Cream crackers

Almost midnight and I've had my shower and now sitting at the computer with mug of tea and some cream crackers.  In fact, a tub of cream crackers.  I don't eat them all of course, but find when I feel a bit peckish late at night and want to snack then cream crackers and tea really does the trick.  Haha!

Now don't let these little crackers trick you.  Though they are small in size and look dry without any fat or oil etc, they are actually worth their weight.  Each cream cracker has approx 35 calories (ten would make 350kcal!), 1 gram of fat but only 0.8g of protein!  Haha!  So I think I'll stop after my sixth one.  Lol!  At least I'm not snacking on crisps.  It'll take something really special for me to eat a crisp. Over two and a half years without eating a crisp!  ;)

This morning we awoke to freezing temperatures once again.  The only difference was there was no fresh snow fallen overnight.  However, the overnight temperature of around -8C in Glasgow made everything much colder and more slippery.  Most things iced over, including my windscreen washer solution which is a first!  I dilute my solution so it can stand to roughly -6C and it coped fine for the past week no problem and was able to squirt out in the mornings.  However, on the way to the gym this morning the fluid was stuck, I guess frozen in the tubing, and I could not get the dirty surface spray off my windscreen.  Upon pressing the skooshing button the wiper also wipes and they ended up smearing the dirty spray from lorry in front all over the windscreen and that started to freeze as well!!  Nooo!!  Was so annoying and also a bit dangerous.  However, I knew where I was going so that made the motorway trip a bit safer.  So that was us going to the gym. After the gym we cleared up the windscreen with clear water AND the windscreen washer fluid started working again.  Thank God!  =)  Was totally knackered after the gym.  Day three at the gym now and this time I worked on chest and shoulders with Sean and James and I did some abs myself as well.  Pure tiring, especially since my chest was recovering from Wednesday's big push of 100kg and my shoulder workout from yesterday.  However with their spotting I managed to bench press 102.5kg and also for shoulder press did six reps of 30kg each dumbbell as well =)  Don't know if it's just because I've been working on my shoulders more with a new routine, but I feel that my shoulders have grown a little in the past two weeks.  Hmm... they definitely need to recover for them to grow properly.  If I do go to the gym tomorrow morning it will be to work on my arms and abs.

Sweet stuff

Been trying to stay away from sweet stuff in the past fortnight.  Tea has no sugar, no snacking apart from fruit and of course no ice creams or desserts etc.  Been trying to cut down in sugar and increase my cardio work at the gym.  This week I've returned to doing interval training when running on the treadmill.  I usually run 6-10mins on the treadmill on a steady pace e.g. 8.5km/h.  However that rate of fat burning is not as face as doing interval training when I first warm up two mins on 6km/h then increase speed to 15km/h for a minute, then drop back to walking pace 6km/h for two minutes and sprint again at 15km/h, then repeat few times round until ten minutes mark.  Then to warm down walk at 6km/h then drop to 3km/h.  Interval training is better at burning fat than running at a steady pace.  It shocks the body to work harder and definitely increases your heart rate and sweat starts to pour out.  Haha!  Been doing more abdominal training as well at the end of my workouts.  Floor wipers and jack knifes are two of my favourite ab exercises at the moment and I find they really burn the abs if done correctly.  At the changing room today I put water into my shaker cup to prepare my protein shake after my shower.  A guy getting changed to start his exercising asked me what I was shaking and I told him about the protein shakes and why people take the supplements.  He seemed quite keen on it, quite like myself a couple of years back.  I told him it's a supplement that does not replace nutritional intake from real food.  However it does work if you take the right stuff and do the right exercise.  He said he could clearly see it works on me.  =)  I took that as a compliment and thanked him.  Then I checked the mirror again.  Lol!!

So I shall continue to lose body fat.  Might not be as good as last time when I reached about 80% of a six pack, but I lost mass as well.  This time I hope to keep the size but drop body fat in a good steady way and have a stronger core. =)

Cleaning up

So tonight after dinner I was really tired from the gym.  Before washing the dishes I had a spare ten mins so I laid on my bed to rest and almost fell asleep!  Lol!  Afer I did the washing up, Cat and I went to the church centre and together with Nick we cleared out the top floor of the church centre.  The level that EM uses for meetings, worship practices and events etc.  For a while I have felt very passionate about clearing up the top level because I felt it was pretty much neglected.  People came in to use the church and after their event is finished they pack up and leave, but things were never done properly and there was no general housekeeping.  So tonight we cleared up the main meeting room, the worship room, the hallway and kitchen.  We dusted the place, hoovered everywhere, did some rearranging, threw unwanted and broken stuff away, recycled stuff etc and generally made the place look much nicer.  Finally the Chinese New Year posters and lucky red envelopes from almost three years ago have been taken down!  The place is now ready for upcoming events like the Christmas Party on the 19th of December =)

We hope that people will begin to appreciate the church centre as it is God's house and should feel like it's part of our house too.  Learn to look after the place.  If it gets messy again, I would be tidying it up again.  I feel this is a God given passion to do this.  I am glad I spent my Friday night clearing up God's house with Cat and Nick.  What better way to spend a Friday night than going out partying, drinking etc.  Haha!