Easter with the family... Also known as "FOOD"

Wake up - eat.

Great start to the day. We were meant to go out for brunch, but this turned out to be way better

Find 'em - eat.

Can you spot the Ferrero Rocher? Well done, Mom

Rest break - eat.

Our Easter haul for the year. Needless to say, it didn't last very long.

Ah, man, Easter is a great time. Not to lose the meaning of the event at all, but Easter Sunday is a day for celebration, and I love how most people agree with me that food is the best way to celebrate things. 

Bro struggled for a while to get the Ferrero Rocher out of its hiding place.
Big sister to the rescue! Except I kept it. Hehe, bad sister I know. But
he did find more of them than I did anyway, so it was fine.

It was a bit of a quieter Easter for us this year, but it was really special to be spending time with family. This time last year I was in Hong Kong, so it was good to be home for a change.

Why yes, that is half a kilo (0.5kg) of Lindt bunny with its baby. And they tasted wonderful of course.
Omnomnom rabbit...

My new love... And it can come in chocolate too!

Arabica, Ethiopian Lima, robustness, chaff, crema... these were some of the words I became a little bit more familiar with today. A few simple words, that have inspired me to pursue the career of barista! Ok, not quite. I'll probably never be a true coffee connoisseur, but I would really love to get there eventually!

I want to learn how to appreciate a good roast, and to be able to identify the different blends of international farms (except I don't think that this is quite how it works - each farm produces it's own kind, and you blend different farms together).

Basically, I want more coffee in my life. This is unusual for me because I only started drinking coffee last year. When I was much younger, I had my first cup of coffee. I loved it so much that I had two cups. That night I had a nightmare that there were giants falling from the sky onto and through the deck of my pirate ship which you gained access to from the office-block-style corridors. It was a horrible nightmare that has stuck with me for many years (over 16!) and so I never drank coffee again.

I reintroduced myself with a mature open-mindedness that has lead me to try a whole host of new foods (that you will hear about in the future, I am sure). I would say that the product that sold me to coffee was the Nescafé Cappuccino sachets: the foam gets me every time, especially when coupled with a crunchy biscotti!

Gillian Rennie

Today was the start of a journey: Homeground Coffee Roasters showed us how they roast the beans from hard green beans to aromatic, warm, brown beans.

These are then ground to be used in the machines to produce top-quality espresso coffee, which we were lucky enough to get a taster of.

Ashley Brown

I normally take my coffee with milk and one sugar, and a cappuccino comes with milk, but I do think that adding milk to this coffee possibly didn't do the coffee justice: the milk of my cappuccino taster seemed to detract from the richness of the flavour, which was delicious, meeting the excellent standards that Homeground seeks to maintain.

So, today marks the beginning of a long and close friendship between coffee and me. I know it's going to be an intimate one with many regular encounters, and I am sure that if they are anything like today, they will be exceptional.

Being a vegetarian is hard...

... and I am quite happy not being one. I am really not having a dig at vegetarians, I think you are all wonderful, and I am inspired by how strongly you uphold your convictions.

But it's not for me. I understand that this can be a sensitive topic: I read somewhere that telling a vegetarian that you will eat meat and they can just not, is kinda like saying that they should just let you continue murdering people while they choose not to participate in such activities (something along those lines...). This is somewhat extreme, but if it's really something that you believe in, then that view has some sense in it. "You just go stand over there with your celibates, and I'll continue over here with my raping ways..." So that just got very serious. But something to think about, perhaps, when you're opposing someone else's views and forcing them to just let you get away with it, without them standing up for something that they feel strongly about.

BUT! I tried Meatless-Monday's this week. It was interesting. I had my boiled egg and coffee for breakfast (not trying out vegan just yet), a spinach and feta pie for lunch (something I had not yet tried, being a huge fan of chicken pies instead), and then dinner. Dinner was my "epiphany". I had Caponata, something which, before coming to University, I had never heard of before. Maybe you haven't either.

In our dining hall, it looks nothing like this. But you can
kind of get the idea of what's in it, or what it looks like

It is an eggplant-based dish, and the way it was prepared in our dining hall (where we are treated to a number of new and unusual meal options) was with a lot of cheese, and almost like a lasagne-type bake dish. The cheese was great, mostly because it is quite a rarity on the dining hall menu.

It wasn't a bad meal at all, but by this time I think I was noticing the lack of protein in my diet for the day, and when I had finished eating, I felt like I had just eaten a side of a full meal: where is my meat?! All these veggies had me feeling unsatisfied. I felt full and not really hungry anymore (there was quite a lot to the meal: all that eggplant, gosh!) but I did not feel as though I had eaten the main part of my meal.

So well done to the vegetarians (and especially the vegans!) for sticking to this type of diet on a daily basis. I'm not really a big meat-eater, but by the end of my Meatless Monday I really felt like I had eaten a lot of plants. It was probably also psychological, but that would still be a factor in a novice Veggie too. I just hope you are getting enough of the right nutrients (says the Human Kineticist and Ergonomist in me).

To count the calories...

As I've mentioned in the "About Me" section of this blog, I love exercise. And I love food. And I struggle to maintain a balance between the two. I am self-diagnosed with some condition in which I find all food hyper-palatable. Once I start eating, I don't want to stop, and I just want more of the flavour. Which results in me eating whole slabs of chocolate and whole packets of biscuits, and massive packets of chips. Even the "healthy" snacks: I eat them all! Because, hey, if I eat it now, it won't be there to tempt me! When it is gone, it's gone. I wish I could convince myself of this while I am eating it though...

In my attempt to never let the effects of "first-year-spread" afflict me again, I Googled, of course. I feel I have to work hard to stay at a certain weight (and then lose some perhaps as well). Thus, I came across "thinspo". An evil word in many cultures, this form of blogging/media sharing is a way for girls (and sometimes guys) to get inspiration for being thin (makes sense, right?). What it ultimately results in, is you sitting on tumblr, scrolling through endless posts and reposts of girls who just make you feel crap about yourself because they are so gorgeous (ahem, so professionally airbrushed).

While that last comment is true for a lot of the pictures, there are actually some really motivational before and after pictures that girls share of themselves (so brave!). There are also innumerable posts with advice on what the right foods are to eat, healthy alternatives, and even, as you move towards the Fitspo side of tumblr, exercises routines and advice for targeting particular areas (most commonly, that booty of course. And enter: the squat!).

Eventually I learnt that in order to lose weight, it was not just about eating less overall, it was about eating fewer calories. If you ate veggies to fill up your Cals, you could eat forever and still not reach your "calorie goal". If you ate pizza, however, one slice was the equivalent of a whole meal in some cases (basically a whole pizza could be the same as a single day's allowance...). So I began to count the calories.

The good news: it works! Basically. So now, in order to maintain a below-first-year-spread-maximum, I count how much energy each thing that passes my lips will give me. If I overeat, I want to burn those calories (or, if I burn the calories, I get to eat more, yay!!!). This might be borderline some kind of purging bulimia thing, but that is probably best reserved for another post. Because, as passionate as I am about exercise and my body, I know what I'm doing.

I thought I'd share this with you as a precursor for what is likely to follow in future blog posts...