Hello!

I just finished my first week of vet school and WOW. What an incredible week. I grew so much as a person. I learned a lot about communication. I reflected on myself. I met my new classmates. I’m SO excited for what is to come.

I’m also white coat official!

I want to share my white coat night, and then I’ll go into some snapshots from the week.

One of my best friends who I’ve known forever came up for the ceremony, as well as my parents, my sister, and her fiancé (in 2 weeks, her husband!) It was amazing to have such a great group supporting me.

We stuck around for some of the post-ceremony festivities before heading to a local brewery (my new fav) to talk about the week.

I recently discovered I love Saisons, and this is one of my favorites!

After beer, we went to Burgers and Brew, a Davis staple, for some burgers. I don’t eat much meat these days because I don’t love to cook it, so I was craving some! I got a turkey burger in a lettuce wrap with sweet potato fries.

We got home pretty late, but definitely had to break into the adorable cupcakes my parents brought!

Then this morning, we went to my favorite coffeeshop for baked goods and coffee. I had a cappuccino and a GF blueberry muffin, plus a GF chocolate donut to share.

It was so nice to have everyone here! On top of all of that, my parents gifted me an avocado tree, complete with installation (my dad dug the hole). I’m excited for that!

And my week.

Like I said, it was a blast but the days were long. We were often at school from 8-6:30, and then had a social event later that evening. Since this is a fitness blog, I do want to touch on how I balanced my workouts this week.

Monday was a rest day. Partly because I did 70% of Angie the day before: 100 pull ups, 100 push ups, 100 sit ups, 100 squats. So I scaled to 70 of everything. I’m glad I did, because I got blisters on my pinkies (who does that??) at the end. I felt way stronger than the 100 pull ups from a couple of weeks ago though!

Tuesday, I woke up early and ran 3 miles before school.

Wednesday, I bit the bullet and woke up REALLY early for 5:45am Crossfit. I definitely feel like myself with morning workouts, but was dragging during the day. Thursday I did 5:45 Crossfit as well. Friday, we had a half day before the White Coat ceremony, so I went straight to the campus gym from class and did a quick squat focussed workout. It’s crazy how fast strength goes. I did not feel strong, and I realized it, so I didn’t get too crazy with the weights or reps because I knew I wouldn’t be able to walk today otherwise!

In terms of food, I feel like I was pretty hungry a lot of the week, probably thanks to long days!

Here are some snapshots:

Peach and goat cheese salad I brought to a potluck, and had TONS of leftovers of.

Current favorite dessert: chocolate Halo Top with sunbutter and whipped cream.

Toast with cheese and an egg, and kale salad with balsamic, garlic powder, salt and pepper, and nutritional yeast.

One of my new roommates 🙂

Required first day of vet school selfie.

Baked potato with vegetarian chili, GF cookie.

Scenes from my morning run.

Nectarines have become a staple.

Mexican lunch.

Super delicious GF pizza. One piece was veggie and one was garlic chicken.

Post-Crossfit, I had zero time so I took breakfast to go!

Last week I bought massive amounts of zucchini and nectarines. And then this week, I went back and did it all again! It’s just SO cheap. All of this (and the picture doesn’t do it justice), was less than $5!

This is a staple dinner. Grated zucchini, egg whites, and garlic and herb cheese.

Post-CF breakfast: a pumpkin spice waffle and a mango vanilla smoothie.

After eating zucchini ALL WEEK, I was craving ketchup like crazy so I made an emergency run to the store to get something to put it on! I got lettuce and deli turkey…I fully acknowledge that this is incredibly weird. Such is life. As is this salad: guacamole, turkey, cheese, and ketchup.

I have a pair of these shoes that are super ratty. And then I recently bought a new pair. I wore one of each out…and didn’t realize it until I was about an hour in. This picture doesn’t do it justice, because the ratty ones look ROUGH. Whoops.

And that was my week! I may have mentioned it before, but I want to say again that as I begin vet school, this blog will understandably change a little bit. I will be posting less frequently, because I will be crazy busy. I also want to take a step back in terms of what I share, and stick more towards health/fitness/healthy and easy meal ideas (especially quick and easy!) and less of the personal life things. Just a heads up! I do want to show that it is (hopefully) possible to stay healthy in vet school! (Or any intense school/work situation.)

*This is not a sponsored post, and all opinions expressed are my own. I found this graphic from PuppySpot, and I loved the information they had to share.*

I’ve said time and time again, one of my favorite things about having a pup is getting to take her places and do things with her.

She even supports me and comes to my races….with limited success. She goes CRAZY when I run away from her! And then again when she sees me come racing in.

As you may have gleaned from previous posts, Chloe is a bit of a difficult dog. I say that lovingly, of course. She can be anxious, needy, and bored when she doesn’t get enough exercise. As a high energy breed, she needs to travel at least 3 miles a day or she is just wild. Because I love fitness, ideally we would get our exercise in together, since we both need it!

Our morning walks together quickly became some of my favorite parts of the week.

The difficulty? For such a high energy dog, she sure is picky about how she exercises. She likes her walks, but she gets bored easily. If I take her to the same trail over and over, she doesn’t want to go, starts dragging, and sometimes refuses to move.

She literally stops walking right in the middle of the road.

When PuppySpot reached out to me with some “Fido Fitness” workout ideas, I jumped at the chance to share, because as I said, my difficult pup needs variety and intrigue in her exercise routine, and yours might as well!

Check it out:

We all know many people are overweight, but did you know many dogs are as well? In my experience, I’ve seen many animals that are overweight. Exercise is a great way to reduce the likelihood of this. So why not do it together?

Unfortunately, my silly dog hates fetch. However, we have done “doga” together before. Protip: a yoga mat on the floor is a dog magnet.

While Chloe hasn’t gone swimming in anything too deep, she does love fountain hopping. She runs around like crazy, and it’s a great way for her to cool off during a hot walk.

Another idea I really love, and can’t wait to try with Chloe (when I see her next. she didn’t come to vet school with me :'( ) is the interval running. I love this idea because she is far too easily distracted to run for very much distance, but I definitely think I could get her sprinting for a few seconds! Anytime I’ve run with Aussies, they seem to want to go full speed, anyways!

I also do want to talk about PuppySpot for a moment. PuppySpot is a network of selected breeders, and helps people find puppies to adopt. I’m not going to go into the “shelter vs bred” adoption debate; obviously there are a lot of dogs in shelters that need homes, and if you adopt a shelter pet, that’s great! Some people want a specific breed for one reason or another, and that’s great too! I want to highlight one particular aspect of PuppySpot: they have certain standards for their breeders, including health and humane standards. I love Chloe, but when we got her she was chock full of parasites, many of which were communicable to humans. When we let our local breeder know that she had tested positive for giardia, the breeder brushed it off. I wish we had had some sort of standard when we were adopting her, because a lot of her behavior problems as a puppy seemed to be linked to her parasites and constant medications. If you want to check out adorable puppies to work out with, check our their puppy page!

In summary: I’m guessing that most people who read my blog love fitness; don’t forget to include those pups!

Hello, hello! I’m currently blogging from my new place, under my new (roommate’s) purring kitty.

Kitties love t-shirt quilts 🙂 Charlie LOVES mine back home!

I wanted to do a full day of eating fro my first day here, but first I want to let you all know HOW I got here, and my final day in the Bay!

Monday, I basically spent all day packing. I broke to make a loaf of chocolate peppermint bark bread from some OLD peppermint bark to take with me and stick in the freezer here.

I still think this is one of the best things I’ve ever baked. It’s so ridiculously good.

I went to evening Crossfit one last time and tore the blisters off my hands from last weeks 100 pull ups during the extensive toes to bar and pull ups in that workout.

Post-workout, my parents and I split a couple of beers we wanted to try as happy hour: Honey Wheat and Mango Wheat Blue Moon. Both good, but I think i prefer Anchor’s mango wheat!

For dinner, we made one of my favorites, butternut squash soup with rotisserie chicken, with Brazilian cheese balls on the side.

That evening, I grabbed a beer with someone from Crossfit as a nice send-off!

Monday morning, I went to morning Crossfit (with extensive hand taping) one last time before we hit the road! Moving was a pretty big deal this time. I’ve never really had to have furniture before, so that was a new adventure.

My roommate was gone (thankfully, because we made quite the mess), but the minute I put the keys in the door, I could hear her cat Rina meowing. She is a lot different from what I was expecting! When I met her before, she had only been in the house for a few days, and I’ve come to learn she is quite the talkative kitty!

“Helping.”

We took a break around dinner time, and had much needed happy hour at a pizza place.

We weren’t planning on actually eating dinner there, but they had GF crust so we went for it! My mom and I split a salad and a cheese pizza.

Afterward, we stumbled on a little creamery and got ice cream. I had honey lavender!

After my parents left later that night, I spent some quality time on the couch with kitty (her name is Rina).

Nighttime was when I ran into trouble.

I let her come in with me, but she meowed ALL NIGHT. She wanted to cuddle, so she’d walk around yowling until I would call to her to come up. Then, she’d jump up and be super purry, but eventually leave and the process would repeat. I do not think I slept too much last night!

On that note, let’s go into our full day of eating!

Breakfast:

I may be back to yogurt bowls! For breakfast, I had plain Greek yogurt with KIND cinnamon granola and sunbutter, with blueberries on the side. Note: the lighting in my kitchen is actually awesome! I had this breakfast basically all fall last year, so we’ll see if that happens again now!

Lunch:

I stopped at the nearby fruit stand and bought over 10 pounds of produce for a really good price! I had one of the figs that I picked up.

For lunch, I had leftover soup and a slice of leftover pizza. I’m not really huge on leftover pizza, but I decided to give the “heat pizza in a pan on the stove” method a try. I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. I ended up cooking both sides of the pizza, flipping it cheese side down at the end. It actually came out really well, and the cheese got a nice crispy layer.

For dessert, I had a couple of squares of dark chocolate.

While I really did get the goods at the produce stand, I still needed to hit up the grocery store for staples. I managed to go into Trader Joe’s and get out with only one impulse buy, which I snacked on mid-afternoon with a Luna bar:

That evening, I visited my new Crossfit box! It’s definitely not air-conditioned (I was ever-hopeful since it’s often over 100 degrees here in the summer), but the people were really nice! I actually met a couple of older vet students! What’s crazy though is that now I’ve been doing Crossfit for 4 years, which is a LONG time. Like, longer than most people. What??

Dinner:

So….I had tonight’s dinner planned, and was also planning on making zucchini lasagna tomorrow…so I bought a massive amount of zucchini (definitely got carried away with it), so that was the focus of tonight’s dinner! I love zucchini because it’s really easy to sauté up quickly, so expect a lot more of it around these parts! Way faster than roasting broccoli or carrots. I made a little bowl of brown rice, zucchini with garlic powder and nutritional yeast, an egg with yolk so runny it exploded all over the floor when I was taking it out of the pan, and some super creamy avocado from the local produce stand.

And mango kombucha.

Yeah, with the local produce, I am definitely not going to mind living here for the next 4 years.

Dessert:

I definitely don’t have the unlimited options from home, but I made out pretty well! One more square of dark chocolate, plus chocolate Halo Top with sunbutter swirled in for a little faux chocolate peanut butter action.