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Kayla Itsines Round 2 – Week 12!

December 21, 2014

It’s only the beginning …

I have finished the 12 week bikini body guide from Kayla Itsines! To any new readers who have only just discovered Honestly Fitness, please click here to read about what the bikini body guide is, and my review of it when I did it my first time round. Yes, this was my second time round, and I feel as if I made much more progress this time round. 

Kayla Itsines Round 2 – Week 12

To give you a quick summary, week 12 was hard. I feel as if I was a little stronger than when I did the workout in week 10 (I used 12 pound weights instead of 10 pounds, woo hoo!). I definitely felt stronger during my arms and ab workouts but I feel as my legs ares is still my weak spot, as I only managed to do one round of each circuit in this week’s leg workout. Anyway, I will be doing my second bikini body guide review sometime in the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for that.

SoulCycle

The rest of my week was great and it seemed to absolutely fly by. I was invited to attend a SoulCycle class on Saturday morning by my friend Amira, and it was so much fun. SoulCycle is a workout chain that specializes in hardcore spinning (i.e. cycling) workouts. I had heard a lot about them because they have a pretty stellar following of various celebrities and a reputation for providing an intense workout. Needless to say I was pretty intimidated!

The studio itself was beautiful and very clean. You sign up at the front desk and they hand you a pair of special spinning shoes and show you where the lockers are so you can drop off your stuff. I recommend that you tell a member of staff if you are new to SoulCycle so they can help you adjust the bicycle and help you actually put your spinning shoes onto the straps (they lock into the bicycle strap)! The workout was fantastic; they dimmed the lights right down and made you do a combination of high resistance climbs and low resistance sprints coupled with some arm work with light dumbbells towards the end. I highly recommend SoulCycle if you are feeling demotivated as the music and vibe of SoulCycle is awesome.

In Food News

In food news, I made my delicious baked zucchini fritters for breakfast on Friday (or was it Thursday??) with smashed avocado on sourdough toast. So delicious and EASY!

honestly fitness easy and healthy baled zucchini fritter recipe

I also had an indulgent Saturday night as my good friend was holding her annual ‘White Elephant’ Christmas party and of course she had made a ton of delicious savory and sweet food. I am definitely paying the price for it today, as my tummy definitely feels unsettled. Fun night regardless though. My white elephant gift was actually really good as it was a small gift set from Bath and Body Works. Someone got lottery tickets which I thought was hilarious!!!  

review of bbg 1.0 week 12

I bought two of James Duigan’s books (the man behind the ‘Clean and Lean‘ diet) so I am testing out a few recipes over the next few days and will be applying that in the New Year. I am excited to share with you all what I think about his philosophy!

Clean & Lean Cookboo - James Duigan

Right now I am currently making some toffee as a homemade gift for a friend. Yeah, spoiled the surprise but she already knew so it’s okay!

What have you been up to this weekend? What are your Christmas plans?

Be sure to keep an eye out for my review of Kayla Itsines Round 2 and for a few special posts I have planned for next week 😉

Honestly yours,
Alice
Thank you for always supporting me! For more Honestly Fitness, check out my Instagram, Facebook, Twitter & Pinterest.

P.S. Kayla has given me a special 5% discount code off her eBooks for my readers. Check it out on my sidebar.

Fitness, Sunday Summary

Kayla Itsines Round 2 – Week 8

November 23, 2014
Kayla Itsines Round 2 - Week 8

I’m back! … back to doing the Kayla Itsines workouts, that is 🙂

Kayla Itsines Round 2 – Week 8

After last week’s hectic schedule, this week seemed utterly boring and felt like it was dragging on SO slowly. The only particularly interesting thing I did this week was have a lovely baking filled night with a good friend of mine at her place in Santa Clara on Saturday night. Everything else was very mundane and underwhelming (think class, work and the library) although I was presented with a big, fat bill on Friday after getting my car serviced. Just what every student needs!

However, I was very excited to see my first ‘published’ piece up on Fiterazzi.com. Click here to read my post – hint, it’s about organic foods 😉 (update: sadly, the site has gone offline and with it, my article. Let me know if you want me to send it to you!).

Kayla Itsines Round 2 - Week 8

Workouts

My poor legs. After a week of not being worked out they received a crazy and plyo heavy leg workout this week and it seriously took me about x days to feel normal again. The arms and abs, and abs and cardio workouts went pretty well. I was a little slower than I would’ve like in my arm workout as I only managed to do about 1 and a half circuits for each round. All in all a very challenging week of workouts as usual, although the leg workout was particularly brutal. Watch out for it, ladies!

Nutrition

Nutrition-wise, I did well although I definitely ate a bit more than normal for two reasons. A) The temperature really dropped this week in San Francisco due to the rain we’ve had and B) It’s that time of the month 🙂 I’ve still been eating a variety of healthy foods but have added in more carbohydrates and fruits. Although Saturday night was kind of naughty and not particularly healthy hehehe. But it’s all about balance; find your healthy lifestyle balance and you’ll be happier from it.

That’s all from me! I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving. My lovely boyfriend will be flying into the city on Wednesday night which I am verrry excited for and we will be spending Thanksgiving with his parents. And I will continue to do the workouts, and I hope you continue to workout too! Don’t let the holidays stop your progress. Just alter what you do to fit around this busy and wonderful holiday.

What are your Thanksgiving plans? For my non-Americans, how do you deal with working out and eating healthy during the holidays?

Honestly yours,
Alice

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Tea, Healthy Treats & Recovery

November 16, 2014

Despite having a day off of work (but not uni work) due to Veterans Day, this week was busy and jam-packed full of uni, work and social related events. 

On Thursday night, the communication studies department at SF State held a talk with Abdur Chowdhury, former Twitter chief scientist and former chief architect at AOL. Needless to say I was extremely excited to attend the talk and hear what he had to say about social media, coming from the father of hashtags himself. It was a really interesting talk with so much cool information. Although it was all interesting stuff, his discussion of the minimization of social networks was particularly interesting. Check out his app ‘Steven’ to understand a little more of where he is going with that idea.

Social events wise, I attended a fun event at Lorna Jane on Saturday, attended the San Francisco international tea festival this morning, and will dine at Le Cheval in Walnut Creek tonight to celebrate my dear friend Alyssa’s birthday.

Lorna Jane SF

Okay so, the event at Lorna Jane featured Lauren Shaber, a Bay Area healthy living blogger, who was there to share her healthy meal planning tips and to give out samples of healthy treats. The healthy treats were so good and I wish I had taken photos so I could show you all; there were chocolate stuffed raspberries, PB&J power balls (my personal fave) and chocolate peanut butter cookies … mmmmm. It was great to actually meet her in person! She was lovely and I am hoping we will get together soon and try out some healthy hotspots in the Bay Area 🙂

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 San Francisco Tea Festival

On Sunday, a friend and I attended the San Francisco Tea Festival which was held in the Ferry Building in Embarcadero. Ironically we are both half British and thus have a keen appreciation for tea. One of the highlights of this festival was a stand featuring tea flavored chocolates! Now I will let the photos do the talking … be prepared for many, many photos of tea now.

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This blog post is soooo long, I do apologize! I’ll end quickly by telling you how I stayed active this week while ensuring my foot recovered. It basically involved a lot of  the elliptical machine (most boring method of cardio ever), focusing on the core and upper body (thank you Kayla Itsines week 2 arms and abs and pilates reformer), and yoga. I definitely ate a little bit more indulgently this week but it hasn’t really affected me weight wise. For some reason I decided that this week was mocha coffee week and I made a batch of my refined sugar-free and grain-free fudge brownies which I snacked on all week despite giving about 3/4 of it to my housemates!

[Tweet “Grain-free and refined sugar-free fudge brownies! No joke, click for the recipe”]

What did you get up to this weekend? Share, share, share!

Honestly yours,
Alice