Disqus for Where Are My Knees

Dark Chocolate and Orange Mousse

Monday, 11 April 2011

I made this for some non-dieting friends and it's seems so induldgent that they had no idea it was only 139 calories per serving!


Serves 4
139 calories per serving

75g good quality plain chocolate (at least 70% cocoa solids)
Splash of orange juice
2 medium eggs
1 teaspoon caster sugar

Melt the chocolate in a bowl over bowling water.  Stir the oranges juice into the melted chocolate and remove from the heat.

Separate the eggs.  Whisk the whites into stiff peaks in a clean bowl, then fold in the sugar

Beat the egg yolks and mix them into the chocolate

Fold the egg whites into this mixture very gently

Place the mixture into individual ramekins and chill in the fridge for at least 3 hours.

Savour every single mouthful.  Mmmmm.

Sunday Summary #4

Sunday, 10 April 2011

Sunday again! How's everyone's week been?

Sarah - Had another week of stopping in hotels and having to eat what I am served. Not good for the diet. I had two wisdom teeth taken out yesterday and can currently only eat little bits of mush so can see myself surviving on mash potato and porridge this week so hopefully that will help with the weight loss. The worse thing is all food has to be room temperature and I love my soup piping hot so even that is out of the window.

Gemma- Only lost another 1/2 lb this week but I've tried lots of new foods and not cheated with my points, I've been very strict and written everything down. Working every day this week has had an impact on the amount of exercise I can do but I hope to pick it back up when I have some time off for Easter. Big challenge for me this week, I went out last night and my friends decided they wanted to go for a Chinese buffet, I looked at my Weight Watchers eating out guide before I went and chose the lowest point food. I stuck with boiled rice, curry and vegetables rather than sugary sauces like Sweet and Sour and fatty meats like duck and pork. I'm off out for my best friends birthday tonight and I can't promise I will behave and stick to my points but I will try my best :)

Charlene - This has been my worse week yet, I'm actually embarrassed to update you all! I'm not sure what happened but I've been a total slacker. I've barely done any exercise and ate so much junk food. I was expecting to gain weight but the scales say I've lost 2.8lbs. I did get drunk last night though, so think the weightloss might just be down to dehydration, we'll find out in the next few days. I'm definitely going to try much harder this week to get back on track. Since the sun is out I think I'll go running again too.

Sarah V - I feel like I'm so on track with the diet at the moment. My motivation is at a high - I'm finding it easy to resist naughty food! I had my weigh-in on Tuesday - first in 2 weeks - and had lost another 3.5lbs. That means I've lost 9lbs so far, since the beginning of March! Even more gratifyingly, several people have commented that I look like I've lost weight. I'm really hoping I can have a couple more good weeks and get another 5lbs off - then I'll have done a stone. I'm still LOVING Zumba, and am considering getting a DVD so I can do it at home. I've also walked to work every single day for the last 2 weeks (a mile each way) and did 9 miles of walking last weekend. And I've only drunk alcohol once in three weeks! In all, I'm feeling pretty damn virtuous! Next week, I just want to keep it up. I really need to blow the dust off the old Wii Fit, too...

Lucy - This week has probably been my worst week so far and it's all been a bit of a blur to be quite honest, my food diary hasn't been filled out since Tuesday either. I haven't been eating well at all but I got on the scales this morning and I'd actually lost weight so I'm not quite sure what's going on there but I'm not going to complain. It was my last week of uni so had major work panic and have dived head-first into my dissertation too, something that will be continuing until May 4th, but I'm definitely going to get back on track as of tomorrow. I'll need to make up for not being able to walk far too because I have sustained a horrible drunken injury to both knees and they're both ridiculously swollen, how lovely. Here is to a better week as of tomorrow!


Where Are My Knees? Pledge

Where Are My Knees?


We are still inviting people to sign up to the Where Are My Knees Pledge? This will give all of our readers the chance to join in and make a pledge to meet their weightloss and exercise goals.

On the last Sunday of each month we will post a summary of our progress to date along with our goals for the following month. We would like to invite our pledgers to tell us about their month and goals too. Each month 3 pledgers will be contacted to write a paragraph to be featured in the main blog post and the other pledgers are able to leave comments on the post to update us with their progress and goals. To make this fair we will be working our way down the list of pledgers to make sure that everyone gets a turn.

To sign up for the pledge all you have to do is:
+ Comment and tell us what your goal is, and leave a link to your blog.
+ Please also leave your email so that we can contact you to write up your paragraph. (You can email us this if you don't want to make it public in a comment)
+ You can also display our button on your blog. The code for that is here.

We've updated our pledge page with all our pledgers so far, but we don't have anyones email address so please let us know them so that you can be involved.

Guest Post - Gem from FromGemWithLove

Saturday, 9 April 2011

Today's guest blog was written by Gem from FromGemWithLove


When I was a little girl my aunt would always say "You're so skinny, put on some weight, do you even eat!?" Which always used to bother me, because no offence to her and my cousins, but they were always bigger than me, and why was that my fault? Just because I was a slimmer girl doesn't mean I never ate, in fact I ate a lot, I ate whatever I wanted, maybe that's what annoyed them so much, because they couldn't? But I was young, and ran around always, I have always been tall and slim...well that was until last year.

I went from being the girl that could eat anything, to recognising that I was in fact a 24 year old woman, who now had hips and what is this, a belly?? You can imagine how this sort of shocked me, but I went through a phase where I just didn't care about it at all, I wasn't un-healthy, so what if I wasn't a size 10 anymore, it's not the end of the world, right? I used to comment on blogs, telling people who were worried about eating an extra piece of cake, to go ahead and eat the damn cake, life is too short. That all changed when I could no longer fit in to my size 12 jeans, jeans suck anyway I have decided, but that is all I lived in, my size 12 skinny, Primark jeans, what was I going to do? I started doing what I always do, I moaned and moaned and MOANED, but I would still eat a whole bag of Doritos and dip to myself (not that much fat actually I have now found, BONUS!)

But it was when my Mom got ill with Pancreatitis that everything changed, she was rushed to hospital, and they told her she would have to eat a low fat diet for the rest of her life. Something that was a big change for her, not because she was overweight, but because she loved all of the nice foods, paté, cake, CHEESE. So I moved in with her, to hep her convalesce, and had to cook her lots of healthy food, then one day I was getting un-dressed to try on a new outfit and she uttered those dreaded words "You need to lose some weight Gem" What?? I had been quite happy with my denial up until that point, my Mom had always told me that I looked good with a bit of weight on me, but she said, kindly mind, that I had put on a bit too much, "All those lovely meals out with Dale!" she said, true. I never believed that phrase 'it's contentment' but I think it's most certainly true now, but the thing is with my boyfriend, he would love me if I was 22 stone, and he would never tell me to lose weight, he would never call me...fat. But isn't there a point where you would want your boyfriend to have a little word? You know it could be when you are about to eat your fourth pork pie...or scraping the bottom of your salsa jar *hides in shame* if someone that close wouldn't/can't tell you, who is going to? Maybe it hits a nerve with Dale, because it was only two/three years ago that he was quite overweight, all of our friendship consisted of Dale consuming buckets of KFC. Now he is all slim and I'm the one crying in to my fry up. How did he do it? Smaller portions, he honestly believes that you can still eat all the things you like if you change the size of your plate.

So this is the option I have adopted, there will be no rivita in my house anytime soon, I have no patience to diet, so I see this as my better option. I am also joining the gym next week, I know a lot of people might think that a size 14 isn't big at all, because well it's not is it, it's an incredibly healthy size. I just don't like those bits that wobble and don't fit in to my jeans anymore, and deep down if I don't change something now at 24, what will I be like at 34? I want to be a healthy adult, not the woman who has the Chinese on speed dial. Now I will leave you all with a good luck and go back to my tortellini...on my small plate.

Fatija risotto... thing

Wednesday, 6 April 2011

Sounds appealing, huh?! I had no idea what to title this post, or in fact this recipe, so that'll have to do I'm afraid!



On Monday it took me absolutely ages to decide what I wanted to have for my dinner and with relatively few items in my cupboard, I made some sort of mish-mash thing of chicken with one of those Original BBQ Fajita mix powders, but it was SO GOOD. I have no idea how good it was calorie wise but I don't imagine it was too bad, there was nothing that unhealthy in it!

Ingredients
enough rice for however many people you're cooking for (I am RUBBISH with rice portion sizes!)
fajita powder mix sachet (you know the ones I mean, yes?)
onions - I used 2, one white & one red
chicken breast - chopped up however you like
frozen, or fresh, peas
can of sweetcorn
peppers, chopped up small
& any other vegetables you fancy, mushrooms would be quite nice added into the mix!

Method
Put the rice onto boil and while that's cooking, cook the chicken and the other ingredients in a seperate pan altogether. Once they're cooked, add the fajita mix - pretty much as you would when you're making actual fajitas! If the whole mixture goes a bit dry, add a splash of water to stop it from being too dry. Once the rice is cooked, drain it and add to the chicken mixture. Mix it all together and make sure it's hot before you serve it, and enjoy!

It was literally so simple and it was just a case of throwing all the stuff together. It's the fajita mix that makes it taste so good and they're not high in calories at all (I don't think?!). If you're vegetarian you can make it without the meat (obviously) and it'll be just as good!

Ps - sorry it might not be very easy to follow, I have no idea how to write methods so they're decent! Hopefully it makes sense though, if not just let me know :)