I heart hot sauce

Posted on August 26, 2010 by lowandbhold

Good morning guys! I’m in a great mood today. It’s been one of those weeks, but I’m finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel!

Yesterday was very productive as far as work goes. I may not like my job all that much, but I still want to do good work. I’m wrapping things up on a huge deadline and it’s such a relief. Still a lot to do, but hopefully the worst of it is over.

I ate lunch out again yesterday. I’ve had a serving of zucchini pasta sitting in the work fridge for the past two days, but I just can’t stand the idea of eating it for some reason.

I liked it a lot when I made it, but I woke up the next morning with an upset stomach and haven’t wanted it since. Instead, I went to City Bites and grabbed a sandwich.

I got the California Chicken Melt with no bacon or cheese. I usually don’t make a lot of special requests when I eat out, but I don’t like bacon and I figured the avocado would be enough fat to satisfy me so the cheese wasn’t necessary.

I also ordered some Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips, but I didn’t receive them. I was sad. I love chips with my sandwiches.

The other half of my watermelon was consumed as an afternoon snack while I continued to work, work, work.

Then I went to the part-time job and worked some more.

When I got home I really wanted to go for a run, but my calves and shins have really been bothering me.

I set out to try anyway, but after about 10 minutes I had to call it quits.

It’s okay though, because this is a step-back week in my training. I’m going to try another easy run tonight, but I really just want to make sure I’m up for my long run Saturday morning, so taking it easy and avoiding injury is key.

I came back in and whipped up something quick to eat, since it was already after 8.

Savory oats are pretty much just an excuse for me to consume massive quantities of hot sauce. This bowl of oat bran with melted parmesan cheese, one egg and heaps of hot sauce really did it for me.

Did you notice the horrible lighting in that picture? Yep, the days are getting shorter my friends. I do not appreciate it.

Well, that’s really all I’ve got – working so diligently makes me a dull girl.

Today will be more of the same with a business lunch thrown in. Free food and a chance to get away from the office? I’ll take it.

Have a great Thursday!

Incoming search terms:

savory oat bran

Newtons and Natural Running

Posted on August 25, 2010 by lowandbhold

Even though the weather has been much cooler, I’m still enjoying my summer fruits.

Viva summer! I know I’m going to sound totally bonkers, but I ran in the gorgeous 70s-ish weather yesterday and actually kind of missed the heat.

Yes, I’ve been complaining about the heat for months now, but I missed the drippy sweaty feeling at the end of the run.

Sweat makes me feel accomplished. That, and I’m clearly never satisfied and can always find something to complain about.

My run was extra exciting yesterday because it was in my brand new Newton running shoes.

There’s a lot of buzz about the barefoot running movement lately. I don’t really know what my thoughts are about barefoot running, but it’s not something I’m ready to try yet.

Newton offers a shoe that promotes the type of running we do barefoot, but in an extremely innovative way. They refer to it as natural running.

Newtons encourage more efficient midfoot running with a set of raised lugs on the front of the shoe.

I am not nearly smart enough to be able to explain to you the exact science behind this, but I know from customer testimony at the running store that these shoes can really make a difference in a runner’s form and efficiency while running.

I definitely enjoyed my first run in my Newton Sir Isaac “S” shoes, but I took it pretty easy.

With barefoot and natural running, it’s extremely important to take it extra slow.

We were raised in shoes and conditioned to run in shoes – so changing our form can create potential soreness in the calf muscles and achilles tendon. Also, pushing too hard too soon could result in serious injury.

I will probably run in these a few times a week for 1-3 miles to build up my tolerance, and then I’ll start wearing them on longer runs. I’ll be sure to give an official review once I’ve adjusted to them.

*I purchased these shoes and chose to discuss them on my own, Newton is in no way compensating me for this post.

When I got home last night from my easy run (I ran with the running group I work at and also a short 1-miler on my own afterwards to test out the shoes) I was craving oatmeal.

Give me weather below 80 degrees and I’m automatically going to want to eat soup and oatmeal. Can’t help it.

Things got a little messy.

It seems I’m out of oat practice.

This was oat bran, with a mashed banana cooked in – served in a nearly empty Smart Balance creamy peanut butter jar.

Two things:

1. The preparation of this oat bran led me to discover that I like my banana sliced into my oats after cooking. It gets too sweet for me when added during the cooking process.

2. I always buy that peanut butter, it’s not fancy and doesn’t have a cult following like other brands but it’s cheap and tastes good.

Okay, I’m out folks. Have a great Wednesday!

Q’s:

1. What are your thoughts on barefoot/natural running?

2. Banana – cooked or not cooked?

Oat Bran Primavera

Posted on May 25, 2010 by lowandbhold

Well, folks, it’s like they say – “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.”

I waited 2 weeks to share my Yellowstone news because I wasn’t sure if it was going to happen or not, and then the day I posted it, the plans fell through. Eh, c’est la vie. I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.

Yesterday was a pretty good Monday. I think my proactivity helped. Lunch was lentil soup with diced avocado, which I’ll be having again today so prepare to be bored tomorrow.

For lunch dessert I had some fresh strawberries. Nature’s candy.

I worked at the part-time job after I left the full-time job, so while there I munched on a mini clif bar.

Work was good, but kind of a boy’s club. I mostly just cleaned and played with my phone. Tonight we’re having a sports bra clinic for the ladies, so I’ll be in the majority once again

I didn’t go to the gym last night. I’m cutting it dangerously close as far as meeting my 25 days goal, but I was too dang tired. I’ve also been nursing a mild migraine for the past two days and I just didn’t have the energy to workout through the pain.

Instead I had some Oat Bran Primavera.

This meal kind of just happened. I normally plan my dinners before I eat lunch, but today I was too busy and when I got home I just set into action before forming any idea of what I wanted.

It turned out great though. I stir-fried some yellow squash, broccolini and grape tomatoes in olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic. Then I added a splash of balsamic and let everything reduce.

While that was happening I cooked up some oatbran and added 2 tablespoons 2% shredded cheddar cheese and a light Laughing Cow cheese wedge and stirred until it was all melty and cheesy.

Then I combined the two.

And in case you’re wondering, yes I do fear that I’m going to turn into broccolini soon. I can’t stop eating it.

Much to my embarassment, I watched the premier of The Bachelorette last night. I have two things to say about it:

1. Can I have Phil?

2. The drama is getting way too redundant. I think I would be MORE interested if they’d cut all the staged controversy out for once.

Really, I just watch for the eye candy.

Wakeup Call Challenge Update: I keep forgetting to mention when I do my morning plyos. I also think I’ve somehow been removed from the email thread? Janetha?

Anyways, I haven’t been too consistent about doing them every morning but I’m currently at 115 minutes for the month.

Well, I’m off to greet the day. Enjoy your Tuesdays everyone.

5 words to describe my weekend

Posted on May 17, 2010 by lowandbhold

This weekend was a lot of things. It was fun at times. It was unusual most of the time. It was exhausting (I probably got around 15 hours of sleep total from Friday through today). It was busy. It was scary.

So let us see how all of those things came to be.

BUSY:

Saturday morning I was in a rush. I had only gotten about 2 hours of sleep the night before and I felt super out of it. I want to explain the reason my Friday was so sleepless, but it’s not food related and it would probably be over-sharing, so I will refrain.

I stopped my Starbucks to caff’ up so I could make it through my shift at the part-time job. I also grabbed a mini Naked smoothie for some nutrients.

I worked from 9 to 5 yesterday at the running store, so I packed snacks to get me through. I had this White Macadamia Nut Clif bar at around 11.

This was my first time trying this Clif flavor and I really liked it. It tasted like a cookie!

I also had a delicious wrap from CoolGreens, but I can’t find the picture. I know I took one though… Anyways, it had beets, hearts of palm, avocado, chicken (yep, chicken), lettuce and a bunch of other veggies. It was off the chain.

After work I can home and had to tidy up the house for company. While cleaning I ate some lentil soup from a can.

FUN:

My friend Andrea came over shortly after that. We had intended to have a wine and girl-talk night, but that quickly changed to a hot tub night, which quickly changed into a jumping in the freezing cold pool night.

UNUSUAL:

Then, when we were soaking wet and looking less than spectacular, we decided to go meet up with a group of my friends and a group of her friends who just so happened to be at the same bar, which just so happened to be 5 minutes from my house.

We looked a little eccentric. This picture was taken pre-makeup so the final results were better.

FUN:

It was a fun night. I got a little tipsy and took to the dance floor. I love to dance to older music, and this was one of those bars. I’m a particularly adept at dancing to funk. I worked up a good sweat breakin’ it down

Exhausting:

After we were all danced out went back to my apartment and crashed – at about 3 a.m.

Sunday morning there were thunderstorms when I awoke, and I finally had the opportunity to roll back over and sleep through them. It was glorious. That was probably the most sleep I had gotten all weekend.

When I finally forced myself out of bed, it was almost time to go to work again, so I had some blueberry oat bran to sustain me.

SCARY:

I went to work and had a few good hours of selling shoes and talking about running. Then Oklahoma’s crazy weather decided it wanted to come out and play yet again. We were supposed to be getting close to softball size hail at my store, so my managers let me off and I drove away from the big ominous clouds.

But I guess I didn’t drive far enough. I ended up having to pull over and wait it out. It was really scary! The hail around me wasn’t too big, but from what I can tell it was pretty crazy over by my apartment! I didn’t get home until around an hour after the storm and it still looked like it had snowed!

UNUSUAL:

Exhausting:

So that was fun. I can tell that my exhaustion was in full effect when I was uploading my pictures into this post last night, because I’m missing several. Irks me.

The rest of last night was spent eating tomato soup, taking a bath and finishing my book, watching TV and then getting into bed and finding myself unable to sleep even though I was exhausted. I see much caffeination in my future.

What five words describe your weekend?

Incoming search terms:

Healthy Dessert Dinner

Posted on April 30, 2010 by lowandbhold

I had time to blog last night, but I didn’t do so because I neglected to take a single food picture throughout the day. Even though I’ve almost been blogging for a full year now, sometimes I just drop the ball.

Yesterday was still a pretty good day. Breakfast was a green monster, lunch was sandwiches catered by work, snack was chocolate and a protein shake and dinner was this.I clearly enjoy eating dessert for dinner, but this was a healthy dessert dinner. Frozen cherries topped with piping hot peanut butter oat bran finished off with whipped cream cheese and Crofter’s Superfruit spread. So delicous!

The jam + cream cheese toppings really took it to another level. I could have eaten a bucket of it.

That decadent dinner was eaten after I attended Body Pump last night. I had originally planned to go Wednesday night, but my shopping got in the way and I ended up only ellipticalling.

I’m actually really glad I waited because the Thursday night teacher is awesome! I’m definitely going to be working that class into my workout schedule from now on. I have DOMS in my hammies, chest and shoulders too, which I love.

Speaking of working out and all that, I’ve already set my goals for May. Look at me being all organized.

First though, let’s review my goal from April, which was to spend no more $150 on groceries throughout the month.

To be honest, this kind of sucked. I stuck with it for the most part, but I definitely found ways to cheat:

1. I ate out quite a bit more than usual, which was partly due to how sick I was at the beginning of the month but still kind of a cheat.

2. I also added grocery items into non-grocery shopping trips a few times, and didn’t count those items toward the total grocery budget. Tisk tisk.

I don’t have an exact total for how much I spent because the machine ate my last receipt (I swear that’s true!), but I technically stayed within the $150 mark.

However, I think $250 per month is a more realistic grocery goal budget for me. My cupboards and fridge always seemed so empty and I hated not having Greek yogurt and fresh produce all the time.

Still, it was a good exercise to help me get a handle on impulse grocery shopping and buying so much food that I end up wasting. I just need to find a happy medium, and I’ll be golden.

My May Goal is a two-parter: 1) I want to get my money’s worth at the gym and 2) I want to tone up.

If I don’t go to the gym 25 days this month, I’m going to cancel my membership.

I love belonging to a gym, but during the summer I like to do a lot of outdoor activities, and I hate throwing money away. So I’m going to try to get to the gym most every day, even if it’s just for a short workout before an outdoor run. If I can’t do that, then I really need to cancel my membership for the summer.

While at the gym, I want to focus on strength training (both in the weight room and at Body Pump classes) and spinning. I can run outside and I can do the elliptical at home, so going there just to get on the cardio machines is kind of pointless. Getting my money’s worth means using the gym to its full potential.

Pretty simple goals! But they could be pretty tough for me to realize. I find it really hard to get to the gym on days where I work at both jobs. I may have to start waking up for extra early workouts too. We’ll see how it all pans out. I know you’re totally on the edge of your seat from excitement.

Moving right along…

I like to feature my breakfasts on days when I don’t have green monsters, so behold:Friday Breakfast at work this morning was some sort of mushroomy egg casserole and cinnamon streusel coffee cake. I’m not really a shroom fan, so the coffee cake was my favorite.

But really, anything with the word cake in it is usually my favorite. cinnamon streusel coffee cake I’m tired this morning, as I had a reunion with my insomnia last night. Joy. Does Starbucks deliver?

Have a fantastic Friday ladies and gentlemen!

Do you have any goals for May?

What are your plans for the weekend?

Highs and lows

Posted on April 11, 2010 by lowandbhold

Hey guys! I’ve spent the weekend recuperating from my illness. Friday night I was one worn out lady, and just needed to get my rest where I could. That meant laying off blogging/blog reading for a few days. But now I’m back!

Like I said though, Friday night I was completely exhausted and decided that I had no desire to cook myself dinner. I was craving sushi, so I picked some up on the way home from the part-time job.

I went to bed pretty early Friday night so I could get up and have energy for work at my part-time job. I had an amazing breakfast Saturday morning to get me going.

That would be a glorious combination of chocolate peanut butter oat bran with home-brewed iced coffee.

For the oat bran I used 1/3 cup dry oat bran cooked in water and added a container of Chocolate Oikos and a spoonful of peanut butter. It was divine.

This breakfast definitely carried me through work at the par-time gig, even though I wasn’t feeling too great.

At the end of work, I got a special visit from Lisa! She came in to try our video gait analysis center and try on some shoes.

She found some shoes that worked really well for her, and she is planning to buy them in a month or so! She also found a great sports bra, that I was happy to ring up for her.

She came by right toward the end of my shift, so after I got off we walked over to 105degrees to have a smoothie and chat. It had been a long time since we’d last hung out!

I got a delicious Hawaiian Spice smoothie.

The cayenne in the smoothie had a definite kick, but it was delicious!

I was really happy Lisa got to see 105degrees, since it’s one of my favorite places right now. It was so good to catch up with her!

After we parted ways I headed out to do some grocery shopping. Per this month’s Grocery Budget Goal, I managed to keep the trip to around $50.

See my total savings?? I thought I did quite well, especially since I hadn’t done a real grocery shop in about two weeks.

The rest of the night I just took it pretty easy. I did a bit of laundry, ate some soup, watched some TV and went to bed where I FINALLY got a good night’s sleep.

I woke up this morning to another divine bowl of oatbran.

I dub this Berry Cheesecake oat bran. It was just 1/3 cup oat bran, Crofter’s Superfruit Spread and whipped cream cheese. Simple and delicious!

I spent the rest of the day cleaning up my apartment, which I’ve been slacking on since I’ve not been feeling well and trying to decide whether or not to run the 10K today.

Sadly, I’m going to take everyone’s advice and skip it. I’m in kind of a bum mood about it, because a lot of people that I talked to at work yesterday kind of made me feel like I should do it and I’m really not sure if I’m making the right decision. I’m just going to trust my gut and not try to do too much and knock myself out of my half marathon training.

Hopefully starting next week I can get back into running strong and running with confidence. But overall, I kind of feel like a bit of a failure. Sorry to say that, but it’s just what I feel.

So overall, it’s been a weekend of highs and lows. I’m thinking of doing some cross training in a bit to try to lift my spirits and get my mind off of the fact that I’m not running today.

I hope your weekend has been full of HIGHS and without any lows. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!

Cloak of Positivity

Posted on March 29, 2010 by lowandbhold

Yay for Monday! My favorite day of the week!

(Did you believe that? I’m trying the whole fake it ’til you make it positivity thing, so let’s roll with it).

This week is full of possibilities. Lots of deadlines, lots of fun activities, lots of errands to finally check off the to-do list. Good times!

Yesterday was a good day, and it started with a good breakfast. I tried Oat Bran for the very first time!

I’ve always wanted to try oat bran, but I usually just end up buying oatmeal because it’s more familiar. I’m glad I bought this though, because oat bran is so much more voluminous than regular oats! I was impressed. I had it with some almond butter, sliced strawberries and a dollop of plain Oikos.

These bowls take awful pictures. They make everything look super red. I like red though, so it’s all good!

After eating that I had to finish up the laundry, wash my sheets and do a lot of work from home. Not the funnest part of the day, but it felt good to get it all done. I had to make the executive decision to post-pone my run until today. There just wasn’t enough time and I didn’t want to be stressed all day trying to rush though everything.

I’ll have to do the 6.5 miles after work tonight at the gym. Not ideal, but it will work.

Eventually I made lunch, which was Baked Risotto Primavera from this recipe. The only changes I made were using half veggie stock/half water to reduce sodium, and only using 1 cup of the Parmesan cheese. It turned out wonderfully!

I served up my portion on top of some arugula to add even more veggies into the mix.

This was a really good dish, I highly recommend the recipe. Pretty crap free too! I’m excited for the leftovers.

I really wanted something sweet afterwards, so I had a Dannon Honey Greek yogurt.

After I ate I got ready for my date. We went to the Oklahoma Thunder vs. Portland Trailblazers basketball game. (The Thunder lost by three… sad.) And after that had a quick dinner next door. It was really fun and much more relaxed than our other dates have been. I’m starting to think there may actually be something there…

I got home around 10 p.m., talked to my Mom for awhile, took a bath and hit they hay. I certainly have NOT had any trouble falling asleep lately. That is a huge perk of being so busy.

The morning has already been really productive, and I’m going to put on my cloak of positivity and kick butt this week!

What is your strategy for remaining positive even when you’re super stressed?

Incoming search terms:

oat bran

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« May
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30