Healthier Horizons - Day 1

TODAY'S SMOOTHIE:
1 x Granny Smith Apple
1 x Largeish Banana
Juice of 1/2 a Lemon
Handful of frozen mixed berries
Some water
VERDICT: Tasty! But green less LOL Will be buying salad spinner and giant bag of leafy greens from the Queen Vic Markets tomorrow morning!

The last few months since quitting my (awful, mind numbing, soul crushing) desk monkey job have felt really great for me. I've moved forward a lot in terms of focussing on what I want and trying to work on my skills (like drawing a LOT which has been something I've always said I would do for almost 15 years now! Well now I'm finally stepping it up!). And now it's time to start focusing on my body!

For me personally, by the time I am 30 (which isn't that far off! eep!) I would like to be able to know not only that I have put the early 20's days of abusing my body thoroughly behind me (overconsumption of alcohol and abuse of all-you-can-eat buffets come to mind) but also that I have a good enough knowledge of what works for my body and what doesn't. I think it is safe to say that my metabolism has finally caught up with me and I can't eat like a crazy fat person stuck inside a seemingly petite Asian frame anymore. To express myself most articulately I must use Spanish: I am feeling rather 'fofo' of late ;-)
My natural aversion to exercise (I don't like sweating!) is something that definitely needs to be sorted out in the near future. Luckily Juan had the great idea of buying each other bicycles for Christmas (cycling and tennis are probably the only things I enjoy in the sports kingdom) so that we could start some leisure rides perhaps on a weekly basis over the summer. High five!
So physical activity aside, my first health goal is to make some small changes to my diet (because all the forces of the universe could never convince me to actually GO on a diet!). I don't think that we eat THAT badly. I don't drink coffee or fizzy drinks (how old do I sound if I mention that the fizz hurts my tongue?), I eat fast food very rarely and when cooking I try to use the minimal amount of oil and maximum amount of vegetables available. But there's always things that can improve!
Also, I need to figure out why I can't stop eating raw spanish onions in salads when I KNOW they make me feel bloated and indigested within an hour of consumption (oh why do they have to be sooo tasty???)

Now, if my blog hasn't made it clear I'll be explicit: I LOVE FOOD. I love experiencing taste and I love experiencing texture. (And I hate mangoes, papayas and apricots.)
I've always been interested in food. I love baking and cooking new things (day to day cooking kinda gets me down sometimes though ... I need new recipes!) and trying out new restaurants. If I see something I haven't tried before, it'll take something pretty disgusting looking to make me turn away from it (deep fried whole birds in Beijing have been know to shame me into submission). One of my top priorities of travelling is to experience new food both top and bottom end and luckily 'street meat' has only caught up with me once (in Laos I believe).
In recent years I've been rather more interested in the nutritional side of things. Although my love of food and cooking would never let me make such drastic changes as going completely raw food (or even slightly vegetarian) I love reading about such extremes as juice feasting and trying to see how the benefits of all these many health ideas could be incorporated into my life.

Which is all a rather long prelude to say that I began step one of 'Green Smoothies' today (smoothies made without milk and with lots of greens like spinach and lettuce) with the above 'greenless' smoothie only because I wanted to test my 10 year old blender's power. I used to love using vegetable juices (usually something like beetroot, celery, apple, tomato, ginger and carrot and prob about 5 other things from the juice bar in the food court under George Street Myers in Sydney) to pep me up on those weekly hungover Sundays at Dymocks so perhaps moving onto some greener juice tomorrow won't be all that hard!

Bottoms UP!