S’mores Smoothie

Happy humpday! Do you see a little light at the end of this week’s tunnel?? For me though, Wednesday is just the start of my week! It’s also the day that feels the longest… I swear Wednesday drags on foreverrrrrrrr.

So let’s back up to yesterday instead of thinking about today! 😉

I made another smoothie that I wanted to share with you guys. I have to admit that this one wasn’t as yummy as my Peanut Butter and Jelly Smoothie, but it was still pretty good and kept me full past lunch time! This is my version of a S’mores Smoothie 🙂 It came out to be about 160 calories.

Into the blender goes:

1/2 cup of low fat cottage cheese. (Please use plain greek yogurt if you don’t like the “sour” taste of cottage cheese! I would have, but I didn’t have any!)

2 tbs cocoa powder

2 tbs marshmallow creme

1/4 cup milk

5-10 ice cubes

sweetener of choice

I poured it all into my tumbler!

I’m actually making another smoothie tonight to take with me to church for dinner because I’m out of a lot of other groceries, and I’m just on a smoothie kick right now! This one is going to be Chocolate Peanut Butter, and I’m kicking up the protein and cals to make it “dinner worthy.” I’ll share it in tomorrow’s post! 🙂

After my smoothie yesterday, I had an apple for “lunch” because I still wasn’t too hungry and then had a container of vanilla greek yogurt about 2 hours later for “2nd lunch.”

I snacked on some frozen grapes and strawberries (I love eating fruit frozen! It makes it last longer!) while Chad played “house-husband” and sewed up one of the dog toys that Pierre destroyed.

It was destroyed again within hours.

Dinner last night didn’t get pictured because it was just boring. Sweet potato with almond butter and a toasted sandwich thin with laughing cow cheese. At least it got the job done!

As far as today goes, there’s really not much to share. I did complete a tough arms and abs workout this morning after 20 minutes on the treadmill. My circuit looked like this…

I bet you can guess what breakfast was! Egg and jam on a whole wheat english muffin! No turkey bacon though, we’re out. 😦

The rest of the day went by smoothly. A little bad weather now, but hopefully it will pass by tonight because Chad and I have to make yet ANOTHER Wednesday night grocery trip. I. Hate. It. Both of us have commitments at church and never get done until 8:30, so that puts us at Walmart around 9:00. I’m usually in bed by then! ugh. My 5 am run is going to come pretty early tomorrow. I’m really hoping that the soreness in my legs will be gone for tomorrow’s run too. Sore legs make for a not-so-fun run. 😦

Well, I’m off to make my smoothie and head to church!

Thanks for reading!

 

PB&J Smoothie and New Workout Clothes!

Hey friends! Good morning and happy Tuesday! 🙂

It’s already been a busy morning for me so far, but luckily I don’t have a very busy day ahead, so I can rest a little now.

Before I get into this morning, let’s get back to yesterday! I mentioned on Facebook and Twitter that I made a delicious “Peanut Butter and Jelly” flavored smoothie around mid-morning, and I’m going to share it with you now! I took “Chocolate Covered Katie’s” recipe here and modified it to fit my nutritional needs. My version comes out to around 150 calories!

Combine 1/2 cup of frozen strawberries, 1 tbs peanut butter, 1/4 cup of milk, 1/8 tsp vanilla extract, sweetener of choice, and depending on how you like the consistency, 5-10 ice cubes.

Pre-blend and Post-blend

It was perfect for my mid-morning snack and kept me full past lunch time! 🙂

Speaking of lunch, Chad and I decided to take our lunch outside on the deck since it was such a pretty day!

Excuse the nasty table top.

After lunch, I decided to head over to Florence a little early (I had a voice lesson at 2) and hit up TJ Maxx and Ross to see if I could find any good deals on workout clothes. I definitely hit the jackpot!

From TJ Maxx, I got New Balance running pants, a purple long-sleeved running top, green Nike sports bra, orange-ish pink Champion sports bra, and a pink dry-fit tank. All for around $60!! I had a gift card to Ross with about $30 left on it, and I bought super comfy yoga pants, a white Adidas sports bra, and a pink Asics tank!

Also from TJ Max, I bought a new tumbler for my smoothie creations and a new coffee that I’ve been looking for everywhere!!

I haven’t used my tumbler yet (I will later this morning when I make another smoothie!), but the coffee is amazing!

Now back to today!

I woke up this morning at 6 and got dressed for my run! I even wore my new pants, sports bra, and long-sleeved top! 🙂

Today’s run was so tough for me. I’m on week 4 of the Couch to 5K program, and the runs consist of 2 reps of running for 3 minutes, walking for 1 1/2 minutes, running for 5 minutes, and walking for 2 1/2 minutes. I made it through the first set fine, but it was the 2nd round of 5 minute running that killed me! But I never stopped! Also, because of yesterday’s leg killing workout, my legs were very sore and didn’t help at all with my running. Oh well, I made it through and I’ll do it again next time! Positive thoughts! 🙂

When I got back, I prepped a batch of quick pumpkin oats straight into the yogurt container because it was the last little bit. I let it sit in the fridge for about 45 minutes while I drank coffee, checked emails, and caught up on some blogs. The oats were extra good today because I used sugar free maple brown sugar oatmeal instead of plain! 🙂

The rest of the morning I’ll be getting ready for my music classes this week, working on music for my lesson and opera, and hopefully getting a haircut! Nothing crazy, just a trim to keep it healthy looking. I’ve also got plans to try out a new smoothie creation this morning that I’ll share with you guys in my next post. I’m super excited about this one and hope it turns out good!

This afternoon, Chad and I are going to check out Aldi’s grocery store to see if we can find some of my healthy food staples at a cheaper price than Walmart. Oh how I wish we had a Trader Joe’s here!! 😦 I’ll be sure to let you know what we find!

I’ll leave you with this text my brother just sent me.

What a goob 😉

Thanks for reading!

If anyone has any running tips or hints, please please please leave a comment or email me so that we can talk! I need all the help I can get! 😉

A New Snack & Giving Up The Scale

Morning everyone! Hope your Monday has started out good! I made sure to start mine off right with a crazy exhausting workout this morning!

I started with this as a warm up…

and then did this leg and abs circuit that had me feeling like a noodle!

I was at the gym for well over an hour with this one. Good thing I don’t work Mondays!

I went for my usual post-workout breakfast as soon as I got home instead of taking a shower first. Don’t worry, I showered after.

And I also just downed 2 large cups of coffee, so I’m ready to go! 🙂

Rewind to yesterday.

I mentioned that  was trying out a new snack creation yesterday. It was very different, but I really enjoyed it!

I blended cottage cheese and pumpkin with some splenda and pumpkin pie spice. When I first heard of this combo, I wanted to gag, but I thought I’d give it a shot. It tasted like pumpkin pie filling! Just not as thick. I also hoped that the fiber from the pumpkin and protein from the cottage cheese would keep me full. And it did!!

Equal parts cottage cheese and pumpkin. Pre-blended

Post blended

Poured into bowl

I think next time, I’ll stick it back in the fridge for a few minutes to let it get really cold again and maybe even add just a little cool whip to make it taste even more like pumpkin pie! 🙂

For dinner, I went with a 6 inch turkey loaded with veggies from Subway.

I took it with me to church and watched the youth play dodge ball. It was pretty entertaining, especially when Chad decided to join in. Let’s all enjoy some awesome iPhone quality action shots of last night’s game.

We ended the night with some popcorn and The Walking Dead! I can’t believe there are only three episodes left this season. It seems so short?

So I know I’m about 5 days late, but Lent started last Wednesday and I had decided to give up my morning Twitter/Facebook/Blog reading time to substitute some devotion/quiet time with God. It’s been going really great, but I felt like I needed to add something else. Some of you may know that I’m a little obsessed with the scale. Sometimes, the scale can even alter my mood for the day. If I’m down, I’m happy. But if the scales goes up (even one pound!) or stays the same, I’m in a bad mood. So I’ve decided to give up the scale! I’m not going to step on it again until after Easter. This is something that’s going to be really hard for me, because I’m used to weighing myself at least once a week. So I’m just going to have to start going by how my clothes feel to measure my progress. I’m not necessarily trying to lose weight, but I am trying to manage and maintain. I”m hoping that with God’s help, I can learn to stay healthy without using the scale as a measure of progress!

What did you give up for Lent, if anything? Any questions or comments on this topic? Just leave them in the comment section or shoot me an email and we’ll talk!

Thanks for reading! 🙂

Fruits and Froyo

Happy Sunday everyone! Hope you all like my new and improved stuffed pepper recipe last night!

I never did finish up my Saturday happenings though, so here they are…

Like I said yesterday, Chad and I were going to run errand and get ingredients for dinner. We ended up putting a few more items into our buggy than we intended, but they were all good things!

All the fruit looked so good, so I picked up some strawberries, grapes, and nectarines! yummy!

Also, can we discuss the fact that every time I get in Chad’s car, there’s a new candy bar wrapper in the floor???

Maybe he thinks he needs to hide all the junk food since I try to eat healthy? 😉

Anyway, when we got home, I decided to go for my “week 3 day 3” Couch to 5K run. I thought that it felt warm enough to run in shorts and a tshirt. WRONG. I was completely frozen within 5 minutes, but I pushed through! The wind was also ridiculous! I thought I was going to be blown over, seriously.

Post-run snack was a fruit bowl I made out of our recent purchase!

Diced nectarine and grapes. YUM!

Dinner was of course, the stuffed peppers. Then we went to a froyo place in Florence called Frostbite because they had a no sugar added vanilla flavor that day. Let me just say that I could eat froyo every day for the rest of my life and be okay.

I got about a cup of the NSA Vanilla with some strawberries, pineapple, mini marshmallows, a teeny tiny bit of brownie bites, and an eensy weensy bit of cheesecake bites. Didn’t wanna go too crazy. 😉

After that, we called it a night!

This morning, after waking up to Pierre licking my face (really), I fixed myself some coffee and breakfast part 1.

A serving of Fiber 1 80 calorie cinnamon squares and about 1/2 a cup of sliced strawberries with a splash of skim milk.

Breakfast part 2 (not pictured) happened at church between services and was 1/4 cup of plain greek yogurt plus 1 cup of frozen grapes. OMG SO GOOD! It was my first time freezing grapes, and now, ALL grapes will go into the freezer as soon as I buy them!

Since my past couple of meals and snacks have been “fruit heavy,” I needed to get some veggies in for lunch! I knew that Chad would be eating last night’s leftovers, so before I went to church, I put a sweet potato in the crockpot on high. It sat for about 5 1/2 hours and was cooked perfectly!

I topped it with almond butter and had a side of Wasa crackers and laughing cow cheese. Delish!

I’ve got a new snack item to try this afternoon that I’ll be sharing with you guys tomorrow, then church tonight, followed by a new episode of The Walking Dead!! I hope you guys don’t think I’m weird for loving this show, but it’s just so good!

Dinner is going to be something quick that I can bring with me to church, so I’m thinking it’ll be Subway. Can’t go wrong there!

Thanks for reading! 🙂

Healthy Stuffed Peppers!

I’m back folks! Not with a post about my Saturday (that will be up tomorrow!), but with another recipe!

Tonight for dinner, I mentioned that I was cooking stuffed peppers. I got the recipe from a pin on pinterest, and it looked like a really good healthy recipe. It was weight watchers friendly and everything! Well, I got to looking at the recipe and calculating some things, and I realized that the nutritional information given was way off. Supposedly only 251 calories for one whole stuffed pepper… nope. Try over 400 calories! Yikes. So, I did some tweaking and made the recipe just a bit healthier! My version gives you one whole pepper (two halves) for only 330 calories!

You’ll need:

1/2 cup of quick brown rice

2 and 1/4 cup of plain tomato sauce

12 oz of lean ground turkey

3/4 cup of fat free mozzarella cheese

3 medium bell peppers

First, you can prep your peppers. Cut them in half lengthwise and cut out the white membrane and seeds.

Place them in a baking dish (or roasting pan).

Brown the turkey in a sauce pan and cook the rice separately. Then, add the rice and 1 & 1/2 cups of tomato sauce to the sauce pan with the turkey.

Evenly distribute the mixture into the peppers.

Take the remaining 3/4 cup of tomato sauce and pour on top of peppers.

Cover and bake at 400 for 45 minutes. Add cheese on top when peppers are done and let melt.

And there you have it! Six halves. Three servings. (Two servings if you’ve got an extremely hungry husband) And so so so so good! 🙂

Hope you get a chance to try this out! Let me know how it works for you!

Thanks for reading! 🙂

Quick Homemade Meatballs (50 cals)

Good afternoon everyone! We’re smack dab in the middle of a beautiful weekend! What are YOU doing to make it fun??

We’re just relaxing and taking care of some small errands today. Then I’m cooking dinner (stuffed peppers!) and taking us out for froyo tonight!! 🙂

But first, let’s talk about last night’s dinner. I mentioned that I was making spaghetti, and I did, but at the last minute, I decided to make some homemade meatballs instead of just browning the beef in the skillet. So here’s my recipe, it’s pretty simple!

You’ll need:

1 lb extra lean ground beef

1/4 cup Italian bread crumbs

3 tbs low fat grated Parmesan Cheese

Combine the crumbs and cheese:

Add the beef  and mix together. Form into balls. I made mine a little big.

Bake at 400 for about 15-20 minutes.

After making 15, each meatball comes out to about 50 calories. I even had one with my meal!

This morning, Chad and I slept in and had coffee in bed while watching a little TV. I don’t why we don’t do that more often because it was so nice!

After finally getting out of the bed around 9:30, I made myself a breakfast of Vanilla Oikos and 1/2 a cup of peanut butter cheerios.

We just laid around the rest of the morning while he worked on some assignments for his licensing school (he’s being ordained!), and I read a little of Mockingjay.

For lunch, I had an interesting tuna dish that had 1 can of tuna, plus 2 tbs plain greek yogurt, and buffalo sauce. Yes, you read that right! I LOVE buffalo sauce and will eat it on anything. Even tuna! My tuna didn’t get pictured, but the second part of lunch did! I sliced an apple to dip in some almond butter. I think I’m officially obsessed with almond butter!

Chad and I are about to get ready, go run some errands, and get the stuff I need to make dinner tonight. Then I’ll probably be taking the afternoon to get my 5k training run in so I can take tomorrow as a rest day. And after dinner, it’s FROYO TIME! 🙂

I’ll have my stuffed peppers recipe up later so you can try it too!

Thanks for reading!

Healthy Mini Pizzas & A 2nd Grade Masseuse

Happy Friday!!! It’s the start of the weekend, and for me, that means a little bit of running but a lot of resting!

Before I go into today’s events, I promised you mini pizzas from last night, so here they are! They are only 135 calories per pizza!! 🙂

Start with sandwich thins. *Note: I advise you toast them beforehand. I didn’t and the middles were a little droopy/soggy from the sauce.*

Add 1/4 a cup of plain tomato sauce to each thin. It seems like a lot, but it makes it so good! I used regular pizza sauce for Chad’s pizzas. It’s more calories though.

Next, add 1/4 a cup of reduced fat mozzarella cheese to each pizza.

Then, add 6 pieces of turkey pepperoni to each pizza.

Broil the pizzas until the cheese melts! Takes about 5 minutes.

I had already plated my pizzas when I took this picture.

I was full after eating just two! 🙂

Now back to the present! This morning, I was awake again at 5 am and made it to the gym by 5:30. (My gym is only 5 minutes away, but I do a lot of stuff in the morning before I leave) I started with 20 minutes on the treadmill doing a mix of speed and incline intervals. Then completed an upper body plus abs circuit in about 35 minutes that looked like this…

I came home, showered, ate breakfast…

The Usual

…and then was off to work with my coffee to-go! It was a great day of elementary music! I danced with kids, made some instruments, and even got a surprisingly good massage from some 2nd grade girls while I sat at my desk. Apparently, they do this to anyone and everyone that will let them (and even some that don’t). You don’t even have to ask. One will start, and the rest just follow. It’s a little funny but hey, I’m not complaining!

My lunch consisted of another turkey sandwich, apple, and yogurt. Gosh I’m a boring foodie. 😦

My snack this afternoon may be a little more interesting. I really wanted some almond butter, so I smeared some on a chocolate chip rice cake and put it in the microwave for just 7 seconds to get it warm. yummmmm, so good!

I’m planning on cooking spaghetti for dinner tonight, then spending the evening with the hubs and maybe watching a movie. This is why I love weekends! Lots of relaxing and hanging out with Chad! 🙂

Have a good Friday night everyone! Thanks for reading!

If you try the pizzas and toast your sandwich thins first, please let me know how it turns out!! I want to make these again and need to know if toasting makes it better. Thanks!

PB&J On This Beautiful Day!

Hello and happy Thursday! 🙂 It’s almost Friday which means the weekend is right around the corner, so get excited!

Today has been SUCH a beautiful day! I’m writing this post outside on our deck. It’s been in the 70’s for most of the day, and that is seriously unheard of in February! But I’m not complaining! 🙂

I got up this morning at 5:30 and got dressed for my run, which I took outside because the weather was so nice. It was still kind of wet from the little rain we got recently, but not too wet to run outside. My legs felt kind of stiff at first, but after running a little while, they started feeling better. Today was Day 2 of Week 3, so I’m sticking with this 9 week plan pretty well!

After my run, I needed food ASAP, so I made some Peanut Butter and Jelly Oats. Sounds weird, but it’s really good! I just added 1 tbs of peanut butter and 2 tbs of sugar free jelly, plus some greek yogurt for protein!

I had already stirred in the peanut butter when I took this.

Lunch was my usual turkey sandwich, apple, and yogurt, and after work, I had opera and snacked on a Clif Kid Z bar on the way.

When I got home, Chad was already out on the deck with the doggies, so I joined him, and now here I am writing this post! I’m about to go inside and start dinner which I’m excited about tonight! I’m making mini healthy pizzas using sandwich thins, tomato sauce, low fat mozzarella cheese, and turkey pepperoni! Hopefully they’ll turn out yummy, and I”ll have them up on my next post!

After dinner, we plan on taking the dogs for a good long walk because it feels so dang good outside! I’m also afraid to waste any of this goodness, so I want to take advantage of it! I”m sure it’ll be 40 degrees and cloudy pretty soon again. 😦

Tomorrow’s a gym day for me, so I’ll be waking up at 5 am to get in my workout. That means an early bedtime tonight! Anyway, I think I’m just rambling now, so how about we just end this right now? 😉

Thanks for reading!

I WON!

Hello! I feel like it’s been so long since I’ve posted, but it was only yesterday morning! Strange… I guess it’s because yesterday and today have felt so loooooong! Anyway, here’s somethings you’ve missed.

Yesterday I spent the morning getting groceries and bought two new products that I was really excited about! Only one of them actually turned out like I hoped though…

I finally jumped on the almond butter train, and O.M.G. it’s amazing. Of course, if you don’t like almonds, you may not like almond butter. But I do, and this stuff is awesome! 🙂

This stuff however, is DIS-GUS-TING. I bought it because I was curious about a zero calorie (and zero nutrient for that matter) “peanut butter” spread. Nope. Fail. Don’t. Buy. This. Stuff.

Last night’s dinner was a bowl full of veggies courtesy of Green Giant!

This morning’s 5 am wake up call felt like a nightmare. I was so exhausted for some reason, but I forced myself out of bed and to the gym. Thank goodness, because I felt so much better afterwards!

I went with my own treadmill workout as a warm-up…

Then did a lower body plus abs circuit…

I even wore my new DIY tank! 😉

My eats today have been really boring… too boring to show any pictures. Egg, turkey bacon, & jam on an English muffin for breakfast. Turkey sandwich, apple, and yogurt for lunch. LUNA Bar for snack (plus a spoonful of almond butter). And dinner tonight was exactly the same as last night. See? Boring.

But I do have some exciting news to share! I finally won a giveaway that I entered from one of my favorite blogs, Fitting It All In! SEE??

I entered to win some thinkThin bars, and I’m SO EXCITED that I actually won! I always enter blog giveaways, but never win. This really just made my day! 🙂

So, I’m sorry I don’t have tons of food pictures for you tonight, but sometimes it’s just not worth it to take pictures of everything. Maybe tomorrow’s post will be better? Until then…

Thanks for reading! 🙂

Pumpkin Makes a Comeback!

Guess who’s back…. back again….

PUMPKIN’S BACK!

and it’s in the form of a “speedy” version of the blog world famous Overnight Oats. Visit any healthy living blog and there are recipes for overnight oats. I usually just roll with the instant oatmeal packets, but I tried something a little different this morning.

But FIRST, I had to get up and run Week 3 Day 1 of my C25K plan! It felt amazing outside and made my run so enjoyable!

When I got back from my run, I got to work on my version of overnight oats.

1 packet plain oatmeal

1/4 cup water

1/4 cup plain greek yogurt

1/4 cup pumpkin

pumpkin pie spice, cinnamon, and splenda to taste.

Mix everything together and stick it in the refrigerator for as long as it takes to thicken. For me, I let it sit for about 20-30 minutes while I drank my coffee and checked emails.

Back up to last night’s dinner, and you’ll see that I went with a lazy option. Chad had to get to a meeting last night, so dinner had to be quick. I called on Betty Crocker (in a box) to make this quick Cheesy Chicken and Noodle dish. It was good and worked out fine for a quick dinner! Not too bad for you either. 210 cals, 5g of fat, 32 carbs, 10g of protein, and 4 sugars per serving. Not bad at all. Thanks Betty!

Since yesterday was such a lazy day (I did practically nothing), I had to make sure to have a few plans for today, which include:

-Grocery trip

-Lesson Plans

-Possibly a Haircut?

-Voice Lesson

-Opera Rehearsal

-Dinner alone 😦

Chad had yet another meeting tonight, but this time he wont be home for dinner, so I’m on my own.

Well, I’m off to tackle my to-do list! I may have a Tuesday 10 post up later tonight! 🙂  Thanks for reading!