All the pretty things

I need this dress – The Body Eclectic Dress

And this dress – Me, Myself, and Ivories Dress

Because they are just AWESOME and super cute 🙂

Online window shopping for the win!

~K

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It begins…

My first “fast day” is going to be Monday.

The plan for the day is as follows:

Breakfast

• Coffee w/ 2% milk & 1 sugar – 50cal

Lunch

• Alphabet soup – 175cal

Snack

• 1/3 cup edamame – 75cal

Dinner

• Steamed veges – 85cal (this is approx 1 1/2 cups of non-starchy vegetables)
• Lemon crumb fish fillet – 150cal

That’s a total of 535cal for the day. You’re allowed to “fill in the gaps” with tea/coffee (sans milk & sugar) if you’re feeling hungry, so I’ll definitely be taking an assortment of teabags to uni with me, along with my travel mug. I’ve tried to include a decent amount of veges (soup is pretty much all veg) as well as protein from the edamame and fish.

I would usually ride to uni, but I think I will get Hubby to drop me off when he heads to work instead. My route to uni has a couple of KILLER hills, and it’s 5.5km, so walking or riding on the first day of a reduced intake just seems like a less-than-intelligent idea.

I’ll let you know how I’m feeling after this.

I’m also looking into how much the entry cost is at our local aquatic centre – it’s indoor, so I could swim right through winter if it’s affordable. I don’t particularly like water, but I do find the process of doing laps to be quite soothing. Go figure :S Also, I’m still seriously considering the idea of going into the Navy, so I need to improve my swimming abilities to pass the fitness test.

~K

New start?

Mental Health PSA: If diets are a trigger for you, please skip this post and any future posts tagged “5:2 diet”.

After a lot of humming and hawing, I’ve decided that I’m going to give the 5:2 diet a go.

I’ve been looking around for an eating plan that fits with my approach to food and is reasonably easy to fit around what Hubby will actually eat, as well as being something that I can manage on our rather small food budget. The end result I’m looking for is bit of weight loss, and an overall shift towards more consistently healthy meals (we tend to be rather red-meat heavy because that’s what Hubby prefers. I’m going to be aiming for more fish and the occasional vegetarian meal. He’ll probably accept the fish, but he probably won’t be too impressed with the vegetarian).

For those of you who have never heard of this diet, the basic premise is that you eat the recommended daily calories for 5 days a week (my recommended level is 1500-1800, depending on how active I am that day), with a reduced intake for the other 2 days (generally recommended as 500 for women).
I was a little hesitant about it at first (I was worried about the whole “starvation reflex” thing) but after speaking to a dietician friend about it, it’s actually a pretty good eating plan. It’s based on the idea that our bodies evolved in an environment where food was not readily available all the time, and our bodies still have not gotten accustomed to the constant food availability.
She said the most important thing was just to make sure I was planning my “fast day” foods so that I was getting a good amount of protein and veges on those days so that I wasn’t feeling hungry.

This seems like it might be the way for me to go, for the following reasons:

• I seem to naturally do this anyway – I have days were I LITERALLY forget to eat, but I figure if I can plan those days, I’ll eat better foods than I do now on my impromptu “fast” days when I suddenly realise it’s 4pm and I haven’t had anything to eat since my morning coffee.
• It gives the freedom to work around life – you can switch up your “fast” days, depending on what your week plan is.
• There’s minimal calorie-counting associated with the non-fast days – most info I’ve read says that calorie counting on non-fast days isn’t really necessary, as long as you’re eating reasonably healthy foods and are aware of your portion sizes.
• I don’t need to buy any special foods – I just work with whatever I have in the pantry/fridge/freezer to do the “fast day” meals, because there’s no special shakes or anything involved in it.
• Weight loss – I’d like to lose a few more kg (currently 66kg, my goal weight is 60kg), and the weight loss associated with this diet is supposed to be easier to keep off, as it is based around a lifestyle change rather than weird things. Also, the diet gives “weight maintenance” recommendations for once you reach your goal weight; you can either double the calories on your fast days, or drop back to a 6:1 ratio.

I’ll try and give little run-downs of how I’m going with it all as I go along (partly to keep myself accountable).

~K

To-do List 19/5/15

List progress for today:

• dishes
• watch week 11 Clinical Health lecture 
• watch Neurological Assessment video
• research for presentation
• finish uni “catch up” list
• cook dinner
• clean paintbrushes

Now I’m off to do the dishes, so I can make them dirty again when I do dinner hahaha.

Then, it’s off to do some more set painting tonight (hence cleaning the paintbrushes). I always forget to clean my brushes properly after I use them, so I tend to just wash the worst of it out and then clean them properly a few days later. This time it’s been a whole week :S I need to replace a few though, out of a starting set of 7 (rounds in sizes 1, 3, 5, square in 2, 4, 6 and 10) I only have the round 3 and square 6 & 10 left. Others have gotten lost along the way, or I’ve left them too long without proper cleaning and they’ve gone solid. I’m managing with just these three atm though, so I can wait for replacements (white taklon brushes are expensive :S).

Now, I should GET OFF TUMBLR and WordPress and actually go do the dishes.

~K

Long-term To-do List

I have decided that my “project” for my Summer/Christmas uni break this year is going to be “Re-learn Japanese”.

I say re-learn, because I learned the language at school (only up until grade 9 though), and I did pretty well, but now I’ve forgotten quite a lot.

However, I’m still tossing up whether I should do Japanese (which I WANT to do) or Chinese (which may be more useful). There’s a rather large Chinese population in my area, so that might be a more useful language (e.g. for working as a nurse at a local hospital). I’ll think about it, I can also do a Diploma of Languages through my uni, so I might look at that for after I’ve finished my Nursing degree.

There’s always the “you could do both”… I’ll think about it.

The main thing is that if I do Chinese, I can probably get help from Mum’s international students (she’s mostly had Chinese students, only 1 Japanese student). If I do Japanese, I’ll have to try and find someone to help me. BUT I’ve wanted to do Japanese again pretty much since I finished high school, I just haven’t had time.

Decisions decisions

~K

ACTUALLY Beautiful music

After yesterday’s whinge about crappy annoying music… here’s some good stuff 🙂

AAAAAAND the song that I’m currently teaching myself to play. Because it is awesome. My hands are waaaaay too small, but I AM DETERMINED.

~K

Beautiful music…

Or at least, that’s what I keep telling myself.

I’ve been transcribing and rewriting music today for the show I’m doing… 

I haven’t actually counted how many times we do this bit yet… basically, this song uses the same chord progression for the chorus, verses, even the BRIDGE. The melody changes just slightly each time, but if I write out everything in full the music will be like 15 pages long. Done this way, it’s only 2 pages.

I had to play this song today at rehearsals too. I stopped reading the music after the 2nd time through the progression… Then the cast was like “Where are we up to”, and my reply was “No idea sorry, I haven’t been reading the music. I’m just following you guys!”. This was the point when I was informed that there was a key change for the last couple of times through. Woop-de-doo, now I have to work out HOW the key change happens.

How I feel right now… please tell me I’m not the only one who remembers this…

At least my A&P exam is done – it was WAY easier than I thought it would be, and that could mean that I either did really well, or bombed. I think I did pretty well though (I hope so, anyway!).

I’ve got a presentation on Thursday, so I’ll have to sort that out tomorrow, but it’s pretty easy (hello first-year boringness). I’ve got to talk for 3 mins about what sort of nurse I want to be, and what training etc is needed to get there. 3 minutes!?!? Piss easy. We don’t even have to hand anything in, or have a powerpoint, or ANYTHING. We just have to get up and talk for 3 minutes. We are purely getting marked on how well we get up and talk, and whether we describe what we want to do sufficiently.

I’d better get back to finishing this song. At least that will be 2 down off of the list.

~K

To-do update 14/05/15

• Wash clothes
• Fold & put away clothes
• Complete Lab Learning Sheets (LLS) for exam this weekend – sorta half-done, got 1 more worksheet finished
• 1 load through dishwasher 3 lots actually
• Watch Week 9 A&P Lecture
• Do weekly A&P quiz

The rest will just have to carry over to tomorrow I guess… Ugh I don’t want to have to go to uni, but I’ll have to because I don’t have a working printer at home right now and I need to print the worksheets (yay for open-book exams though!). Bleh. 

~K

To-do list 14/05/15

I’m sharing my to-do list for the day, in the hopes that I will get a bit more of it done… Because all these things really need to be done today :S

• Wash clothes
• Fold & put away clothes
• Complete Lab Learning Sheets (LLS) for exam this weekend
• 1 load through dishwasher
• Watch Week 9 A&P Lecture
• Do weekly A&P quiz

I’ll check back this evening and let you all know what I got done.

~K

Midweek Motivation

~K