Lent

So I know I am not Catholic, or whatever religion started lent. However "during Lent, many of the faithful commit to fasting or giving up certain types of luxury as a form of penitence". My religion doesn't necessary believe in penitence more like repentance which is kind of the same thing. Anyway for lent this year for the first time ever, I am going to challenge myself to get my body square with my spirituality. So I am giving up meat for lent. Which as a former veg shouldn't be that hard, but have you ever had a burger at Red Robbin? They are amazing.

I have recently put on some lbs and have let myself do whatever I want. That has to change. I cant keep going on this crazy roller coaster. I am not happy or healthy with my body. I have a race to run in less than 8 months and I dont want to not be ready.

Goals Goals Goals

So I have been trying to get back into the swing of things, its been kind of rough. I have set a couple of goals. First I am going to try so hard to not eat after 7pm. What that means for me is getting enough calories in the day so when I get home from work I don't want to eat everything that is not nailed down. This is going to be a very hard goal. I am going to allow myself some wiggle room on the weekends but during the week I am going to really try to stick to this goal.
My second goal is try to take the time to make some good food, I mean cook it myself. Women cannot live on salad alone I am learning. So I have been searching veg and vegan websites to try to come up with some yummy good food that will be easy and nutritious.
I am also trying to be more zen. I know how hippie of me. But my little brother recently got diagnosed with hypertension. He is a stress case (I love you) I tend to be pretty chill about things but I have a short fuse and can be super grumpy (others might say bitchy) at times. So I am trying tea and yoga. Today I went down to Shangri-la Tea room in Boise and had my first bubble tea. At first taste I was hooked, but after a while I wan unhappy. I think I should try a different one. It was a little to sweet for me. (Such an old lady thing to say) But I did order a veggie burger and some kale chips. OMG to die for. I will go back! And if anybody is interested in being a hippie with me, you can go too.
I can totally make the Kale chips by myself, but I have gotta figure out this burger recipe. Best I have ever had.

So yummy!
 Happy Health!

My Workout Jar

I was on pinterest the other day and I saw something really cool. It was a couple of jars and one said pounds lost and the other one said pounds to lose or something to that effect. Well I thought it was a good idea and a good incentive. I liked that you could see the progress as its happening. So I went to hobby lobby on my lunch break and looked around for some cool jars. Well I found one cool jar but not two. So I decided to make my own version of the incentive jar. I got a really cool jar and it is going to be my workout jar. Every time I work out I put one stone in the jar. If I run out of jar before I run out of working outs, then I will just take all the stones out and start over.

One little sad stone, but its a start right?

Also I got a pedometer this weekend. I had one but I lost it, so I got another one. SILD suggested that I set a goal to walk so many steps. I think I am going to start off today with 3,000, and hopefully end the week at about 10,000 steps. I dont know how realistic that is, so this week is going to be about trial and error I guess.

Waterfall Race and One-upmanship

I know I promised that I would take pictures of my juicing process. I had every intention, but then day 7 rolled around and I never got to it. I think the juice week was a good success. I felt amazing. I will do it again in the future if I ever feel like I need a system reboot.
So on to the next goal. Me and SILD are team working out and getting healthy. We want to do this 5k (running) in our hometown in August. So while SILD is in better shape than me, she is not resting on her laurels. We are challenging each other from across the state.

Today she is the winner, she got up and did a morning workout. I decided to sleep in. However yesterday me and my roommate did a couple mile walk...in the freezing cold! So I won. I think this one-upmanship thing is good though. It challenges us to do better than the other person. Not in a bad way. In a good competitive way.

Day 4

Hello people! Its day 4 and guess what I forgot to do again last night.... TAKE PICTURES! Grrrr! To say that yesterday was a bit of a long day is not an exaggeration. My co-worker is out of town so I (stupidly) volunteered to work the 2 and 1/2 extra hours a night for 4 days. It will be good to have all that comp time, but this week is long long long and its only Tuesday. OK back to the real reason I am here, to talk about day 4 of juicing. Last night when I got home I was very tired and more than a little hungry. I had come up against McDonalds smells and popcorn smells yesterday at work. It was brutal. But I stood firm. I was not sure how juicing would work for such a long day away from my juicer. Turns out I underestimated a bit. So I adjusted today I am positive that I will be better at then end of my night. How am I feeling? I feel actually very good. I have lost 3lbs and everything seems to be ok. I guess I am a bit shocked because I expected this to be much much harder. I however am not a stranger to healthy foods, fruits and veggies. I was a full time Vegetarian for over a year and a half.  So maybe this cleanse might be more extreme for somebody who doesn't eat a lot of healthy food. However at the end of my 7 days I do plan on keeping up the diet of (mostly?) vegetarian trying to cut out dairy and my final goal is to cut out sugar....yesh! I am however not sure if I am going to allow myself to eat meat. I go back and forth about it all the time.
Here is the problem with being full veg. The people you tell wont let you forget it. Trust me everybody from my roommate to my co-worker is always loudly expressing concern that there is nothing for me to eat. I regret telling people. I wish I would have just kept it to myself and secretly avoided the foods. I have been eating meat for a while though and the other day our bosses took us out to lunch. I wanted a freaking cheese burger but my co-worker loudly asked what I was going to eat since I didn't eat meat. I normally like attention but I didn't want that kind of attention. So I settled for a lame grilled cheese. Booo! Anyway more on that later.
I do have a couple of pictures I just snapped at my desk:

So the big one is 32 oz and that will be my lunch, after lunch and whenever I need some food.  It has spinach, carrots, celery, cucumber, apples, pares, oranges, and just a ton of stuff that I can't all remember. It is super yummy!
The little bottle is for dinner. It has tomatoes, celery, cucumber, spinach, carrots. Kind of more hardy. At least in my mind. I think its about 160z ish? The bottle doesnt have a number on it.
Both bottles are not all the way full as you can see, but I doubt I will have the end of the day hungries like I did yesterday with this load. 
Anyway I promise I will get more pictures before the end of this 7 days.

Day 2

I am just finishing up day 2 of my juice cleanse, and to be honest I thought it was going to be much harder? I have had a lazy weekend, so maybe when work starts again tomorrow it will be more tricky. But I feel good. No problems to report. The only thing is that my roommate cooked soup and it smelled amazing, then I went to the movies today and that popcorn never smelled so good. But I am determined to finish this goal. I will take some pictures of the juicing process and post them here in the next day or so. My camera was all the way upstairs.

Oh well hello neglected blog

Well its a New Year and time to take the bull by its horns! Gosh it seems like this blog gets stopped and started a lot. So let me start at the beginning.... Last year I had some health problems that really caused me to have some setbacks. But I am sick to death of that. I already made myself a promise not to go through that stuff again. I am too young for that and It was super not fun.

So there is this movie that pretty much changed my life./http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/. You can get it on Hulu or Netflix. Its about a man on the verge of death and how he changed his life for good by going on a juice fast. At least watch the trailer. Its so good. I told BFFE to watch it and we have been passing around the knowledge ever since. So I have been wanting to get a juicer forever, since I watched this movie a few months ago, but I kept putting it off or spending money on stupid things like bills. Whatever, anyway BFFE got on recently and I was so jealous, but guess what! She got me on for Christmas. So starting on Saturday we are going for the full 7 day juice fast. I know from the movie the first 3 days is going to be hell. But we are doing it together, even from across the state so I think we can make it.

Anyway so there is my first goal. Get through this fast! I am sure I will be blogging about my experience just mainly for my benefit but also for you guys to ask questions and maybe see if this is something you want to try. I am also going to set a goal to not drink anything other than water. I dont like a lot of soda anyway so this wont be to hard, but I do like my occasional coffee. I think those things are ok in moderation. Anyway what goals do you guys have this year? Good luck!

Pressure Wins!

I am always encouraging BFFH to post more pictures on her blog, especially since I need to show you how awesome she is. I blogged about her triathlon a while ago, but I didn't have any pictures to post to show how amazing she is. But low and behold my nagging worked, so now I get to show them to you!

BFFH is the tall one! My cute little tomboy best friend.

I can see her in this picture, but maybe nobody else can, just know she is there.

Anyway I just wanted to give her some props because she is awesome and deserves to hear it a lot.

Happy Monday?

Okay not so much, Mondays are my least favorite day. I feel bad because I am sure Monday is just a scapegoat to our not getting enough sleep the night before (Poor Monday). Which is usually my case. In fact last night I was up super late watching Veronica Mars. So I refused to get up early and go to the gym. I let myself off the hook because I did after all walk the 5k two days ago. Okay not a good excuse, but I am using it anyway.
 The 5k was so fun, I even worked up a bit of a sweat. I am on my way to running next time. Baby steps.

 So even though I am watching what I eat, I cannot live without my treats. So I have trying to find healthier options to my sweet cravings. Soyjoy bars, good healthy snack, about 140 calories, all natural.... however they don't taste that awesome. I found out the the strawberry is not good. Repeat, not good. So I was ready to give this snack the heave ho, but the blueberry and mango coconut ended up being pretty delicious. So I just wont be buying strawberry again.  The giant cookie is vegan. It was surprisingly not bad. However it was like $1.50. Nobody needs to eat a single cookie for a buck 50. So silly, but I wanted to try, so I did.  The last treat was Newman's own peanut butter cups. AMAZING!! Probably the best peanut butter treat I have ever had. It is made from all natural ingredients, and tasted so good. However it was about $1.65 for that treat, so that is the bummer part.  But I figure a treat should be just that a treat, so even though I wont be buying any Newman's peanut butter cups in bulk, once in a while probably wont break the bank.

 Also I wanted to share this delicious creation BFFE and I came up with when she was here. It was actually her brother's idea, we just stole it and put our own twist on it. Our version of flatbread pizza. We just got some panini bread coated it with butter and garlic put cheese and veggies and baked it in the oven for a while. Sure it wasn't the most healthy meal, but it could be if you wanted to. It was the weekend, we were splurging on our calories, so we didn't even try to make these super healthy. Next time I might cut out the garlic butter and try some pesto or something like that. Anyway super yum, cheap and fun!

Weigh in Wednesdays

So I stepped on the scale today and I am pleased to say I lost that pound that I gained last week. But I am also bummed because I was watching the biggest loser today and saw people losing 25+ pounds in one week. Okay I realize that I dont have cute Bob Harper kicking my ass, but still one pound loss is not making me happy. Maybe its because I went home and ate coco Krispies for dinner the last two night? So there you have it. I have been kicking my tush at the gym this week, today was an especially hard kick. I know I just need to go slow and steady to win the race and realize that Bob is not going to be walking in that door, so its up to me.
On a heavy note, my sister is very ill. Please keep her in your prayers. We find out more from the Doctors tomorrow. Its so hard being away from home in times like this. But it also reinforces this health journey that I am on.
Have an awesome day, and good health to everybody!