lost in the war of numbers

Oh my God, what a drama!

Firstly I am very sorry for not blogging in a week, especially because it was supposed to be my tone up etc week but here is my excuse:

First my internet connection broke down toegther with half of my power connection (half?! - yes only half of the power plugs in my room worked) and then I had the most stressful week in my life.

As usual I underestimated the work of packing all my belongings into boxes for moving out and started about 48 hours before... BAD MISTAKE! I literally packed every second of the last two days and ended up with 8 boxes, 12 sacks full of clothes, 2 suitcases again full of...guess what...clothes and 3 IKEA bags full of leftover stuff that I could't fit into 8 boxes, 12 sacks and 2 suitcases. I mean it was not my first time moving but it was the first time I had to do it all by myself and had no Mama or Papa around to help me and calm me down when having a panic attack, which quite frankly happened a few times within the last 6 days!



And now I am sitting in an empty room of 30 square metres and here every word I say 3 three times as an echo!



Unfortunately though I didn`t find any second to post and I feel very guilty, especially because it would probably have helped me avoiding some bad stress related eating and maybe prevented me from stepping on my housemates scale on monday... I am not sure why I did it. Maybe it was just out of interest or maybe I just wanted something positive to cheer me up...in fact the opposite happened. I was shocked by the number and probably more shocked about the fact that the number on the scale devastated me so much! I mean I know that the number is irrelevant as long as I feel good about myself and I am happy with my body but as soon as I saw this number all good thoughts seemed to have vanished and I felt thrown back to where I was a few month ago: controlled by the scale and unhappy with myself just because of A NUMBER!!! It feels like being lost and not being able to find the road you were on before! And even though it is a few days ago I still feel the consequences and still struggle to find my way back to the positive and happy thoughts that I had before! But I hope and know that a few days of good eating and running (which unfortuantely couldn't do the past week because there is something wrong with my knee: according to the doctor my inner thigh muscle is apparantly not as strong as the outer one and so my kneecap is pushed inwards whenever I run, weird?!) and of course less pressure and stress will lead me the way back to the 'road of positivity' I was on before. And I really learned my lesson when it comes to weighing myself! I promised myself on monday: I am not gonna weigh myself again until I am mentally strong enough to live with the number, as high as it might be, without relating it to the level of my self-esteem!!

Sorry about the long post but I had to get rid of all of these negative thoughts...blogging really is like therapy!

About my tone-up, relaxation and detoxing week: I will do this project at some point but with all the stuff going on right now I think it is better to postpone it! Tomorrow I will fly home (Munich) to spend the weekend with my family and friends (and celebrate my birthday with my homegirls!) before the 'Adventure France' begins on tuesday. I am excited but nervous about going there and living with a family as their au-pair! I really hope I can fullfill all there expectations!

Quick trip to Maastricht

I am gonna be in Maastricht for the next few days, to have a look at the University at which, if all things go as planned; I am gonna start studying in September. Unfortunately I am running out of time, because I felt the need to go to the Gym before leaving at 11:45... So I just leave you with some food pictures that i desperately wanted to share...recipes will follow! Have some great days!



Pumpkin, celery, lentil, brown rice salad topped with hummus



bean massala with salad and pita bread



black bean and avocado salad on top of spinach leaves



scrambled tofu on spinach leaves topped with mild salsa

Banana "cappuccino"

I am not a big coffee drinker... well actually it varies from drinking no coffee at all to drinking a lot of coffee and then depend on it (as in getting headaches if I don't get any)... But at the moment I feel totally fine without it! I love the taste but hate the feeling of the caffeine rush in my body!

But this post is actually about something that may look like coffee but is in fact a much healthier and yummier delight! Banana cappuccino! I made this for dessert the other day but it serves lovely breakfast as well and I hav to admit that since I made it for the first time I had it at least once every day!



It is refreshing and ridiciously easy!



All you need for a Banana cappuccino is:

• 1 Banana (preferably frozen)
• 3 litlle Icecubes
• 2/3 cup of non dairy milk (I used rice-soy milk)
• pinch of vanilla powder
• pinch of cinnamon

But everything into blender and blend for about 2 minutes

as toppings some really nice options are:

• some sort of nutbutter
• granola or muesli
• chocolate chips
• sliced up banana
• some more cinnamon

this is definately one of my favourite recipes in the world!

Besides eating this all day long I had some other very delicious meals. My Korean housemate decided to spoil me with some homecoocked Misosoup and Korean Vegetable Pancakes! It was delicious a very fun to make.

The Korean Pancakes are very easy to make. You just need:

• 1 small sweet potato
• 1/2 zuccini
• 1 cup of flour
• 1 egg

You have to cut the vegetables very thinly and then mix everything together. Place little dollops of it in a heated pan and bake for about 3 minutes on each side!

Although eating vegan most of the time I don`t mind eating an organic egg once in a while!

This was the end result! It was delicious and just what we needed on a cold and dark day in Hamburg!

I have some more recipes waiting to be published the next days but as for now that must be enough :) I'm leaving for the gym and am massively excited because I took a 2-days break due to a housemate casting we had on the weekend!

What is your favourite cuisine, nationality wise?

The challenge of a bad day

This morning when I woke up I felt blue.... not just a little but massively! I couldn`t really tell why but the day just seemed to be wrong! Usually that would mean that I find myself feeling sad for myself all day and just lock myself in...with a block of chocolate in most cases. But one of my New Year's resolution was to "feel bad emotions" instead of ignoring them in order to find out ways to make them go away...without the "help" of food.

So I am reading this book at the moment called "The Happiness Project" by Gretchen Rubin, in which the author dedicates one year trying to be happier in life! It is a very interesting book and although everyone has his own definition of happiness and different "happy moments" it is yet surprising how many parallels I found.



In January, she is approaching the task from a different angle each month, she sets the goal to "tackle a nagging task" and in fact that is what I often find myself in. Whenever I have something rather annoying to do, and that can be even just a small task, like cleaning my room, which I am trying to avoid I often tell myself "I'll do it tomorrow!". Although I now that I would actually benefit from doing it now. And if more of these little tasks come together and become a bulk i tend to stress out and be overwhelmed.

Reading this book inspired me to think about how I could improve my mood and turn the day into a good one! In order to become happier I had to first figure out what actually makes me happy and what, on the other hand makes me unhappy!

First up was things that make me happy and cheer me up:

1) Food
I know this is actually what shouldn't be on the list but let me explain. Whenever I get stressed and find myself in uncomfortable situations i either eat to much or restrict to much. So the challenge is to eat the right amount (and not get carried away) and therefore avoid binges later in the day.



So I had this lovely bowl of muesli with apple and mangoe topped with almond butter.


2) Exercise
again the golden rule is not to get carried away! So i did my usual routine that i planned for the week. After that I enjoyed a very hot shower, which was originally not on the list but it felt so good that I had to put it up there.

3) Browsing blogs
I did that quite a lot today! It is just so inspiring and motivating!

4) Listening to music
and so I listened to my new favourite radiostation NOVA 96,9 Sydney via live stream, God bless the internet!

I could think of some other things that make me happy, like talking to my best friend on skype, which I did earlier this morning, but looking around my room there was something very eye-catching that was clearly on my list of things that make me unhappy.

Can you tell what it is?!

1) Messy surrounding
So I did what had to be done and cleaned my room and it was actually a good opportunity to collect some stuff for the flea market next week. Because I move to France on February the 2nd I have to get rid of a lot of stuff and keep the amount of furniture and boxes that go into storage as little as possible. First off was my desk!





A blogger need an organized desk!



looks much better!

I took a little break from cleaning to enjoy some very nice lunch.



Salad of mixed vegtables and scrambled tofu with some apple slices for dessert



it was very yummy and in fact made me happier!

After lunch there was still heaps to do and so I cleaned the rest of the room! And it went from this:





To this:






Ok maybe I should have put the vacuum cleaner away before taking this picture! You can tell by the change of light that I took it easy and it took me a while to finish this nagging task, but I did it and it makes me happier!

So this was my day challenging my bad mood, and although I might not be the happiest person in the world at night either I really think I completed my task to try and find out what makes me happy and unhappy. I am finishing off my day with two things that never failed to make me happy!

Dinner:



which included bean, brocolli and sweet potatoe masalla, mashed up avocado and half a whole wheat pita


And my beloved friends from Gossip Girl. Oh this show just makes me happy! It is funny how after watching one episode you feel like one of them, or is that just me?! EHHHM...anyways, I hope you guys had a great day!

What is your secret to boost up your mood on a bad day?

favourite tv shows and lovely breakfast

I am a really sad blogger!

no my peanutbutter jar ist not empty...yet. It is a problem of different matter that keeps me from being completely happy. Let me explain first. I am a person who loves her routines and especially now that I have plenty of time for myself ( I still have 2 weeks to go before I move to France and have nothing to do expect organizing some stuff and keeping care of myself) I have a special morning routine that is highly in danger now!

I start my day early at 7 am. Spend the first half an hour or so checking emails and blogs on the internet befor I enjoy a lovely breakfast that usually looks like this:

In this this case it was a delicious musli blowl with apple and banana along with almond butte´r and rapsberry jam! yum! breakfast, check!

After breakfast I need at least 2 hours to digest before my gym routine can begin so I usually enjoy one episode of my favourite tv-show, which is lately Breaking Bad.

And here is where the drama begins. I finished the last episode of season 3 and therefore have non left, which puts a huge whole into my morning routine, that I am not sure how to fill!! You see major drama happening! So for tomorrow I have to find something new to replace it! But gees this show is good, I really enjoyed watching it and I can't wait until the next season comes out, which should be pretty soon!

Ah well I guess I just have to hit the Gym earlier today and then do some research for a replacement leter in the day! Or do you guys have an suggestions for a new favourite TV-show?

But it is funny how much safer I feel if I can just stick to my routine. I think it is still something that is left from my old control freak times in which I literally freaked out when something happened which did`n't fit my plan! But I think I am becoming better and better in coping with little changes, because in the end life never runs according the plan and that's what makes it so interesting!!

Do you have a certain routine in the morning or for the day? What's your favourite TV-show?

Back into business

Hey there blogworld, I am back!

It´s been a while and a lot happened in the past couple of month but I started to feel the urge for blogging today as I read a recent post of Chelsey from "Clean eating Chelsey". In this post she talks about the impact the scale used to have on her life. And this is what I want to talk about today, because in fact I also used to be a "scale slave", as she calls it, for a very long time in my life!

In my family weight was always a big issue, as my Mum struggled a lot with her overweight and was trying out new diet weekly. both my parents had the habbit of weighing themselves every morning. Even on some long holiday trips the scale was packed in the luggage to go on the trip with us. And as children tend to pick up habits that are lived by the people there the closest to, Ialso began to weigh myself on a daily basis when I was around 12!

In times of obsessive food restriction (have a look at my About page for more information) the scale was my best friend and worst enemy at the same time. If the numbers on it went down I was happy cheerful and therefore committed to lose even more, if the numbers went up on the other hand it put me into a stage of frustraion, confusion and self-hatred. But one thing the scale always gave me was the feeling of control. I felt like without this control I would not be able to mantaine my weight. It seemed to be some feeling of being in control in a world where you have absolutely none!
In times when I worked out, and actually felt better about my body I stepped on the scale and all this pride and self-confidence was gone within seconds. I mean I knew that I would gain from working out, because muscles weigh more than fat, but the power of the numbers was always bigger in the end, so that sometimes I even stopped working out so the I weighed less again!

It was in late November last year, when I decided to end this drama. It was a tough time for me, I was unhappy with my university studies, was in the process of ending a 2-years on-and-off relationship and just moved out from my parents house into a city 8 hours away from home, where I knew absolutely noone. My sister was at my place for a visit and we just enjoyed a delicious thai chicken-curry and chocolate fondue for dessert, when it suddenly stroke me and I said: let's destroy my scale. And so we did, I took a hammer and destroyed my scale completely in a very relieving, almost ceremonial act!

And ever since I didn´t weigh myself. And as I thought before, it was not easy at the beginning. I freaked out whenever I ate more than I planned and felt a huge urge to just step on the scale to assure that the impact wasn´t that big! But after almost two month i am fine! I am finally (re-) building a connection between my mind and my body. Now I go by how I feel and how my clothes fit me. Also I concentrate more on what I eat, but in a good way. Before i crushed my scale I ate foods that were low in calorie and that was basically the only criteria I based my meal decisions on. Now, and that has definately to do with me going mostly vegan, because I experienced the same effect whenever I went vegan for a while, I go by how food makes me feel. If it makes my tummy and tastebuds happy it´s got to be good for me aka my mind!

So I think it is possible to be in "control" (I rather refer to it as "balance" now, because that what it feels like to me) without the daily habit of hopping on the scale in the morning! Don't get me wrong I am not saying that weighing yourself daily is necessarily wrong for everybody! But if you feel that the numbers on the scale tend to have a uncomfortable impact on your mood you should maybe consider crushing it with a hammer!