Just Keep Blogging, Just Keep Blogging

“Just keep swimming, just keep swimming” – Finding Nemo

Why hello friends!  I just have to say, I give the big-time bloggers some major props for being so consistent with writing multiple blog entries a day for multiple years.  I didn’t realize how time consuming it can be!  Have no fear, though.  We absolutely love it!!  Now, we’re just working on creating a consistent schedule of blogging times.

Anyhoo, here’s a quick recap of some our EATS from the past couple days.

We were a little more adventurous with our breakfast dishes this week! Woohoo!

First up is a very KathEats-inspired breakfast.  A few days ago, she had posted some French toast with warm pears and, no lie, I literally booked it to the kitchen to recreate it!  SO YUMMY! It was my first time actually making French toast too.

The ingredients:

• 2 eggs
• 2 slices of Sprouts Wheat and Oats bread
• A splash of vanilla rice milk and vanilla extract
• A dash of cinnamon and brown sugar
• A chopped up pear (for topping)

Mix eggs, milk, vanilla, cinnamon, and brown sugar in bowl:

Place bread in bowl and cover both sides with the mixture:

Heat on stovetop, flip, plate, top with pears, drizzle with maple syrup, sprinkle more cinnamon, and ENJOY!!

We also ate some veggie, rice, and bean wraps.  A STAPLE dish in this house!

Load up a whole wheat tortilla with rice, beans, peppers, onions, avocado, spinach, salsa, and Greek Yogurt.

Exploding with goodness:

Mmmmm.

Oh, hey! Another breakfast surprise and another KathEats-inspired dish:

OATMEAL!!!!

Do I dare say, this is perhaps my new FAVE breakfast?  It kept me full and satisfied until lunch time!

To the pot, I added:

• 1/2 cup rolled oats
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/2 cup rice milk
• Sprinkle of cinnamon and brown sugar
• Splash of vanilla extract

Cook on medium heat and swirl around until it reaches your desired consistency.

Pre-toppings:

With toppings:

• Honey and almond granola
• Scoop of peanut butter
• Maple syrup

While I ate oatmeal, Dustin prepared his fave:

Omelette and pancakes!  He is willing to give oatmeal a chance this week though!  Wahoo!

FITNESS

Finally, some fitness news.  After a few days of trying to squeeze in running, yoga, and Whittle My Middle, we realized we were totally overwhelming ourselves.  It was our first week working out in a LONG time.

We’ve decided that we’re going to make RUNNING our priority for the next week, really enforcing it as a habit.  Then, we are going to introduce yoga and core exercises each following week.  It seems that in order to make a habit stick, it’s best to focus on ONE thing at a time, which is where we messed up.

Although we are just focusing on running this week, it doesn’t mean we won’t try to fit in other exercises.  We simply won’t stress it to the point where we feel bad if we don’t fit it in.

We also joined 24 Hour Fitness, since our apartment gym has been packed even in the morning now.  This ensures we have NO excuses for not finding the time to work out.  We’re also pretty pumped about the lap pool and some of the classes.  I think it will help us keep focused as we can add some variety to our workouts.

In regards to our running program, we are still doing the Couch to 5K (week 2, baby!).  From now on, however, we are walking/running for 50 minutes 6 days a week.  I read somewhere recently that for the first 20 minutes of running, your body is simply using up its glycogen stores and it’s not until after those 20 minutes that you begin burning fat, which is one of our aims.  So bring on the burn!!!

Oh, and we also haven’t been forgetting our daily green smoothies and salads!

I’m working on a Ten in 10 update post that will include our first two weeks and give you a glimpse into our progress so far.

Catch ya later!

The Hardest Part is Getting Started

Heyooo, everyone!  How is your week going?  I can’t believe it’s already Thursday.  The week flew by for us.

Yesterday we didn’t get a chance to post because we were super busy cleaning the apartment from top to bottom.  It’s amazing how much stuff we always find despite our efforts to minimize clutter.  Bah!  But what are you gonna do?

Anyways, we kind of used cleaning as our exercise.  It was a lot of work, and we definitely burned some calories.

Here are some of our eats from the day.  Let’s just say it was a cheese-a-licious day!  I realize cheese is not the healthiest food, but it’s awesome! And we still got greens.

The day started with egg and cheese on whole wheat English muffins with mustard:

Somewhere mid-morning, the green smoothie craving kicked in: Mmmm. Love. Love. Love!

A snack of orange and apple slices:

Grilled cheese English muffins (hmm our breakfast minus the egg…guess we weren’t feeling the creativity yesterday) with Deep River Kettle Cooked Chips and salad mix from Costco:

And tomato soup (I couldn’t get an appetizing picture, but it tasted amazing):

Later that night, we had some Annie’s “peace sign” mac and cheese:

Loved the concept, but overall, I wasn’t that impressed with this particular flavor. I do like their other flavors.  Dustin, on the other hand, really liked it and said he would easily go buy some more to eat right now. 

We also attempted to make some hummus:

It looked sooo good, but we hated it! Maybe we are too addicted to Sabra.  Probably.  Dustin tried fixing it by adding in all kinds of random ingredients, but it just got worse.  C’est la vie!  If anyone has any amazing hummus recipes, we’d love to know! We’ve attempted many times and it’s never right.

OK, now flash forward to today.  Well I guess if it’s today, then you wouldn’t need to flash forward because you are already here.

It was day 2 of Couch to 5K.  It was also our second day of waking up at 5AM for a morning workout.  I’m not going to lie.  It was extremely hard to get up this morning.  Not sure if it’s been the unusually cold weather or getting to bed a little later, but we ALMOST decided to snooze.

Dustin deserves all the credit for getting us up.  It really helps to have a supportive partner.  I kept saying, “Do you want to sleep for another hour?”  I think I asked so many times that he was finally just like, “Let’s just get up!”. We felt so incredible once we got to the gym and really just have to remember that feeling every time we struggle to get ourselves up.  The hardest part truly is getting started.

GOOD NEWS:

• Both treadmills were working at the gym today.  This meant we knocked it out in much less time.  Score!
• Dustin discovered XM radio built into the walls of our apartment’s gym.  Needless to say, he was pumped because his headphones went out and one of the XM fitness channels plays the exact type of music he would normally play.  Double score!

Super attractive red face…sweet!

FUN PROJECT:

Today I decided that after every workout (starting tomorrow), we are going to take a picture of ourselves holding up a sign that says how many days we’ve been hitting the gym.  Then, after 365 days, we are going to each create a slideshow that goes through every picture from start to “end”(fast forward style) in order to see how our bodies have transformed.  It will be fun just to check every couple weeks or so too.    If anyone else is interested in taking part in this, let me know! Maybe we can have everyone’s compiled on one website and it can be motivation for people just getting started.

After the gym, we did our first session of yoga at home.  We put candles around the living room to set a tranquil mood.  It made me so happy.

After some yoga, we made breakfast.  We have a slight pancake addiction right now.  At least they are healthy ones, and I added chia seeds for an extra health boost.  I made the pancakes while Dustin whipped up a big southwestern omelette for us to share.   It had salsa, green/yellow/orange/red peppers, and a sprinkle of cheese.

Then, we headed out to RunTex and Costco.  We needed to go to RunTex to swap out Dustin’s shoes.  He had blistered abnormally fast and called Donnie, the man who we met the first time, in order to find out if it was the shoes or if he was running improperly.  Donnie was SO nice.  Such genuine service.  He had us come by in order to re-do Dustin’s sizes and watch him run some more.  Dustin  tried on some more pairs and was able to swap his out for a pair that fit him much better. Donnie and his wife also gave us more great running tips, as well as advice on eating a diet with no meat.  Thanks, Donny and RunTex!

While we were there, our curiosity (and hunger) caused us to try these:

Freeze-dried fruit made locally.  We tried the strawberry and decided we prefer our fruit juicy.  We have yet to try the pineapple.

For lunch we wanted something quick so we swung by the grocery store to pick up these goods:

And this:

This is what we created:

We’re not usually fans of“imitation” products and prefer cooking from scratch on most occasions, but I have to say, these were awesome!  I honestly felt guilty at points because it felt like I was eating an actually hamburger.  Which is also the part that weirds me out.  We gave it two thumbs up!

Some apple slices to snack on the way to Costco:

And we haven’t been forgetting to bring our water bottles with us:

Now it’s time to go prepare some dinner!  We’re making Quinoa Vegetable Pilaf from Savvy Vegetarian’s website tonight.  Exciting! We’ve been needing some more protein.

Hope you’re all having a fabulous day and feeling great!