Thrown Off Course

Been a bit thrown off course this year already! Planning to get leaner and fitter by the summer time, and stay that way. To that end I’ve joined a local gym, and signed up for a new eating plan. Yes it’s an eating plan, and not some fad diet.

I’ve been thrown off course by this flu bug that’s laid me low for a week. I’ve not been out of the house for six days, let alone to the gym. I have stuck to the eating plan, although this has been easier as I haven’t felt like eating huge amounts and certainly not wanted anything alcoholic.

I do feel down though, that I haven’t been able to get to the gym and do a few workouts. Anyway, I’m not going to give up on it. I’m getting back to work next week, back to the gym and staying on target with the eating.

What’s the eating plan? It’s called Noom. As mentioned above it’s not a fad diet. Rather it’s a way of eating more sensibly. I can still eat everything I like, but some food items just need to be consumed in strict moderation.

I am trying to eat better, and not so much less. For example, last night I had pork and broccoli with baked potato, instead of roasted or sautéed.

This morning I had avocado on toast. It was tasty actually.

Avocado On Toast
Avocado On Toast

It’s certainly better for my waistline than bacon, fried eggs and hash browns, but there’s nothing to stop me eating those too, just less often!

Scrobbling

Some of you may wonder what the heck scrobbling is. It’s a method of keeping track what music you listen to, using a service provided by Last.fm You can share your played list with others; you can get suggestions of what else you might like based on your listening choices and it’s a fun way to generate some statistics to look back on as the years go by.

Now I used to scrobble most of what I play when I used Spotify. When I switched to Apple Music the process became unreliable, as Apple Music will only add tuns that you have in your library and not a regular stream.

Now, though, having got some excellent IEMs for Christmas, I have decided to switch streaming again. This time I am going to a Tidal HiFi account. I couldn’t hear the difference on my iPhone before but with these new buds I certainly can. I already could hear the difference between Apple’s AAC stream and Tidal’s CD quality on my desktop but I tend to do most of my listening when on my phone.

For those of you that would like to follow my eclectic musical tastes you can find my scrobbles here

Oh, in case you’re wondering, the IEMs I got for Christmas are the excellent RHA T20i. They are certainly an improvement on my old Bose QC15 cans. There’s no noise canceling but as the noise isolation is so good it’s not really needed. Noise leakage is superb too. I hate sitting next to people with cheap buds and you can hear that tinny sound that’s leaking out and I don’t want to be guilty of that myself. I tend to drive my buds quite hard too.

Here’s to a musical 2019 with plenty of new discoveries!

New Year’s Day 2019

Not a good night’s sleep. After getting to sleep around 2am I kept walking up with a headache. It’s not booze as I had one G&T around 10.30 last night and that was it.

There’s been a bug going around so it could be that. Anyway, I decided that is probably be better getting up and going to the gym so I did.

Anytime Fitness, Hounslow

After my workout I met Kathy in Costa

Cappuccino, Costa

Then we checked out Mam’s Cuisine, which is right next door. I had a vegetarian sandwich, and Kathy had Chicken Thali.

Bought some chicken breast on the way home, and I marinated that when we got indoors.  Kathy cooked that and we had a salad with it.  Afterwards, Christmas pudding and double cream.

A Sam Adams Boston Lager to wash it down.