The perspective from Wednesday....

Thus far this week, I have run half an hour every day. I have taken tonight off, to make a Moroccan chickpea stew, which is rather nice but takes some work. You need to start early so that the ingredients can literally stew away. I have also started on the Whittle my Middle challenge and so far so good - in that I am persevering!
More importantly, I have managed to stop eating rubbish. When I first started working, I used to come home for lunch (as I live fairly close by), but then as I started getting to know more people, I started going out to lunch more and more. And so started a vicious circle. Well, now I am hopefully back to my normal self, in that I take my lunch in to work, and do not have a snack from the vending machine. This week was a bit hectic, as I had forgotten how long it takes to chop up vegetables etc in the morning! So why not do it the night before? Well, I had read somewhere, a long time ago, that as soon as you chop up fruit or vegetables, they start losing their anti-oxidants. Chop them up the night before and they lose a significant percentage of their nutritional value. It is for this very reason that I cannot buy pre-chopped anything. However, I do buy bags of stir fry veggies because I use a lot of them. But for the rest, I chop, hack and saw away.
Most importantly, I prepared a dessert each day, with very few calories. My fave is a Greek yogurt parfait with blueberries, very simple too, just alternate layers of yogurt and blueberries. Today I had some baked apples and mixed berries with plain yogurt. It may not sound very exciting, but it is delicious. Naturally it is perfect when the fruit is hot and the yogurt cold, but even so, you get a good 'sweet' fix, and very few calories.
I guess I have been feeling out of sorts due to the poor diet I have been following recently whilst on holiday. Sure, ribs and chips might be very good, but it made me feel lethargic and out of sorts. I think that I am slowly becoming myself again!
Now all I have to do is get through Friday. Friday is the day that our department are having their 'Christmas' lunch. We are going to Top of the Hub, a restaurant at the top of the Prudential building here in Boston. The 360 degree view is magnificent, and the food is not too shabby either! The last time we went out to lunch with my group, we went to the The Capital Grille, and the starter was clam chowder - needless to say the desserts were exquisite - and that was the general vein of December. Last year I managed to resist all of this, also because I did not know too many people, as we only moved here last March. This year, the party started on Halloween and ended on 31 December - just to put the Whittle my Middle challenge in perspective!
Anyway, I am thankful that I have started running again - albeit only for half an hour, but I am happy that I have started shaking off the laziness, and regaining my once sunny outlook on all things exercise-related. I am trying to remember, that if I can do something for 30 days straight, it becomes a habit!