I feel like I say this over and over, but I love returning to the classic blog posts: this is what I ate, here are some ideas for you. But my favorite posts are the one that start off with a little discussion or reflection about something that was of value to me and I hope could be of value to you. So we’ll start with thoughts and move to food adventures. Sound good?

Today’s thoughts are brought to you by the usual: dog walk + Bucci Radio podcast.

(For some reason she’s been sitting on the floor of my car lately?)

This week’s podcast was about changing food habits for long term change, versus just a diet fix, but the podcast went into much more life stuff than that. One thing that got me thinking was a discussion about a woman with a sugar addiction; thoughts about sugar took up so much of her life, that it took away from everything else because it took up so much headspace. Thankfully, I think I’m at a place with food that it honestly doesn’t consume me, but this got me thinking about how to apply this concept to other areas of my life. I know that vet school is insanely hard, stressful, and takes up a massive amount of time. Going in, I can’t afford to have distractions, like spending hours lost on the internet, or stressing out over what to eat. I’m both trying to strip it down, and prepare in the time before school starts. That’s part of why I got my Quick and Easy meal page going. I’ll still need to fuel myself with healthy food, but I don’t have hours to spend scouring the internet for recipes. I’m also trying to strip down my social media; I’ve unfollowing some accounts on instagram that spam a lot, or whose posts I don’t care for, for example.

The guest speaker on this episode talked about a morning routine that allowed for maximum productivity, and I was thinking that I need to spend some time now brainstorming and figuring out the best way to be productive. I need to sit down and make a list of what I value, and what needs to get done, then figure out how to tackle it. I need to organize my life, and be doing this, I need to strip away all the extra stuff that isn’t serving me well; the overhead that causes me unnecessary stress.

I invite you to examine you life; it seems to me that everyone is always crazy busy; what areas can you cut back or simplify to free up some time and mental space?

…and now onto the food.

I have a couple days worth of nearly full days of food. Let’s back up to yesterday, a work day. I had my usual Cheerios (strawberry this day) before Crossfit.

When I plan out my days of meals, I try to balance them as best possible. For instance, yesterday I knew my lunch had little to no protein, so I tried to build a super protein heavy breakfast to compensate. I actually tried something different! I made banana pancakes (and had a heck of a time flipping them…)

I blended up 1 ripe banana with 1 egg and about 1.5 tablespoons egg whites, plus baking powder and a dash of salt. For toppings/dipping, I mixed real maple syrup with some greek yogurt, and served it all with CSA strawberries. this was more delicious than I was expecting, so I may need to add this to the breakfast rotation!

For lunch, I had leftover Miso Noodle Soup with crackers.

I packed a smoothie for snack, which I ended up sipping on around 4-5. I used 1 cup of nonfat milk, half a flapjacked chocolate smoothie mix, 1/2 cup frozen blueberries, and cocoa powder.

For dinner, we had the ridiculously easy spaghetti squash pad thai. The veggies included were stir fry veggies+random veggies that needed to be used up: carrots and asparagus; it worked beautifully!

The main event was of course dessert. We made our family’s recipe for bread pudding, which was a little bit of a comedy of errors. The bread pudding part came out just fine, but the difficulties started when making the rum sauce. First, my mom measured out the rum to add, but forgot if she had doubled the amount of not, so had to measure out what she had. Then, we realized that she had added TEASPOONS and not tablespoons. When we made this recipe last time, the cornstarch made the sauce super jello-y, so this time we wanted to reduce it. However, we were reading the recipe from my blog, and apparently I was already smart enough to reduce it on there, so we had half as much cornstarch as we needed, so the sauce wasn’t thickening. I added the extra tablespoon to the boiling sauce, and it instantly foamed up and boiled over, onto the gas flame burner, making a giant mess. THEN, the cornstarch wasn’t blending well into the sauce so we had clumps. PHEW. Plus, we didn’t end up burning off much of the rum (which was a plus for my dad).

The end result was tasty though!

I didn’t have work today (Thursday), so I wanted to sleep in a bit, but also hit workouts hard today so tomorrow will be a complete rest before my race Saturday.

So, I decided on a 9:30am spin class. For breakfast, I had maple blueberry bread and CSA watermelon (in balled form).

I am still obsessed with this bread, and will need to make more soon.

Spin was fun! It was an hour class, which normally I avoid because an hour on a bike can get boring. Well, it turned out this hour long class was only 45 minutes on the bike, plus 15 minutes of off the bike strength with TRX. We did some arms, single leg squats, and abs, before calling it a day!

Before lunch, I had to make a quick trip to the store because we didn’t have any lettuce, and I had my salad all planned out!

For lunch, I made a salad with leftover grilled chicken and a little deli turkey (I only had 0.5 oz chicken left…), plus fresh peach and burrata cheese. I think it’s starting to be peach season! This one was delicious, and not all made it onto the salad! Crackers on the side.

I was majorly craving a big double chocolate muffin, but sadly didn’t have one on hand. Instead, I tried the ever popular “belt sander brownie,” or so I think it’s called? It’s just chocolate protein powder, cocoa powder, milk, baking powder, and necessary chocolate chips, then microwaved.

This was actually pretty edible! Chocolate chips are key! My only issue is that my protein powder has stevia, and I really hate the flavor of stevia. In a smoothie, you can’t really taste it super strongly because I don’t use much protein. Aw well, got the job done.

Snack before my hour long dog walk was the usual:

This evening, I went to Crossfit. We worked on Oly lifts, and then did a WOD with lots of deadlifts and running. I went lighter on the deads since I don’t want to be too sore for my race!

For dinner, we used up the last of our CSA goodies with a delicious grilled meal. We used the marinade in this Cooking Light Grilled Lemon Chicken recipe and served it with grilled corn and roasted zucchini with garlic powder and nutritional yeast.

Since dinner was on the lighter side, I made quite the bowl for dessert. I pulled a piece of peppermint bark bread out of the freezer and topped it with mint chip Halo Top, fudge sauce, and whipped cream. Yum!

And now I’m finishing this up while watching the Warriors play in the finals. I really wish I actually liked basketball…

What could you strip down in your life?