Have faith in the plan...

The plan dropped in my inbox last Tuesday, it is ninety pages long.  NINETY! I read it three times on Tuesday night, I started making shopping lists, there were things on the list that I didn't even know what they were let alone where to buy them. There are quite a lot of eggs on the plan, eggs and me do not get along, it's a long story and I may tell it one day, suffice to say I won't be having at least four of the recipes included. I keep looking at the recipes whilst making my lists, for quantities.  I look at the quantities on my list and back to the recipe, look at the quantities again, surely not, that is only two servings.  I have a feeling Joe Wicks AKA The Body Coach is having a laugh at my expense, his 90 Day shift, shape, sustain plan is supposed to turn my body into a lean machine. Re-programming my badly formatted metabolism to enjoy healthy carbohydrates and protein and burn fat.  But this plan right here, with these HUGE portions, three meals every single day, two snacks and enough water to keep a whale afloat is absolutely terrifying to me. I can not even comprehend how eating this amount of food can do anything other than shape me into a small bungalow.  There are however, noticeable omissions from my plan, apparently chocolate is not a good fuel for my body, neither are milk or cheese, I am allowed two coffees per day if I must and fruit flavoured and green tea are go!

Your plan and it's quantities and exact measurements of macro nutrients are tailored specifically for you, you have a coach who is right there at the end of an email, ready and willing to answer even your must banal questions, and to offer support. You have to complete 4 or 5 thirty minute HIIT (high intensity interval training) sessions per week and on a training day you have to tailor your meals to include this and therefore have a high carb meal straight after training, it's the sheer amount of food though. I've always been a one meal a day girl, well one meal and some toast...one meal,  some early morning toast and a mid afternoon bar of chocolate, and a biscuit, or two biscuits, maybe three, but, BUT I only ever have one meal.

I have had to get organised, I am going to have to take perfectly weighed and huge portions of food to work for my lunch, not forgetting my mammoth snack. I have to weigh out, prepare and cook low carb meals for non training and carb meals for straight after training, I am used to cooking from scratch, I have never eaten processed foods or ready meals, however this is another level completely, it is so precise, none of my favourite "let's just chuck everything in the slow cooker and see what happens"  I am slightly OCD although this has relaxed over the past few years so I spent six hours in my kitchen yesterday preparing meals, weighing, cooking, portioning, freezing. Today I've made my own Granola (Joe's Granola Recipe) and boy do I feel smug about it. So tomorrow I start the plan, day one of cycle one and my kids? They will be living on boiled rice for the next ninety days and they will smile about it while mother gets lean.

Geek me, I'm done.

I've just finished watching the third season finale of Arrow with my 11 year old son. I bloody love it, I love how enthusiastic and excited my son gets about it, I love how absolutely beautiful Stephen Amell is, I love how camp John Barrowman is, even playing an evil mastermind, I really love when Flash turns up in an episode and I even love the gorgeously young and skinny girls playing all of the female characters.  I'm not sure my son knows just how lucky he is being a geek today. Over the many, many years that I have loved Science Fiction, fantasy and comic books, there have been many, many bad films and tv shows.  Every time I watched one of these a little bit of my geek died inside as normals were given more ammunition to throw at my beloved characters. Recently and now though things have changed, NOW though...Oh. My. TARDIS, shall I list them? Do you want me to give you a list?

Iron Man

Thor

Captain America

DOCTOR WHO

Star Trek

Arrow

Avengers Assemble

Agents of Shield

Star Trek into Darkness

Torchwood

Agent Carter

Dark Knight

Flash

Guardians of theGalaxy

Man of Steel

DAREDEVIL

Avengers Age of Ultron

And, AND imminent

Ant Man

DOCTOR WHO is always imminent

Jessica Jones.

Defenders

Suicide Squad

Batman v Superman, I can't actually remember them all, there have been so many and so many to come. However, I'm not sure I like this. These big budget, well written, glossy films and shows have been good, I mean, some of them have been excellent, characterful and exciting and more recently pretty damn dark. Normal people have started to take notice of the long time lonely world of the geek, they have watched and enjoyed MY films and shows, now when I am at the cinema with my kids watching a Marvel movie we aren't the only three people who don't leave when the credits start to roll. Now when I go to Forbidden Planet, it's busy. Lots of normals buying my shit.  On the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who a couple of years ago you couldn't buy a Sonic Screwdriver for love nor money. Ten years ago I wore a disguise simply walking into that shop and it was an Aladin's cave of goodness, items overstocked and getting dusty...Geekdom is evolving and unlike Charizard I'm not convinced it is a good thing.

Feet don't get fat.

It's been a while...

A lot has happened. I'm going to blog about some of it, some day. 

I, like many humans am not happy in my skin, I can not remember a single point in my adult life when I have been. I'm trying to do something about this now, something other than drinking an obscene amount of cocktails to give me the confidence to even get out the door. There seems be an upsurge in getting super fit right now, fit camps, boot camps, metafit, insanity...or possibly, it's always been this way it's just a loop I've never been privy to before. Prior to a year ago the most exercise I had ever done during an evening  was putting my finger in the air and licking the DJ's face...or day time feverishly tidying my house, after a full day at work, whilst simultaneously running round after two kids, two cats and a dog with a Cadbury's Caramel melting in my pocket...melting in my hand...my mouth, it was melting in my mouth...because I'd eaten it. 

So now I do Zumba and Piloxing and am just about to start The Body Coach's 90 Day Shift, Shape, Sustain Plan. I have always had a very unhealthy relationship with food, I'm hoping this plan will change that. I've discovered a love of fitness already over the past year so I am really looking forward to the HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) I can't actually believe I know what HIIT means and am looking forward to it.  As part of the initial process you have to send three photos, in swimwear or shorts, or underwear,  front, side and back. It took me an hour to swallow back my anxiety and ask my 17 year old daughter to take them for me, then...then I had to actually look at them as I attached them to the form...

Shudder...

I really need to do the plan. 

On and on...

"People regurgitate the same old cliches and it becomes like a photocopy of a photocopy of something" - Steve Coogan 

X is for Xerox 

Any of you pricks move....

 

"When you're dealing with a store like this, they're insured up the ass. They're not supposed to give you any resistance whatsoever. If you get a customer, or an employee, who thinks he's Charles Bronson, take the butt of your gun and smash their nose in. Everybody jumps. He falls down screaming, blood squirts out of his nose, nobody says fucking shit after that. You might get some bitch talk shit to you, but give her a look like you're gonna smash her in the face next, watch her shut the fuck up. Now if it's a manager, that's a different story. Managers know better than to fuck around, so if you get one that's giving you static, he probably thinks he's a real cowboy, so you gotta break that son of a bitch in two. If you wanna know something and he won't tell you, cut off one of his fingers. The little one. Then tell him his thumb's next. After that he'll tell you if he wears ladies underwear. I'm hungry. Let's get a taco"- Mr White 

W is for Weapons

I don't wanna be the same as everybody else...

“In every big-budget science fiction movie there's the moment when a spaceship as large as New York suddenly goes to light speed. A twanging noise like a wooden ruler being plucked over the edge of a desk, a dazzling refraction of light, and suddenly the stars have all been stretched out thin and it's gone. This was exactly like that, except that instead of a gleaming twelve-mile-long spaceship, it was an off-white twenty-year-old motor scooter. And you didn't have the special rainbow effects. And it probably wasn't going at more than two hundred miles an hour. And instead of a pulsing whine sliding up the octaves, it just went putputputputput ... VROOOOSH. But it was exactly like that anyway.”- Neil Gaiman.

V is for Vespa.

Cow go moo...

“His knowledge of country lore was a little hazy, but he felt fairly sure that if the cows lay down, it meant rain. If they were standing it would probably be fine. These cows were taking it in turns to execute slow and solemn somersaults; and Tyler wondered what it presaged for the weather.”  - Terry Pratchett, Good Omens.

U is for Udder. 

Only trees...

“

Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak.”

―George R Martin, A Dance with Dragons

T is for Tree

A ball! my favourite thing...

“This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience.”  - Dean Koontz

 S is for Springer Spaniel

Taken...

 

"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you" - Bryan Mills (character)

R is for Ransom

Curiouser and curiouser

“Let’s consider your age to begin with — how old are you?’
‘I’m seven and a half exactly.’
‘You needn’t say “exactually,”’ the Queen remarked: ‘I can believe it without that. Now I’ll give you something to believe. I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.’
‘I can’t believe that!’ said Alice.
‘Can’t you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone. ‘Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.’
Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said: ‘one can’t believe impossible things.’
‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
― Lewis Carroll

Q is for Queen

Blossom...

“We got into an argument over the color of love. I said it was pink, and he said it was red. So you see, I had no other choice but to stab him.
” Jarod Kintz, My love can only occupy one person at a time.




P is for Pink

Silence.

We are a family, and the loyalty of the family must come before anything and everyone else. For if we honor that commitment, we will never be vanquished-but if we falter in that loyalty we will all be condemned.”

- Mario Puzo, The Family

O is for Omerta

o·mer·tà

[aw-mer-tah; English oh-mer-tuh] Show IPA

noun Italian.

secrecy sworn to by oath; code of silence.

There's no place like home..

"Is it possible for home to be a person and not a place?” - Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss



N is for Newcastle upon Tyne.

Judoon you say...

 

“Naked I felt as if my soul was exposed, my thoughts could be read. In the mask I felt protected. I eased the elastic strap over my head, adjusted the fascia to my cheekbones and glanced again at the mirror. The acid in my tummy had gone. Masked I am me. Masked I can do anything.”    -Chloe Thurlow

M is for Mask

New Life...

What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.”
―Kobayashi Issa, Poems.

From these tiny flower buds, apples will grow.  Ain't nature brilliant?

L is for Life

Donuts.....

So my youngest child has been poorly since Friday so I'm back blogging (is that even a term) I'm also painfully aware that this photograph is such a cop-out, however it's either this or nothing so this it is...

K is for Krispy Kreme.

p.s they were delicious.

These are not the droids you are looking for...

"For my ally is the Force – and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you: here. Between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship" - Master Yoda.

J is for Jedi.

Infinity

 

"Your mobile telephone. I bring you to a paradise planet two billion light years from Earth and you want to update Twitter" - The Doctor

I've been trying reallly hard to keep up with the Doctor Who theme, I'm just not sure I'm going to make it this year.  Especially as the main part of my blog post is a photo I take daily, and I didn't want to just take photos of Doctor Who figures/toys that relate to that letter. 

I is for iPad.

"Smart bunch Time Lords, no dress sense, dreadful hats, but smart" - The Doctor

H is for Hat

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