"OK, you're a runner. Get over it"

I'm not normally one for responding to flame war provoking articles on the internet, but for this, I'll make an exception.

A few days ago, Chad Stafko wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal, which you can find here, wondering aloud why runners find it virtually impossible not to scream from the rooftops: "I'M A RUNNER!!! I RUN LOTS!!! LOOK AT ME!!!" (except put in a far much more articulate way, of course).

Go on, read it. I'll be right here waiting.

...

Read it? Good.

As you can imagine, the piece sparked outrage in the running community. There was even a rebuttal in Runners World, which quite frankly I found childish and quite cringeworthy.

So here's my rebuttal, which hopefully is fairly honest and actually assumes Mr Stafko actually has something going on between his ears, which the Runner's World piece sorely fails to do.

"What's with this infatuation with running and the near-mandatory ritual of preening about it?"

I'm not going to deny that there is a culture of "preening" (as Mr Stafko succinctly puts it) in the running community. Heck - I have a blog about it, I'm one of the worst offenders!

Medal selfie!

I like shouting my running achievements from the rooftops, and here's why: if you had told me 5 years ago that I would turn into a runner, I would have thought you were having a laugh. If you had told me two weeks into my Couch to 5k training that I would still be going strong over two years later, I would have said you were nuts.

Running is HARD. Sure, it gets easier, but it never gets easy. Running 10km is HARD. Running a marathon is HARD. So if I do something HARD, I want to give myself a little pat on the back, so I have the motivation to keep plugging away at it.

But it's not just the case with running. In 2006, I won the SBEA Award for the highest score in SQA Higher Administration in the country. That was HARD. Seven years later, I'm still riding that wave. That baby is still on my CV, I bring it up (semi)jokily in conversation whenever I can, and that little medal has pride of place on my shelf. Getting recognition for that award gave me the confidence I needed to study hard and get a First in my degree at uni (another achievement I'm proud of - sorry about that).

But you've got to celebrate your achievements. Whether it's mental, physical, whatever. If you don't find joy in your victories, then your life is going to be a long, hard and miserable road.

"When they're not out there sweating through the miles. they can relax with a running magazine... Runners World... Running Times, Trail Runner, Runner's Gazette and several others. Reading. About Running."

I like reading about my interests. Gosh, imagine that.

"Or these runners, when they're not running, can go shopping—at a running store...It sells only running equipment and apparel...This "equipment," of course, is nothing but shoes and clothes. You can buy these same shoes at a sporting-goods store or online, probably for much less...this apparel serves a clear purpose: We can look at them and immediately know that the person wearing it is a runner—perhaps even an accomplished one.

Here, Mr Stafko kind of has a point. You definitely can buy most things in a running store at online, or at another more general shop for much less.

Which is why I shop online, or in a more general sports shop, for my running gear.

Heck, it took me a over a year to actually get myself kitted out properly. And I certainly didn't get the stuff from a running store, when I could get it elsewhere for much cheaper.

Having said that, I do get my shoes from a running specialist. But thats not so I can smugly parade around town with my branded shopping bag looking like an accomplished runner, as Mr Stafko seems to believe.

The reason I go there for my shoes is because I have shitty feet. I need to get my gait analysed by a specialist, which are only found in these kind of shops, before I feel confident enough to make my purchase. Yes, it means the shoes are more expensive, but you are paying for that specific expertise. If it means I am going to avoid injury, then it's a premium I don't mind forking out for.

"Why would someone want to get up at 5 a.m. and run 10 miles...?"

Because I'm too shattered to go for a run after I come in from work. I do it first thing in the morning, because I actually have energy then and it's a great way to wake up.

Plus, I don't really fancy dying of a heart attack at 50.

"I have a theory. There is no more visible form of strenuous exercise than running. When runners are dashing down a street in the middle of town or through a subdivision, they know that every driver, every pedestrian, every leaf-raker and every person idly staring out a window can see them."

I don't know where Mr Stafko lives, but have you ever been outside at 5am?! The streets are DESERTED.

There's absolutely no one about. If I wanted to be seen by every Tom, Dick and Harry, I would choose a more "peak" time. And maybe consider putting some makeup on. The "halfway-through-a-run" look is not a pleasant sight.

So why do I not hide away in a gym and do my run on a treadmill to avoid offending people like Mr Stafko? Well, why the heck should I pay £25 a month to do something that I can do outside for free? That's what attracted me to running in the first place - you need hardly any equipment and don't need to drag yourself to a gym to do it.

"You can spot them, wandering through the mall or killing time at Starbucks, proudly wearing their "[Fill in the blank] 5K Run" T-shirts. They're getting what they want, without losing a drop of sweat."

If you spot me in a coffee shop with one of my old race t shirts, it doesn't mean I am showing off. It means I haven't done a wash cycle in a while and I am running out of actual clothes to wear. I will also be wearing my old, greying knickers.

"I saw a great new bumper sticker the other day. It read 0.0. I'll take one of those, please."

This makes me feel really sad. It suggest to me that Mr Stafko doesn't want to run, purely because he doesn't want to be seen as a "runner".

That is really such a shame, because running is a great way to keep fit and could probably do wonders for his health. Don't sacrifice quality of life for the sake of a couple of cultural differences!

Chad, if you read this, come and do a 5km with me. I'll show you how good it feels - then we can put a selfie of our sweaty faces up on Facebook afterwards. :)

This could be YOU, Chad!!!

Ham and Lentil Soup

Another soup recipe, yay!

This is an old favourite in the MFC household. It's really simple to make, Mr MFC loves it and it's hella cheap.

It's my grandma's recipe, who passed it down to my mum, who passed it on to me, and I will definitely be passing it on to my kids. Its an absolute essential for any adult to have in their recipe arsenal, if you ask me.

Ham and Lentil Soup (for 4)

1 litre of stock made from ham or vegetable cubes
100g lentils
1 onion chopped or (if you're lazy like me) sliced
4/5 slices of ham (cheap sandwich slices work just fine)
2 carrots, grated or chopped

1) Bung everything in a pot and bring to the boil

2) Put the pot lid on and simmer for an hour

Here's one I made earlier

3) Er... that's it. Done. 

It's really that simple. Not only that, the only really essential ingredients in this recipe are the stock and the lentils. Everything else is optional. 

Bearing that in mind, assuming you get just basic stock cubes and a bag of lentils, this soup just works out at roughly 7p per portion. I'm serious, I've worked it out and everything!!!

Basic pack of 10 stock cubes cost 20p, and a 500g of lentils costs £1.09 (from Tesco, which we have already established may not always be the cheapest). That's enough to make 5 batches, which is 20 portions. 

£1.29/20 = 7p (or 6.45p to be more precise). 

Any excuse to reference Breaking Bad, really.

So next time someone moans at you that "eating healthy is too expensive", do me a favour and slap that in their faces. 

...oh I almost forgot! Nutritionals!

kcals: 135

fat: 1g

sat fat: 0.2g

Enjoy! 

How I halved my monthly food spend

Since around November last year, I have become quite obsessed with the idea of "weeding out the unnecessary".

This obsession has seeped into pretty much every area of my life: I've got rid of a lot of my stuff; I think carefully about how I spend my time; and I have tried to shop less.

Not only has it made my home much more pleasant place to live, I feel more relaxed I have saved a SHEDLOAD of money. I'm not going to bore you with everything that I have done, we would probably be here forever, but seen as this blog is about food, I will talk about my food shopping. To be fair, it is probably one of the aspects of my "paring down" that I am most proud of. Not only do I save a lot of money, but we also waste a lot less.

Mr MFC and I used to spend around £250 on food a month. Now we spend about £125. These simple tips may come as common sense, but I thought I would share with you anyway:

Know how much things cost

I have done food shopping for myself for over six years, but only until very recently have I actually made a point of stopping to acknowledge how much things actually cost. When I did, I was shocked. It's amazing how marketing can dupe you. Large supermarket chains that constantly tell you they are good value for money, that they are the cheapest around (not naming any names) are actually probably the most expensive places to shop. I'd never realised, I just assumed that they were cheap because the billboards told me so.

Don't fall into that trap. Start to take note of how much things cost. Start with the basics, such as milk, bread, eggs etc and move onto stuff that you buy often. It's actually a lot easier than you think.

Take milk for example. I used to pay £1.29 for 4 pints of semi skimmed. Now I normally pay 79p for two litres (which is marginally less than two pints). While I used to be happy to shell out £1 for a loaf of bread, now I rarely pay more than 65p.

Even if the idea of learning the prices of every item on your grocery list seems daunting, just learning a couple of the key items on your list will give a pretty reliable guage for the pricing of the shop as a whole. Say for example I go into a shop that is selling milk for £1.50, I know to run a mile. And now, hopefully you do too :)

Shop around

Having said that, once you pay more and more attention to pricing, you will come to realise that you will rarely get the best deal on your entire grocery list all in one place. It's a pain, but one of the facts of life, I'm afraid. If you truly want to have a good value, varied store cupboard, you have to mix up where you shop.

I have my weekly shop, which is Lidl. I can find most of the stuff I need there at the cheapest price. However, there are some things that I simply can't get there or (gasp shock horror) I can get cheaper elsewhere.

Enter my monthly shop: Sainsburys.

I know what you are thinking: "how is Sainsburys cheaper than Lidl?!". Believe it or not, Sainburys is cheaper on a few items that I use often: spaghetti, tinned tomatoes, chicken to name but a few.

BUT neither shop gives me the variety or value for money that I demand for snacks such as cereal bars. Those I get from Poundland, which I pop into just as and when I need to stock up.

It just comes back to knowing what things cost. Over time, and comparing receipts, you too will realise that different shops offer value for money on different items, and stock different items too of varying quality, so vary where you shop to make sure your cupboard is always full of the food you love, no matter where it is from.

Be smart with offers

Offers are great, but be mindful of the fact that their sole purpose is to make you buy more than you intended. If you needed the item on offer anyway, then fantastic! Fill yer boots. But be careful will offers, especially those that include high end branded stuff, as it may end up costing you more than you intended to spend in the first place.

Plan ahead

You can instantly build up your immunity to these kind of offers, and other impulse buys, by going into the shop with a list. If you have a list to hand, you have a clear idea of what you need and are less likely to stray from the essentials.

How do you get a clear idea of what you need? By planning your meals, of course! I know I am not the first to say this, and I definitely won't be the last, but if you want to save money on food, one of the most effective things you can do is plan your meals.

By planning your meals, you can make sure you use all of your fresh produce before it goes off. You can also take stock of what you already have in your cupboard and create a meal plan to fit around it. Once you have all your meals planned, you can figure out what ingredients you will need to get. Nine times out of ten, you will need a lot less than you think.

There will also be a lot less nights where you will succumb to the takeaway, simply because you don't know what to have for dinner that night. The decision will already be made for you.

The freezer is your friend


If by some chance you do buy more fresh produce than you need, chances are you can freeze it. Sometimes I see vegetables on offer, so I stock up, go home, process it and freeze it. Frozen vegetables are great for plopping into soups or slow cooked stews.

Meat as well, which is notoriously expensive, can just be dipped into as and when you need it if you freeze it. I like to get the big packs of chilled chicken breasts, these offer the best value, and then split them into portion sizes with either freezer bags or cling film when I get home.

Don't go shopping unless you have to

You might find that with a freezer full of goodies and an organised meal plan, a week might roll around and you don't need to get anything. That's okay. It's odd that we have trained ourselves into doing a "weekly shop", but the reality is that if you don't need anything, there's no point in going! Don't go shopping just because it's in your schedule - go shopping only if you genuinely need to stock up.

What are your food money saving tips? Is there anything I've missed? Please let me know in the comments!

A love letter to yoghurt

Back in May this year, I went to Crete for a week with Mr MFC for a much needed dose of vitamin D. Although, if I say I go on holiday simply for the sunshine, I would be lying. I go on holiday to indulge. I'm sorry. I spend 51 weeks out of the year trying to eat what is best, so sue me if I can't take a week off to enjoy myself.

The Greek food is amazing. I love noshing on gyros (shredded lamb with pitta bread and tsatsiki), moussaka and souvlaki (pork on a stick. glorious). When I'm not eating, I am normally lazing at a seaside bar working through a cocktail that is bigger than my head.

Mmm artificial colourings!

Without a doubt, my favourite Greek cuisine was the yoghurt. Every morning I was away, I would start my day with a big dollop of luxuriously thick yoghurt and lashings of gorgeous sweet honey. Mmmmmm yummy!

Now don't get me wrong, I have always really liked yoghurt, but recently I have really ramped up my affair, slurping down at least one portion a day.

Lidl do a 500ml pot of really smooth yogurt for 50p, and it's enough to last me about five days (none of this "consume within three days of opening" nonsense). I sometimes have it the Greek way, with yoghurt, but recently I have been experimenting with yoghurt and fruit. For example:

Yogurt with Blueberries

Yoghurt with Tinned Mandarins

Basically, any kind of fruit I have lying around, I'll just chuck it in and see what happens. I haven't been disappointed yet, it goes great with peach, nectarine, strawberries, pineapple...

I also love the fact that yoghurt is full of protein, so added with the fibre from the fruit you get a really satisfying snack/ after dinner treat! And the scale rarely tips 100 kcals. Bonus.

But enough about me, how do you take your yoghurt? ;)

Alibi

As a girl in my mid-twenties, I love to party. Don't get me wrong, I am not out EVERY weekend getting sloshed, but when the mood takes me, I can certainly get going with the best of them. The only problem is, I really get punished for my sins the next day. 

Even when I was a teenager, my hangovers were awful. I wouldn't be able to leave my bed, and when I did it would just be to go to the toilet to throw up. Unfortunately, it's only got worse as I have gotten older, and now even a couple of glasses of wine is enough to give me a fuzzy head the next morning. 

So I suppose Alibi was made for people like me. According to its website, Alibi is "the world's first PRETOX drink... [it] has been developed to prepare your body to recieve and process toxins quickly and efficiently."

I have seen it around for a while, but my default setting on all things ending in "-tox" is "cynical", so I never really felt tempted to give it ago. It wasn't until I saw it on offer in Holland and Barrett last week that I decided it might be worth a punt. 

I had a flat party last night, so I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to give this stuff a test run. I had the pomegranate flavour, which was sweet, light and refreshing. It was so tasty in fact, I would probably just have it as a regular drink. At 99 kcals, it's not exactly saintly, but it could certainly be worse. I chugged it down before I left the flat, and then just carried on with my night as normal.

The results? Well I had a pretty heavy night (as was to be expected), but I made sure to do what I usually do and break up the alcohol with some soft drinks throughout the night, and chugged down lots of water before I went to bed to prevent excess dehydration, which I know even on its own helps massively.

I woke up this morning with the expected fuzzy head, but it wasn't nearly as bad as what I was expecting. You could have been forgiven for thinking that I had only gone out for a couple, and I hadn't stayed out the entire night tanking vodka jellies, downing jagerbombs and dancing to godawful R'n'B (which I DID NOT do.... obviously...).

So, even though I have been quite cynical in the past, I must say that I will definitely be using Alibi again! I know that it's hardly a replacement for not partying hard in the first place, but life is for living! And a girl's got to have some fun, right? ;)

TL;DR

So once again, I have let a few months slip by without posting. Man, that's a nasty habit I am developing.

I know that excuses aren't really my style, but if I was going to make an excuse, my personal life has been a bit of a roller-coaster recently. Luckily, I haven't let my fitness routine slip, but unfortunately life pretty much drained me of any extra energy to do anything else.

Have you ever felt that your life is so exhausting, that you are happy with just existing? Not sure if that makes sense, but basically for a while back there, I would get up, work out, go to work, come home, and sit in front of the TV until I fell asleep, then start the whole routine again the next morning. That was all I had the energy to do.

I am not going to go into it, but basically pretty rough shit has been going on in my professional life. It wasn't anyone's fault, but it was a pretty tough situation that started a whole existential crisis about what I was doing with my life, was I doing the right thing, am I capable of doing more... and then when I thought I didn't have enough emotional energy to deal with anything else, BAM! Death hit. 

It was Mr MFC's grandad. I don't think he would mind me saying that it was expected, he had been ill for some time, but it didn't make things any easier. Losing someone close to you never is.

That was a couple of months ago now, and it's just now that I have started to feel like I am coming back to life again. I think I still have some way to go, but I feel now like I am taking positive steps to change things things, rather than just sitting back and letting stuff happen to me.

So, with all that chat out of the way, let me update you on the stuff that has been going on in my life since I chatted to you last:

• I went to Crete for a week and discovered my love for Greek yoghurt and honey
• I have run in not one, but two races!
• I have gained 6lbs in weight (but it might not necessarily be a bad thing...)
• My ankle is still giving me hassle, but not so much that I have had to stop the running. Thankfully, I am getting fitted for my own custom made orthotic which should make things even better!
• I have handed in my notice at my current job (see reference to "rough shit" above) and start my new job in two weeks. Yes, I am cacking it.

But enough about me, how have you been? :)

Someone scratch me

So I am in a bit of a huffy mood today. I just feel minging. Why you ask? Uch, it might be something to do with this:

Basically a few months ago I was prescribed a skin cream by the doctor, which I reacted badly to. So the doctor, being the caring and thorough professional that they are, referred me to the dermatologist to have a skin patch test.

Now, I was imagining the sample size would be quite small, and I'd maybe have something about the size of an A5 sheet of paper put on the base of my back. Silly me. When the nurse wheeled out all the samples she had to administer, I wondered whether there would be enough room on me to fit them all. There were 132 in total.

132.

And I'm not sure if you've ever had a huge selection of irritants stuck on your back, but I'll tell you now. It fricken kills. First comes the tightness, where you can barely move because the skin on your back has been glued together, but that loosens off quick enough. Just in time for the itching. MY GOD the itching.

It's taking pretty much every ounce of my being not to rip this thing off and go to town on the nearest tree like Baloo...

But I have managed to resist. Thankfully I only have to endure it one more night, then it gets taken off tomorrow morning.

Unfortunately, it doesn't end there. Did I mention I am not allowed to shower during this?

Yeah, the last shower I had was on Monday morning, and I'm not allowed to shower again until Friday afternoon. Delightful, right?!

At first I thought that I would be able to wash after I got the patch taken off, but no. I have to keep the whole area dry until my last appointment on Friday, to make sure they catch any delayed reactions. Funzies!!!

If you haven't gathered already, this puts any form of excess perspiration out of the question for this week. That includes - you guessed it - any form of vigorous exercise. Which means I am having to put my training on hold for a week. With my 10k just around the corner, that is mighty frustrating.

I know I know, it will be good when I am done to have a comprehensive list of things that cause my skin to react and I'll know to avoid, but right now, with my back alight with all the horrible itching, it's difficult to be positive.

Pity me. :(