Video - Building Core Strength: Safely Performing Planks

I'm getting stitches every time I run and one possible cause of this, I gather, is that my core muscles ain't up to scratch. You core basically consists of your stomach muscles, back muscles and your ass and you use it for pretty much everything. There are a few ways to strengthen the muscles, like yoga and pilates, but one method that doesn't involve classes or equipment (don't know about you, but I'm on a budget here) is doing planks. And I'm not going to explain them, because I dug up this video for that exact reason. If you could ignore the cheesy American voice over, that'd be awesome.

Video: Chris McDougall Talking Barefoot Running and the Tarahumara

I just finished reading Christopher McDougall's book on the Tarahumara and barefoot running, Born to Run, and it's massively important to runners and probably everyone else. Full review's coming, but in the meantime I highly recommend you watch McDougall's Ted talk. REALLY.

Chinese Takeaway Smoothie (Pineapple and Ginger)

I mentioned the other day that I was off to make some smoothie. I did it. It went well. It was inspired by my mate's favourite meal from the Chinese takeaway: pineapple and ginger. I left out the chicken he normally has with it. The smoothie was like this:

Ingredients:

Half a pineapple

Fresh chopped ginger x 1tsp (crushed will do)

Apple x 1

Banana x 2

Apple Juice x 300ml(ish)

Honey x 1tbsp

Low fat natural yogurt x 3 or 4 dollops

Oats x some (optional)

Method:

BLEND.

As with the apple and cinnamon recipe, the measurements are really rough guidelines. Go easy on the ginger to start with. If you over-do it your smoothie can end up too bitter. You can always add more after the first blend. I know half a pineapple sounds expensive, but I got a massive one for £1.25 from the market, and I chopped up the rest to use for breakfast. You should get around 1,500ml of smoothie, depending on the size of your pineapple. I reckon, having got the fruit from the market and used the rest of the natural yogurt for other stuff, the whole lot probably cost about £1.30.

You might have noticed that the ingredients are nearly the same as for the apple and cinnamon. That's because banana, apple, yogurt, fruit juice and oats (if you like them) are your basic smoothie building blocks. The juice will change, depending on what you're making. Freezing some banana or buying frozen fruit from the supermarket freezer section will make your smoothie more... well, frozen. Personally, I like having something a bit icy in there but I don't think it's necessary and I'm not a big fan of blending in crushed ice.

If you've got any suggestions for awesome smoothies, hit us up in the comments or on twitter!

Smoothie Fun: Apple vs Cinnamon

I really, deeply, truly love smoothies. They're tasty as all hell, super-nutritious and slip one or two of your five a day down your neck before you've even noticed what's happened. And they're particularly good if you've got some exercising to be getting on with.

I've been told second-hand by someone Swedish that if it doesn't have yogurt in, it's just fruit juice, and I'm happy to go with that. Slopping some natural yogurt in there throws some protein into the mix, which is useful stuff for repairing damage post-workout. Fruit's good for you for all the reasons fruit's good for you. I like to chuck some oats in there, too, to bulk my smoothie up and add some extra carbs. Below's a rough recipe for apple and cinnamon smoothie. Apparently cinnamon raises your metabolism, so that's something, eh?

Ingredients:

Apple x 2

Banana x 1 or 2

Apple juice x 200ml(ish)

Low fat natural yogurt x 5 or 6 big dollops

Oats x some

Cinnamon x 1tsp (or to taste)

Method:

Blend ingredients together like a maniac. I like to put some more oats in once everything else is blended, since I like the texture.

All the quantities I stuck on the ingredients list are very rough guidelines. One of the beauties of smoothies is the fact that because there's no actual cooking involved you can keep adding to them until they're spot on. They're also dead easy to make and experiment with, as the flavours you're putting together make sense even if your cooking abilities extend to microwaving Chicago Town mini-pizzas.

Right, I'm off to try making pineapple and ginger smoothie, based on the fact that's a sauce used in Chinese takeaways. I'll let you know how it goes...

Barefoot Running: A Right Quick Tutorial

Learn to Run Barefoot with Lee Saxby and Terra Plana from GTB Goodtruebeautiful GmbH on Vimeo.

So, this is quite interesting. Yes, it's a promotion for a product so yes, take it with a wee pinch of salt. Still, I'm looking forward to giving this stuff a go and seeing how it feels.

PS: I'm reading Born to Run right now, which is about a remote tribe of ultra runners who've been going barefoot for centuries. So far, so awesome.

Man Vs Gut vs National Pie Week and Millies

So, National Pie Week came along. Unhelpfully, it came along at the same time as pancake day in a manner that's not staggeringly helpful to a man who's trying to lose weight. But, I'm from Yorkshire and I'm not likely to back down from a national pie event, am I? So I made bloody well sure that I got a good run in on Saturday morning and took on a light breakfast to ready myself. For my one trip back to the world of pie, I selected Millies. I'd been tempted by Calls Landing (where I had a very good Cowboy Stew a couple of weeks back), but as Calls Landing was serving pies from Wilsons, which is a five minute walk away from my house in Morley, I thought I ought to try something that wouldn't necessarily be on offer the rest of the year round. Plus, Millies (evilly) tweeted the picture you see above at me earlier in the week.

Millies, if you're not familiar with it, is an organic food shop on Vicar Lane with a small cafe nestled at the back. It won me over when I went in looking for a healthy snack earlier in the year and came out with some very awesome soup containing blue cheese and chickpeas. The chap who made it was even kind enough to pass on the recipe over the phone. You can't moan about that kind of service.

The seating area at the back's a little no-frills, but I think there's more seating at the front and the emphasis does seem to be more on good quality takeaway than sit-down service. Anyway, I got there and was a little bit disappointed to find there was only one slice of pie left (Kirsty, my girlfriend, was with me and also in need of grub) but it was a hefty slice so we shared it and Kirsty got some banana cake.

Because the chap who made it (Sam?) was out there was a bit of confusion about what came with the pie, so I wound up with a portion of roast veg, heated along with the pie and served up in an environment-friendly card carton. The thick shortcrust top was perhaps a little tough and I managed to break one of Millies' wooden forks on an unidentified root vegetable that was in with the roast veg, but it was all undeniably tasty. The pie filling was rich and obviously made from good quality beef, and the whole thing was about eight cuts above the sort of pie-ish fare you can expect from a lot of places in Leeds on the go (Greggs, I do love you, but I'm looking at YOU). At £3:50, it certainly kicked the arse of a Boots meal deal.

Millies didn't do loads to help me get thinner this weekend, but I'm not going to moan at them about it. I figure: if you're going to have pie, you might as well have pie made with fresh ingredients and a minimum of additives and whatnot. It might not have been the lowest-fat lunch in the world, but it was still damn good food. I also reckon that (for me, at least) full on deprivation is going to result in a tumble off the wagon, and the pie came after a run and super-healthy breakfast and was later followed by a super-lean tea.

Use Your Scales Right, Dumbass!

I decided that destroying my gut and getting healthy was going to commence in January, right after the festivities involving food and booze were over. So it was that in good faith (and knowing I had no scales at home) I spotted a set of scales in a friend's (friends' mum's, if we're going to be accurate) toilet. 'Aha!' I thought. 'If I'm going to be less fat I should totally weigh myself!' So I did. It was a bit upsetting, actually. I weighed 18 stone. I'm 6'2, but that's still quite a bit. The goal was to lose a stone by February 5th, when I was off snowboarding. An ambitious but achievable goal, I reckoned.

So off I trotted, continuing to not own a set of scales. Flash forward a bit over three weeks and I went round to my Mum's house, where there ARE some scales. I waited until after lunch (I'd just eaten when I weighed myself at the friends' mum's house) then pottered upstairs to weigh myself. 17st. Brilliant! Except... I'd been prepared to be perhaps a little bit disappointed. Had I really lost a full stone? It'd only been three and bit weeks, after all. So had I really lost a stone, or had the first set of scales (which were analogue and decrepit-looking) been a bit off? I didn't know. Still don't. I'm inclined to think they were close enough and that, judging on the speed I've lost weight at since, I reached my target Feb 5th. But I don't know for certain.

Lesson: use the same set of scales to weigh yourself on every time (dumbass!)

I still don't own a pair of scales, though. Part of me can definitely see the benefit of monitoring my weight and seeing the smaller milestones being hit, but part of me doesn't want to be bogged down in weighing myself every day. I'm trying to make a change to my lifestyle that'll last and will improve my health for the rest of my life. Daily weigh-ins, like obsessive calorie counting, don't seem to be entering into the spirit of that. Sure, weighing in needs to happen to make sure my belly's going in the right direction, but every few weeks when I'm visiting my parents will do for me.

(That is all).

Played Football, Didn't Die: Improvement

Yesterday I got roped into playing football. I played 5-a-side with some mates for a few months back in 2009, but since I pretty much dropped out I've been rock-bottom last choice when they're short. I guess they hit rock-bottom last night, because I was called on.

It's important to understand that I'm shit at football. Last night, however, I didn't disgrace myself. I'm still shit at football, but I didn't look like a dying man with lungs full of concrete, which is a massive improvement over last time I played (when I looked like a dying man with lungs full of concrete). The exercise is different to the running I've been doing, with lots of acceleration/deceleration and short bursts of sprinting, but I survived it anyway. Then I ate an apple. Then I went home to a woefully unappealing hotpot I'd had in the slow cooker which required an extra hour's work to be rendered tasty.

Point is, I'm finally at that point where I'm noticeably fitter. You don't tend to notice so much when you're doing your regular training because you're doing it continuously so the improvements feel incremental, but when you get back to something you've not done in a while - WOW. The difference was well noticeable.

I had the same thing happened on Sunday when me, my girlfriend and her dad hiked up Pen-Y-Ghent in the Yorkshire Dales. Last time I did it was with my (much fitter than me) brother and I was stopping and starting and wheezing and leaving salt deposits on the ground with my sweat. This time I was actually, genuinely wanting to run at some points. As in, I'm actually considering taking up fell running once my fitness improves some more. (Really).

My point is: there's a proper pay-off to exercise that stretches beyond a better fit for your old space invaders t-shirt. Your body becomes fun to use, instead of a dead weight you're dragging around.

If you were feeling so inclined, you could probably sum up this post as EXERCISE IS GOOD FOR YOU. I know, right? Who knew...

Pancake Day! Surviving it With Cinnamon Apple

So, Pancake Day happened. Pancakes are traditionally slathered in syrup or sprinkled with sugar which, I gather, is bad for you. This is the exact sort of stuff to be avoided when you're trying to kill your gut, but I looked it up and pancakes aren't inherently bad for you. You can make a pancake with something like 70 calories, 10g of carb and 2g of fat, if you stick to low cal sprays instead of oil. So that's liveable.

Then I got this recipe for caramelised apple to form the pancake's guts. This is, basically, one apple (fried) with two tsps of brown sugar and some cinnamon added about halfway through. The recipe recommends 1/4 tsp of cinnamon, but I've never been one to pansy about with flavour (to my own detriment, occasionally) so I just chucked some at the apple until I felt like stopping. The result was, I promise, quite delicious. The recipe says you get 210 calories, 29g of carb and 8.5g of fat. I reckon they've based that on tiny, tiny pancakes, so it might all be a bit more than that, but that's not too bad.

I enjoyed it so much that I shoved apple and cinnamon in my porridge when the Oat So Simple ran out and I had to switch back to regular oats this morning. That was pretty good, too.

Apple and cinnamon (and sugar) is pretty much a winner.

(I went and forgot to take a photo, so the pic above comes from the recipe page)

My First Burgers! The Chilli Chicken Kind

Last night I made Chilli Chicken burgers. First ever burgers! They were a bit awesome and pretty easy.

I got the recipe from Ainsley Harriott's Low Fat Meals in Minutes. Basically consists of mashing up 500g of lean chicken (or Turkey) mince with a tablespoon of fresh mint, two tablespoons of fresh coriander or parsley, one chopped chili, Worcester sauce and salt and pepper. Then you grill them for about five minutes on each side. That's about it. I put them in granary baps I got cheap from the 'soon you won't be able to eat this' shelf at Asda with tomato, lettuce and ultra-super-mega-light mayo.

I did cock up and forgot to add the Worcester sauce, though. Ended up putting it on as they were cooking. They still turned out super-tasty, but I'd recommend bothering to put it IN the burgers anyway. I also used dried chili flakes rather than a fresh one, because Kirsty finds getting proper bits of chili in her food to be too hot. Honestly, I reckon you could use ground/dry herbs and spices instead of the fresh ones, too. Ainsley's a bit big on telling you to use fresh this and fresh that, but not all supermarkets carry fresh herbs and not everyone can get to the market for them.

I used the old fashioned grill, but I reckon my George Foreman would have done them. I was a bit worried it would squish the mixture too much, but I think it'd have been OK and, because I couldn't get lean chicken mince, there was a bit of fat the GF would have got rid of.

Still: very satisfying, easy meal!

Man Vs Gut: What's That All About, Then?

So, here's a blog about learning to be healthier. Or, learning to build a better body, if you're feeling that way out. About trying not to be a lard-arse. Because, guys, I'm a lard-arse. But I'm about 9% less of a lard-arse than I was a couple of months back. I've been a lard-arse for about as long as 84% of the people I know can remember, so I'm having to take a pop at NOT being a lard-arse from a standing start. It's a pretty steep learning curve and it's turning out to be a surprising one.

It's surprising because I like it. It's surprising if we ever met in real life because I like running now, and the only think I liked that didn't involve sitting down or a bedroom three months ago was snowboarding. And I'm learning to cook and learning about food!

So, this is a blog about learning all that (and not, despite the high recurrence of 'I' in the above two paragraphs, about me). I'd say it was a blog about lifestyle change if it didn't sound a bit wanky. (It totally is about lifestyle change, though.)

Some of it will be practical stuff I've learned (REAL practical stuff for people who work a fair amount and have too many DVDs to catch up on to go foraging for rare berries). Some of it will be recipes. Some of it will be reviews or pointers to useful books, apps, products and resources. If you already know a lot about food and exercise maybe you'll sit behind your monitor shaking your head in dismay at me. If not, maybe we can all learn along together like a big fat happy hippie family.

A large chunk of it will be more general posts about losing weight and running and food, the culture around those things and how they affect you as a human being, because I think there's more to be said about all the above than nuts and bolts 'how-to' guides. Yeah, I guess there might be some bleating about 'me', too. (Sorry about that). Hopefully there will be the odd guest post, too.

In short: here's a blog about learning to be healthy and everything that comes with that. Hope you like it.