Super Saturday Session & Freezer Meals

This weekend I had the house to myself as the b/f went up to Taupo to watch the motor racing and I felt I needed a weekend at home.

I decided earlier in the week that this weekend I would steal an idea out of the 12 Week Body Transformation and do a Super Saturday Session, my aim being to burn at least 1000 calories.

This is easier said than done given it takes me forever to burn calories, it was a tough day. I also decided that I didn’t have to do the whole lot in one go and so long as I burnt at least 1000 calories over the day I was happy.

I began the morning with a bike ride, I was curious to see how many calories riding a bike was as I’ve never worn my HRM when we go for bike rides, 65minutes and around 15k later I had burnt 424 calories – not bad.

The next thing on my list to try was a run which I decided to leave until later in the afternoon and instead do a couple of levels of the 30 Day Shred DVD’s. Level 1 & 2 and around 50minutes later I had burnt another 298 calories, bringing my total up to 722 calories for the day.

I then decided it was time for a break and did a few random things around the house and went to Harvey Norman to get some photo’s of my Queenstown trip printed, you’ve got to love 9cent prints!

That afternoon I decided it was time to finish what I had started and headed out for a run/walk to burn the rest of these calories. My original plan was to run half and walk half of my route which is just under 9km, after reaching the halfway mark and checking my heart rate monitor I found that the time was the same as when I had started! Grr, I had pressed the start button twice on accident which meant my 4km run had not been counted! I also then decided to keep running and see how far I could go before walking, I ended up running the whole lot. Mind you the last few km’s were pretty slow but that’s not the point.

My total calories burnt (Excluding the 4km run that wasn’t counted by my HRM) was 931! I had run the 4km loop earlier in the week and had burnt just over 200 calories so by my estimate my total burn was 1131! Mission Accomplished.

My HRM also tracks the fat burned as well – I really don’t understand how this relates to anything but over my three workouts of the day I burnt 120g of fat, that has to be a good thing!

I can tell you I was pretty tired by the end of it and the rest of the day consisted of a lot of sitting on the couch! I can see a few SSS in my future, the next one will be in a few weeks when the boy is gallivanting around the country to another event I can’t be arsed with. After that weekend I honestly may not have the time for 3 hours of exercise on a Saturday but I’m planning on choosing a number of calories to burn a week and sticking to it.

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I did remember to turn the crockpot on in the morning which contained a large roast chicken, it was cooked by mid afternoon so I threw some potatoes in the oven to cook and set about loading all the food that was ready into freezer containers (I had cut up and prepared all the veges on Friday night and left them in bowls of water). I also made some packet gravy and cheese sauce – I love love love the homemade alternatives but I very much doubt either could be done for less calories than these packet ones, and they wern’t crazy high in salt so I wasn’t bothering to make homemade ones.

In the end my size 22 chicken ($11.98 on sale at Pak n Save!) made 8 freezer meals and combined with the beans, carrots, cauliflower, potatoes and cheesesauce and gravy each meal comes out at 387calories and would have cost me around $2 for each meal – beats $10-15 at the takeaway store and because I have weighed everything I know the calories are accurate. Win!

Of course it won’t be quite the same as the freshly made roasts but freezer meals are hardly ever as good as their fresh cousins now are they.

On Friday night I also made some freezer macaroni cheese for the b/f and today I’m planning on making butter chicken to freeze (our current number one takeaway) in hopes that we will stop buying takeaways quite as often if it’s as easy as a few minutes in the microwave.

Do you set exercise targets like this and try to beat them? Do you ever plan meals? What are some of your favourite freezer meals?