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Well this has been one busy week! I’ve been recovering from the Great North Run, worked two late nights, been grocery shopping for my Gran while my Mam and Dad have been away and doing a hell of a lot of thinking. Thank goodness the weekend is here, and better still, I have next week off!

I’ve still been able to fit in some great workouts this week:

• Sat: REST
• Sun: Great North Run!
• Mon: REST (obviously!) + 20 minutes yoga to stretch out
• Tue: Yoga (20 minutes) + Cardio intervals (30 minutes) + Body Pump
• Wed: Cardio intervals (1 hour) plus abs
• Thurs: Davina Super Sculpt Pump DVD, MTV Yoga DVD (1 hour 10 mins)
• Friday: Random bike intervals (30 minutes) cardio intervals (30 minutes) abs

Plus I’ve had some delicious eats including lots of snacks:

 Banana Sunshine Muffin and apples

 Bedtime snack of apple, carrots and cashew butter, mmm!

Near empty tahini jar with apples, raisins and cinnamon, microwaved and topped with granola

Plus countless more apples, rice cakes with nut butters etc, I’m really getting into the whole day time snacking thing, and its really helping to stop me from over eating on an evening :-)

Green smoothies have featured as usual:

I made this amazing Chocolate Cherry Almond Green Smoothie containing:

• Kale (or greens of choice such as spinach etc)
• Frozen cherries
• 1 scoop of chocolate hemp protein powder (or you could use 1 tbsp of cocoa powder)
• Ice
• Water (or you could use a milk or non dairy milk)
• 1/2 tsp of almond extract

For toppings:

• Almond butter (1 tbsp made into a sauce with hot water)
• Dried cherries
• Flaked almonds

I also added the usual xanthan and guar gums for thickness, maca powder, msm crystals, greens powder and berries powder. This tasted delicious!

I also finally got round to opening my box of Kashi Go Lean I’d ordered from iHerb:

I had a bowl with a large chopped banana, frozen blueberries and vanilla rice milk and it was delicious!

Speaking of iHerb:

I ordered this giant bag of peanut flour, I can not wait to have some fun with this! I think its going to be pretty much the same as PB2, however this is a lot cheaper than that! I love that it has 16g of protein per 1/4 cup serving, that’s better than a lot of vegan protein powders!

I also treated myself to a bar of this delicious chocolate at an event I was at for work:

Divine Ginger and Orange Dark Chocolate plus fair trade sultana’s to keep at work for snacks, yum!

While I’ve been working late I’ve been having a bowl of this amazing soup to keep me going:

I think I made a soup like this last year and called it Simple Soup its pretty much a fridge soup recipe – i.e. chuck in whatever veggies you have on hand. This contained (washed and chopped):

• 2 onions
• 2 leeks
• 3 carrots
• 2 courgettes
• 1 sweet potato
• 1 cup of red lentils
• handful of kale
• 2 tsp of vegetable bouillon and hot water

I semi blended it with a stick blender. I have to say you can’t go wrong with lentils and sweet potatoes!

Tonight for dinner I dug out a tofu and aubergine curry from the freezer and served it with quinoa and steamed greens, so good!

So I said at the beginning of the post I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my diet and stuff, well actually I’ve been thinking about things for quite a while! I really see October as being a fresh start for my diet, my exercise routine (especially post Great North Run as all my training has been geared up for that) and my budgeting! I’ve got a lot of posts I want to write over the next week on those subjects that I really hope you’ll enjoy, and won’t find too boring ;-) one of which includes this…

I’m busy writing up a post for my Big Budget Challenge Round 2, and as a few of us seem to be in the money saving frame of mind right now I’m going to make it a challenge that any one can join in with if they like! I’ll be designing a blog button we can all use and doing weekly budgeting posts from around the blog world. At least that way we can all be skint together ;-)

As for my weekend and week off, said budgeting issues have dictated that we will be staycationing in style! I actually really love to have time off to just chill at home and get caught up with things, especially at this time of year! We’ll probably have a couple of days out to town and maybe the coast, I’ll be getting a lot of stuff up on eBay, sorting out my autumn / winter wardrobe, completing an assignment for my course and watching the entire Star Wars series of movies on blu ray DVD :-) Of course there will be much cooking and baking going on too!

Do you have staycations sometimes? What’s your favourite staycationing activity?

Hope you have a great weekend and don’t forget to enter my international giveaway for the brilliant vegan recipe book Blissful Bites!