was pretty nervous though coming home and was anxious when I got on the scales this morning to see the damage that 5-days in Boston had done to GT & I. Funnily enough, we were both at our lowest body fat % since starting PCP! GT was down to 19.8%, and I had shot thru my previous low of 15.6% to 14.6%. I gotta admit though, as GT blogged in previously - the exercises are getting pretty tiring!

A couple of other nice little surprises from Boston - I took the opportunity of US visit to buy some stuff off Amazon which I'd been eyeing but not willing to pay shipping for to HK:

1.) a 14"x16" pizza stone. It's the perfect size to fit in my oven as a tray! Previously I only had one of those round circle pizza stones which meant I could make pizza, but my bread side was pretty limited - and most of the time I could only bake on loaf at a time. Guess who's going to be a-baking this weekend! ;)

2.) This second item is a multi-spice grinder. Super cool! If you have lots of different spices that need to be ground (as most PCP people undoubtedly will), but don't want to have 10 grinders sitting around, this one lets you change the cartridges of whatever you're grinding. This baby came with 3 cartridges, but I bought an extra 6, so I can have a total of 9 different spices on hand to grind. Can you guess what's inside those little jars? I'll give you a clue - looks like pepper, but it's not.

Alright gang... time for my date with 8min Mike, but before I leave just a couple more photos:

 GT & I at Endicott Estate for Eliza & Liang's wedding

My brother Liang, and wife Liza ripping it up on the dance floor!

This week's exercises are so tiring!

We can barley walk!
For the past 3 days, we did our exercise at the park next to The Holiday Inn in Boston and had breakfast at the lobby, their pancakes are delicious!
The breakfast is buffet style with hard boiled eggs, skim milk, wheat toasts - all PCP permitted! They also have a pancake maker called "The Popcake Machine" which delicious pancakes just come by pressing a couple of buttons!

I had one each day without butter and maple syrup (of course!) but it still taste awesome! It was the motivation to keep me going with the tough exercises for the past 3 days.
Now that we are leaving, I've to look for other things to replace the pancakes to keep me going for the next few days' exercises. Maybe we'll try making our healthy pancakes with fresh fruits as toppings. YUM!

Day 45 - Congratulations to all the recently complete!

Hi PCP-ers,

Greenie and I are at Boston Logan airport sharing some strawberries, orange and blueberries as our morning snack right now. We'd just like to extend a BIIIIG congratulations to all the Day 90-ers who complete today! To think that we're now the "ahead group" and more importantly that we're half-way thru PCP is simply amazing!

Once again, congratulations to all on your hard work - and awesome bodies! We're keenly waiting to "see you on the other side".
^^

Day 43 - Hi from Boston!

Just a super quick post to say that we're currently in Boston (Hi!) for Liang (Wei's brother's) wedding. We'll be here till Sunday EST before flying back to HK and arriving home on Monday evening. Eating has been more guess work than anything since scales have been banned by my brother and his wife as they have had friends with eating problems in the past and didn't want to cause any complications - which was fine by me and Greenie. We're trying to learn to eyeball the food a bit more, and have found it quite enjoyable to eat without having to measure to the T each time we do, but at the same time are also more aware of what we eat, even when we do.

It's 6am in Boston now, and we have Chinese door games starting at 10am today so time to get up for exercise and breakfast, then get ready for wedding! One thing we've noticed - the eggs in the US are HUUUUGE! I don't know if it's just the ones my brother buys, but they are soo large even compared to the XL eggs in HK!

Here are just a couple of pictures of Sim family (incl. Greenie) having breakfast in Boston. Hope everyone has a lovely weekend!

BTW new photos up for new week We took them a couple of days ago before we left, so a day or two early .

Day 39 - then there was the sourdough...

This was actually from yesterday (Sunday baking - Day 38) but only had time to upload the picture today. The sourdough took a bit longer to ferment vs. the ciabatta, as it was a two stage process; but turned out quite nicely in the end. There's two different methods I've tried for making sourdough so far. Last week was using a sponge as a starter; this week was the old dough method.

Day 37 - bad boy poolish COMPLETE!

The pictures kinda speak for themselves... the bread turned out awesome. Thanks for all the advice Molly! I can't believe that my home oven was actually able to produce this kind of bread! It was crispy on the outside and very chewy (that half translucent kind) on the inside, and it even tasted sweet, which was weird cos I added no sugar!

So apparently there's a technical term for "bubbles in bread", which I was trying to get - it's referred to as "open crumb". This bread wasn't CRAZY open crumb like the bad boy poolish, but open enough to have some really nice chewiness to the bread, and to way exceed an openness in crumb I'd ever achieved before.

Learning techniques such as  how to stretch and fold the dough was also a bread-epiphany. Finally, steaming up the oven before cooking also made a huge difference to the crust of the bread... WOWW!

P.S. We've put up our new Day 37 photos...

Update: ok, I've never tried to upload a video for our PCP blog yet, but here goes nothing...!

Day 36 - New peak; AMAYWs & bad boy poolish…

Aha, so Day 36 PCP & Day 2 new work… alarm went off at 5 this morning & jumped straight outta bed. Wanted to make sure that I was running on schedule so wouldn't be late for work.
Jumped on scales & what a nice surprise! Broke thru the 16% body fat barrier today! I'd been hovering around 16% for the past week or so, & thought perhaps I may have plateaued. I know we're still far from "Peak Condition" the ahead group blazing along to PC is testament to that, but to me, it's a little victory in itself anyway. Afterall, whens the last time my body fat was this low? Probably never, hence a new peak! I'm sure we'll be creating many new peaks over the coming weeks, but nonetheless…

15.7% really put me in a good mood, skips felt good, and though I fumbled around a bit with interval timer because it was still quite dark, I still managed to complete the entire workout within 50 minutes, and at the same time, toast my bread and boil my eggs. Also checked our new diets out for the week.... WOOHOO the much coveted AMAYW (as much as you want)! This is like striking the food jackpot! :D I didn't think these would come so soon, but I'm not complaining - it seems like a nice lil reward for my "new peak". Unfortunately the AMAYW is a lunch time one, which logistically makes it difficult, because I can't really bring AMAYW veges to work, but oh well at least I can bring more. I think I must've brought just a bit over 200g today. I'm usually quite satisfied on the 180g, but might as well utilise the extra if I have it, and see where it takes me.

GT worked till 4am last night, so no workout for her this morning... poor thing. I think maybe she should just skip today's workouts, have a good night's of rest and we can do a solid set of workouts on Day 37...

Finally, bread baking this weekend (yay!). It takes us time to eat the bread, but I've been eyeing this recipe for what the guy (I imagine it's a guy anyway) as "bad boy poolish". My bread's become "better", but I've never been able to have the awesome amounts of air this guy gets into his bread. Hopefully some carefully preperation and patient proofing will make a bread as wonderful as this! This one I'll probably try making white instead of wholemeal though...just in case. Pictures (hopefully successful ones) to come on the weekend!

Day 35 - First day of work and new iPoddy!

So today was my first day on the new job. Finally back to work! Was a pretty easy day given that:

1.) I had the whole day beforehand to prepare all my meals
2.) It was our "rest" day, so all I had to do was skips (though I paid a visit to 8min Mike too)
3.) I only had to start at 8.30am.

Tomorrow will be a different story. I've got the meals half sorted, but still don't know our diets for tomorrow yet. Tomorrow will be anything BUT a rest day, starting a new week, and work will start from 7am from now on... BUT AT LEAST IT'S FRIDAY!!! (yay~)

So - I also got a my new iPod shuffle delivered today! I ordered it a couple of days ago, and was hoping to receive it yesterday before I started work, but oh well.

So here's a picture of my new iPod shuffle vs. my old one. Th reason I had to go out and buy a new iPod is because the battery of the old one was pretty much dead. For some reason, it would only last for about 5 minute before running out of batteries. It was getting really annoying. The new shuffle is actually smaller than the old one, but has longer battery life (15hrs vs. 12 hrs) and better ability to switch between playlists! ahh... technology. Never ceases to amaze me. Impressive! (I'm starting to sound old and senile...)

I've always liked the shuffle because of its big buttons letting you pump up the volume or skip songs with ease when exercising. They did go off of that for the 3rd gen shuffle, which  was not impressed at - but apparently no one else was either! Luckily they brought back all the good things about the 2nd gen shuffle into their latest incarnation.

Not as fancy as all the other iPods, but definitely much more functional. The current gen nano seemed tempting at first because it also now has a clip, but when I considered the fiddly touch screen, and the more expensive price tag for something which didn't quite serve my purpose, I decided that this time more expensive was not necessarily better (which I am proud of because that doesn't happen often!).

Purchasing the iPod from apple we get free engraving too! Didn't really know what I wanted to engrave - I wanted to put my name at least in case anyone decided to claim it was theirs and not mine, but also wanted a message to keep me pumped whenever I work out - a motto if you will. After deliberating many minutes, I decided to go with No pain, no gain. Very cliched, and very late 80s/early 90s, but in my mind, also very appropriate.

P.S. don't ask me why I put the photos this way and that. I thought it'd look neat, but reviewing it now, it kinda looks stupid, but I can't be bothered to go back and change it anymore. Time for evening snack, then some digestion time and off to bed! 5am start tomorrow. Happy Friday everyone!

Day 33 - Is this Tandoori? Sourdough tomorrow!

So I decided to make Tandoori chicken for dinner tonight. I remember Yeeman telling me very early on (before I had even started PCP), that Tandoori was one of the foods they discovered making which was both PCP compliant AND tasty. So I looked up this recipe online which was one of the first hits on google and had a 5 star rating. Surefire bet!

Pictured above is my okra and grilled egg plants with some leftover Hainan Chicken, and my "Tandoori Chicken". I was kinda surprised I gotta admit. It smells like tandoori; it tastes like tandoori; but it sure as anything doesn't LOOK like tandoori (or the tandoori that I was used to), and I couldn't find any ingredients on the list which I could work out would make it look orange like the tandoori I'm used to. A quick google for me discovered: "What gives tandoori chicken its distinctive reddish-orange color? red food coloring!".  Traditionally this may have been caused by annatto seeds, but this was not one of the ingredients on my recipes...

Oh well, good to have another useless fact up my sleeve, along with some other of my random googles this week, such as finding out that white and brown eggs have the same nutritional content (WOW!).

Excited about tomorrow morning. It is my last day of unemployment (start work on Thursday boohoo..), but also I have been keeping this starter for sourdough for the past few days, and have finally been able to create a sponge to try making my own wholemeal sourdough!

Here's a lil peek of what it looks like so far! I've been keeping it in a plastic container, as I read online that this is a good way of letting things rise too, which seems to make sense, and with the container, I can put dought straight on, as well as tins like this. Neat! It's been sitting for almost 24 hours to proof and I finally get to bake it tomorrow morning for breakfast. Smells sour... YAY! Can't wait!

Day 31 - Indulgences, bread baking and snapping resistance bands...

GT and I finally got around to having our indulgence the other night. She was kind enough not to have it in Korea, but instead we shared half a bottle of wine when she came back instead. This with some grilled salmon and steamed vegetables made for a VERY pleasant meal!

I have been busy over the past few days baking too. Baked some wholemeal rolls on Friday, made a couple of wholewheat Turkish pides yesterday, and have also prepped some starter, to make sourdough perhaps in a few days time. Ever since the breakthrough of using cooler water and the oven as a means to let the bread rise (thanks Molly), my bread has become increasingly edible, and so I've been making more of it (plus GT enjoys it too).

Here are a couple of pictures of the bread, before baking, and another with one baked and the other about to be put in. I brushed the top of the bread with one of the egg yolks from our egg white quota of the day.

This morning's exercise was pretty tough. We had to get up at 5am to do our exercse, because GT had to be in NT by 7.30am for a friends wedding. I also start work next Thursday, which means that I'll have to wake up around that time everyday to fit my exercise in anyways. It was actually not too bad because the birds start chirping around 4am, and at least it was still quite cools when we did our skipping. I was relieved to find that we only had one leg exercise today instead of two... until we got to the actual exercise. 4x 16 floor jumps later GT and I were rolling around crying on the floor for mercy!

The rest of the exercises today weren't too bad, except that when doing my katanas, my resistance band snapped! I didn't keep the actual reciept for the purchase, but still have the credit card receipt. Hopefully that's enough to claim a warranty!

P.S. Whatever happened to all the comments from my previous post?! I'm sure there were at least 5 other comments apart from Shirley's before! grrr... st0pid blogger.

Day 28 - 加油 Day 73-ers!!!

Done our exercises for today - it's rest day, so only took 15 min for GT & I to get thru the jumps. Nice! Been reading the blogs for all the people in the group ahead, and it seems that the culmination of 10 weeks intense training and the introduction of "sets to failure" have left some of you feeling tired and unmotivated. All I can offer you from this point is 加油! がんばって！ You can do it!!!

So close, and yet so far away, I don't think I'd dare to brave any of these exercises with Yeeman anymore for fear of the pain I'd have to go through the next day, but I admire all the determination in you that has led up to this point and would just like to encourage you to give it all you've got in these final moments!

Just as a point of reference to let you reminisce on where we (the latter group) are now and reflect on how far you've come...

The picture portrays the eggs that GT & I are eating on a daily basis now. I was boiling our eggs this morning when I came to realise how many we were burning thru per day. Two for her and three for me.

Anyways, best of luck, and in the famous words of :08 min. abs guy: "Hopefully you won't have to dig too far gang - at least not for long!"

Day 27 - The bad, the ugly... and the good!

So GT & I have this neat-o scale thing which not only measures your weight, but your muscle, fat, water and bone among other things. These scales can be pretty sensitive, to EVERYTHING (i.e. clothing you wear amount of water you've drunk if you've just eaten or pooped etc), so we've tried to take the variables out of the equation by weighing ourselves (naked) every morning as soon as we wake up before we have a glass of water or go to the toilet or anything.

Being the "analyst" that I am, I've been recording these results on a daily basis, in order to plot our progress over time... ofcourse there'll be up and down days, but overall, we'd like to perhaps see fat come down muscle increase etc etc... Here are what's been happening so far:

 Greenie's daily stats

Wei's daily stats

So what does this tell us? Well, for both of us, it seems our average fat % is decreasing, which is obviously a good sign, muscle, seems to be quite stable for GT, if not slightly increasing. Body weight (as irrelevant as you may want to put it) has also on average decreased for both of us. For GT, perhaps she takes it as a good thing, to me however; that's bad. People were already commenting about how skinny I am, and how I should gain more weight (can't get enough of that from family!), and though I like that my average fat %has been trending downward, so has my kg in muscle, which means not only am I losing fat, but I'm also losing muscle along the way! :((( again, I'm wondering if I should be eating more food. I'm not feeling hungry everyday like I was 1-2 weeks ago, so perhaps my body has learnt to adjust to the lower amounts of food, but given that there's still muscle degeneration I wonder if it means I've fallen comfortable eating at a lower, albeit unsustainable level...? My weight this morning was down to 60kg, whereas the start of this program I was at ~64kg. Seems like quite a large decrease... hope I don't drop any lower...

On a happier note, I've mastered baking! Thanks to Molly's advice on putting the bread in the oven to rise, and using cooler milk/water, it seems that my bread has done a much better job rising, and tastes pretty good now - still not adding salt!

Here's a picture of my breakfast this morning, post my PCP workout. I anticipate starting work within the next week or so, so woke up 5am this morning to try and get myself back into what will become my daily routine of exercise before work once I'm back to work...

Bread look tasty? ;) [it is!] Best part, is that it's PCP compliant! All it has is stone-ground strong wholemeal bread flour (whatever that means), water, milk and yeast! I've made a whole batch, and just freeze them. In the morning, I can toast it for 5-10 min (same timer for eggs), and every morning I'm set with a nicely toasted bread bun and a soft-boil egg!

Day 26 - What to indulge? Hainan Chicken Rice & the Rock Climbing test…

So yesterday we get an indulgence! w00t! Lucky for Greenie, she just went to Korea yesterday for work, so she's pretty clear on what she wants for her indulgence (korean bbq it seems). I still haven't worked out what I want to have for mine yet. Something salty seems like a good candidate! Wine is also tempting, but that'll only be a glass or two, & I wouldn't know what to do with the rest of the bottle. Thing is I don't really feel like I need to indulge in anything at this point in time & so don't really want to waste the indulgence... Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions let me know, so I can come up with a super worth indulgence! :D

On a different note, made Hainanese chicken rice for dinner last night. The last time I tried this was back in week 1. I kinda stuffed up the recipe last time because the water became too hot, & eventually boiled, whereas you're just supposed to poach the chicken. Made a pretty successful skinless & poached chicken last night.

 This is the massive meat cleaver I bought to chop up the chicken.

 This is my Hainanese "skinless" chicken

Rock climbing with Donna, Yeeman today. I've been doing my push ups on my fingers instead of using a push up holder things. This has gotten easier, perhaps because of training, but I'm sure it also has to do with the fact that I've lost 3 kg since starting PCP. My fingers were one of my weaknesses at climbing along with my wrists. I don't think I've really improved on wrist strength, but being lighter should help. Let's see if this helps with my rock climbing! ^^

Update: So back from climbing now. Here are a photo of me climbing. Yeeman belaying, and Donna climbing in the background. Climb was pretty good, but haven't climbed for a while, so need time to get back into it. Lighter body weight definitely made a difference though...

Day 23 - true workout = 表尿

haha... so this is really Day 22 post workout, but since I already posted this morning, I'll call it Day 23. Woke up, and did work out this morning; went to sleep feeling particularly excited and energetic last night, and told myself I'd give it a bit of a push today. I got so excited though, that I find it hard to fall asleep, and got up closer to 7 than 6...

No matter! I was still determined to have a good one today. Instead of 1050 jumps, I decided to go for 3x 6mins just to really get myself warmed up. I think on average I skip about 2 skips per second, or perhaps slightly more, so that would put me up for 120x18= +2,000 skips, well within today's limit.

I time myself with my trusty Gymboss timer. It's a good timer, because it not only does time for reps, but also time for rest so you can use it for keeping you honest between sets, but also for things such as plank, where you need to time your rep as well as your rest between.  They're $19.95 and they ship everywhere, well worth the money. Check it out!

Here's a picture of my (black) one, next to Greenie's (hot pink) one. She's still in SG, coming back today, but we couldn't find her timer before she left for the trip, and I found it whilst she was away. Not matter, I'm sure she's keeping herself honest. ;) In the background is my Nike speed rope. It's old school. I bought this rope back when I was in Australia, so would've been about five years ago... I actually had 2 varieties, one was a plastic speed rope with unweighted handles, and then the other was a leather speed rope with 0.5lb weighted handles. I used to skip more with the leather one, until it frayed, and eventually snapped from overskipping one day, and so I unscrewed the handles from the leather one to use on the speed rope. Anyway, it's old but good rope. Gives my arms a workout as well as my legs whilst getting my heart pumping - trifecta!

Two names to never name your sons...
So anyways, back to my blog and why I say "true workout = 表尿". I'm not sure if I'm writing the Chinese characters right, but I imagine this is how it's spelt. One of my ex-colleagues told me once that if you're Cantonese, there's two names that you wouldn't name your children. If you're surname is Wang, you wouldn't call them Ben (笨王 means king of stupid and is a pun on Ben Wang), and if your surname is Liu, you wouldn't call your son Bill/William (表尿 [as I imagine it's written] means to "wet your pants" in Cantonese, and is a pun on Bill Liu). Anyway, as per my previous blogs, I have done some of the later workouts with Yeeman over the past few weeks, so have an idea of how tough it gets, but just because we're only in week 3 doesn't mean the exercises are easy! I've found that using my interval timer to keep a strict time; maintaining form and pressing through the exercises even now, makes for a super tiring workout... to the point where I wet my pants.

Here's a picture of "me" after my second set of bicep curls. Looking down at my curling, I was given a "nice surprise" to see that I'd totally wet myself! haha... well, not literally, but just from all the sweat I had produced, you can see it looks like I've really peed my pants. From the shot you can also see (or perhaps not), that I've had to pull my shorts up super high Steve Urkel style, as the stupid cord from my Sennheiser earphones were too short! The earphones came with a short cable length, and an additional extender, but the problem is that with the extender, the cable becomes way too long, and without it, it's slightly too short to clip on to my shorts, and yet too long to clip onto the collar of my shirt! eurhg... Oh also another thing I've noticed is that my sweat doesn't taste as salty anymore, perhaps from the change in diet, but I suppose we can go more into that next time.

Bicycles vs. Planks...?
Anyways, needless to see I was even more soaked after the completion of that workout. Had a quick check of my new diet, and discovered a nice little Easter egg in the form of a post workout snack. Both GT & I get one. Nice! Downed my egg-white, and again, was keen to try out the ab exercises from the later group, as there was some debate on Shirley's blog as to whether bicycle's were harder or planks. After doing the first 1-2 sets of bicycles, I thought they were definitely harder as I couldn't complete a set without dropping my legs, but then I discovered a little secret during my 3rd set. I have to keep on breathing! As stupid as it sounds, I was struggling to keep my feet moving so much, I forgot about breath, which is what I think made me fail in the first few sets. Whereas with planks, you're not moving, so all you care about IS breathing (and form of course). So in the end, I haven't decided which is harder, bicycles or planks because they're both pretty damn hard! But at least I learnt the secret (for me anyways) of how to better deal with bicycles.

Finally, I've seen that I'm starting to see a bit of definition peek through around my abdominal area...

Here's a picture just before jumping into the shower. Not quite there yet, I know, but at least we're making some progress I suppose. Will take our 360 degree photos tomorrow after GT comes back from SG.

Day 22 - WHR vs. BMI

So I've been watching a lot of TV whilst still on gardening leave, and have recently got into House M.D. Most of the time I have no idea what they're talking about, but it's always fun to watch them talk about the differential diagosis, and on the odd occasion wikipedia what they're actually referring to.

Anyway, was reading Shirley's Blog where she mentioned visceral fat yesterday, and I had spoken to Yeeman about visceral fat in the past since her scale at home gives it as one of her stats.

Anyway, as you do with wikipedia, I started on visceral fat, then somehow got sucked down the rabbit hole looking at other things, when I stumbled across waist-hip ratio being a better indicator of obesity related risks vs. BMI. I found this curious, because eveyone knows and talks about BMI but I'd never heard of WHR before.

Anyways, it's a good and interesting read for anyone who's interested. I shall be going to procure myself a measuring tape shortly so I can calculate my WHR.
;)

Day 21 - Cheap chin-up bars; a taste of things to come and body purging

Cheap chin-up bars
So I bought our original chin-up bar about a month ago from First Boxing, as all the other places seemed to be sold out of chin-up bars in Hong Kong. It cost +HK$400, which seemed a reasonable price talking to other people, though I had heard the shop people at GigaSports in Times Square tell me it was ~HK$160. I thought it must've just been my crappy Cantonese, and passed it off as a whatever...

A couple of weeks later I go ask again, and they're still out of stock, and again I ask the price; again ~HK$160. I went to the store this morning to ask if they had stock again, and low-and-behold the shop assistant actually called me back this afternoon saying they had stock.

Despite the fact that I already have a chin-up bar, I wanted to get this second one because:

1.) Greenie can't do proper chin-ups yet, and having 2 seperate bars means we can do our pull-ups/incline pull ups without taking the bar down and repositioning which breaks our routine, and I find very frustrating.

2.) I felt ripped off by the first bar I had bought, and despite it being a sunk cost, wanted to "average down" my cost per chin-up bar.

Went to the shop, and they had the bar for me, and even 10% discount if you pay with Hang Seng, HSBC or 銀聯卡. Bar ended up costing HK$150.2.

If anyone in Hong Kong hasn't bought a chin-up bar yet, get one from there. Call up first though, just to make sure they still have stock +852 2506 3300 for Kettler Deluxe Door Chinning Bar.


Day 64 exercises and scrumpdidliumptious dinner with Yee
On a totally different note, did some Day 64 exercises with Yeeman a couple of days ago, just to keep her company. We had gone to a friend's drinks beforehand, and has used each other as a reason to excuse ourselves early and (for me anyway) Yeeman's presence helped keep me from drinking.

Three super sets of leg exercises later, I could barely stand up, but was a good workout overall. Yeeman then cooked us an awesome dinner of some tasty grilled tuna, sweet potatoes, baby corn and okra. So jealous of her "all you can eat vegetable" diet, but on the flip side, I'm not feeling as hungry as I was a week ago anymore, so it didn't bug me too much. Thanks for dinner Yee! ^^

Yeeman was also kind enough to invite us to go workout with her and Shirley on Sunday morning. We'll see how it goes I think... ;)

90 second planks and body purging
Last part - super quick. So apart from my purchase of the chin-up bar today, I also decided that on top of the 1,000 skips, I'd try the ab exercises from the latter group for yesterday's exercises given that everyone's blog seemed to be raving about the 90 second planks.

I kinda cheated as I hadn't done the entire workout beforehand, so I'm sure it was easier than what everyone else had to go through, but my whole body was convulsing by the end of the 4th set! A quick glance at my abs afterwards, and I actually saw some veins popping out! Something I had NEVER seen before. Scary - but kinda cool; it's good to know that after so many years of life there's still new things that you can learn about yourself. I didn't have enough time to grab out the camera and take a picture before they had faded back into my body again, but I sure wasn't prepared to go through another set of 90 second planks just to reproduce the result!

Oh, and on a related, topic on something which Patrick did mention I have been getting some pimples around my upper pectoral area.

He asked us to consider these as the last shout from our bodies as toxins were purged - I'd like to think of it in a different way. The last time pimples were a big problem would've been when we were back in puberty, which means hormones, which translates to growth. Hopefully all this exercise means our bodies are producing more hormones to help us build muscle and hence the breakout. haha... to me it seems like a more motivational way of thinking about it rather than just a body purged of toxins, but perhaps that's just me.

Day 18 - back to Hong Kong; back to 100% diet

Got back to Hong Kong yesterday evening. Greenie has just left for Singapore though, so we won't have each other's support for PCP for the next week. She has a lot of travel this month, being away for most of the month, but we've been doing our exercises seperately since I went to Grandma's funeral anyway, and it seems to have made us both stronger and less dependent on each other, which I'm really proud of.

I made some wholemeal potato and rosemary loaf before going to Penang for the funeral, and took it with me, since Greenie didn't really like it. My family happened to get a slice of the bread, and tried it. None of them liked it either... -.- I had followed the recipe to a T, except whenever I saw the words oil sugar or salt, had left them out. Plus it was perhaps for white flour instead of wholemeal. Oh well, back to the drawing board. I've tried to make bread a few times in my life, but never seem to be able to get it to rise properly.

I tried making more bread this evening, since I've got all this flour from my previous attempt (plus I want to work out the secret of getting the bread to rise properly and be fluffy!!!) 

Followed the recipe for wholemeal bread rolls on the side of the packet this time. By default no oil and no sugar, so a good start, but there was salt in the recipe which I have foregone. See how they turn out later tonight.
;)

Also just posted up my day 18 pictures. Haven't had a chance to take for Greenie yet, so hers may have to wait till she comes back from Singapore at the end of this week.

Edit: and here are the finished bread rolls! mm... I hope they taste as good as they look and smell! Guess I'll find out tomorrow.