This Weekend

Date: November 24, 2014

Author: astottler

Happy Monday! Who is ready for Thanksgiving? I know I am! I’m going to pick up my Turkey Trot race packet today! Woo!

How about a little weekend recap?

My Friday started off with a track workout and a free cappuccino.

Not a bad start!

After a full day of classes, I packed up and headed home for the week. From there, I threw on my school colors and headed to our rival school for the night. I have a ton of friends that go to Cal, and this was Big Game week-our rival football game! As you can imagine, I was pretty popular rocking my red on the streets of Berkeley the night before Big Game.

Our night began with a pizza dinner from Sliver, one of the many gourmet pizza places in the area. We then went and saw Mockingjay. I actually liked it a lot more than I was expecting. I don’t remember liking the book much but the movie was good! And I thought they split it off at a good point.

After the movie, we chatted and then watched Pitch Perfect, which I had never seen.

Luckily, we managed to sleep through all the rain expected and wake up the next morning to a partly sunny day. First stop was brunch, where I got a chicken and avocado omelet.

From there, we went to a restaurant to watch the football game from. Let’s just say I was definitely the happiest person there. WE WON!

At halftime, we stepped out to grab froyo from my friend’s favorite place. It was super thick and delicious. I got pumpkin and chocolate, with cookie dough!

After the game, I headed home to hang out with these guys:

Sunday morning began with a 6 miler along one of my favorite trails.

(Recycled pic)

Followed by lunch at the Whole Foods hot bar.

My lunch of choice was macaroni and cheese with butternut squash, plus some assorted salads.

For dinner, I shockingly met up with my sister. This is shocking because she is so busy and I never see her! We went to a Russian restaurant, and I got some delicious mushroom dumplings. They were served with onions and a sour cream type of sauce! So good!

This weekend was such a fun way to kick off Thanksgiving break! There was one casualty though.

My shoes had a small rip in them before I left for Berkeley, and I figured it wouldn’t be an issue. It quickly became worse (than the picture) and let’s just say I was lucky my toes weren’t sticking out, given about half the shoe is disconnected to the soul. Oops…

What did you do this weekend?

That’s okay Crossfit, I didn’t really want to be able to walk anyway.

Date: November 7, 2014

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

First of all, you guys are seriously amazing. Your comments on my last couple of posts seriously made my day!

Second of all-I guess this makes the first post on my ‘journey’?

My morning began with a trip to the gym. I’m teaching spin this weekend, and my playlist was pretty terrible, so I had to make some adjustments. It was 1000x better afterwards! Phew! I want to practice it one more time before teaching though. I also did some abs (because I never do them) and calf raises because I’m hoping strengthening my calves will help my plantar fasciitis. Hopefully.

Normally I would do a dining hall breakfast but it was already closed so I had a banana and sun butter in my room, followed by a persimmon.

I ended up only having one class today, which was unexpected. My lab was postponed due to a gas leak in the building, so I gained 4 hours in the afternoon.

For lunch, I went to the dining hall with my friend.

Clam chowder (surprisingly good), salad, kabocha, and a small slice of super thin crust pizza.

I also had 1.5 small cookies.

My afternoon wasn’t nearly as productive as it should have been, but such is life. For a snack, I munched on some sweet potato tortilla chips-seriously, these are good! I also had a pomegranate.

My roommate brought these back from her farm (right??) and it was so good! That being said, if you want an exercise in mindful eating…this thing was so difficult to eat! And my desk looked like a murder scene afterwards.

After studying for chem, I went to Crossfit. We usually have one class a week that is just strength, which was what today was. Before I get into that, let me just say that today is the first day since MONDAY that I’ve been able to walk like a somewhat normal person. Apparently we started this new program that includes high reps of squats. I don’t think I’ve ever done a set of 10 weighted squats. My gosh. That was Monday night. I went in again Tuesday morning where we proceeded to do 120 wall balls and 50 air squats. Yeah. I’m still sore, and I’m hoping today doesn’t make me unable to walk tomorrow. I love weights…but man.

Today was…more squats. Yay? It went better than I was expecting. We did sets of 8, which wasn’t as bad as I anticipated. We also did 5 minutes of rowing, stiff leg deadlifts, and planks. So a pretty low key day.

For dinner, I made some wraps in my room. Turkey, garlic and herb laughing cow, spinach, and red pepper on a whole wheat tortilla.

I downloaded a Blogilates meal plan a while ago, and while I never really followed it, I’m a fan of these guys. They are easy dorm food, super filling, and I’m already dreaming up variations.

After dinner, I was still hungry and craving something sweet so I thawed out a couple of frozen pumpkin muffins.

These probably weren’t the best choice. What I really want is to make some pumpkin bread. I have a fantastic healthy recipe, but I’d need to go home to do it because I have no ingredients here. I also desperately need something for before morning Crossfit, which I’ve been going to more. Back in the day when I used to do morning weights, I always had banana bread or some type of quick bread and it worked great. I just don’t really have many carb sources in my room right now, and I always get so light headed so that needs to change!

Overall thoughts? Not bad, definitely areas for improvement. And now I’m off to do more work! Yippee.

The Post I Never Thought I’d Write

Date: November 6, 2014

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Well, this is a post I never thought I’d write, just because it makes me uncomfortable. But after thinking it over, I’m happy with my decision.

I’m going to get serious about losing the college weight, and I’m going to document it all on the blog.

I hate to use the blog as accountability, but aside from the fact content has been lacking lately, I think this is something a lot of people can relate to. Pretty much everyone gains weight in college.

So what does that mean for the blog? Honestly, it won’t change that much, and it won’t be something I’m always discussing. But it’ll be there.

(Please note that these pictures don’t really match the content. I just have pictures without words, and words without pictures.)

(Greek salad)

So what am I going to do?

Well, for starters, nothing crazy. No specific diet-no paleo, no Whole-30, no vegan (not that there is anything wrong with those, but I’ve found they don’t work for me).

Just portion control. Moderation. And yes, I’m going to do the dreaded “calorie counting.” Or at least “estimating.” Here are a few areas I think I can improve and focus on:

-portion control (it’s easy to just glop stuff on a plate)

-fewer sweets (this does not mean NO sweets though!)

(-increased activity) <-I’m pretty active so we’ll see about this.

Given I am pretty active, I don’t trust generic calorie calculators that tell me how much I should eat. Instead, I’m going to track calories in and calories burned in exercise for a little while to calculate where I should be for moderate weight loss. <-But also because I’m a nerd and like and trust math. So it will be a learning process that will take some adjustment.

(Pumpkin bread pudding from TJ’s with homemade rum sauce)

While I have a specific weight goal in mind, I will not be posting it for several reasons. Besides that fact that I don’t want that on the Internet, I don’t want comparison. I also don’t know if that goal will change-it may not be reasonable if I’ve put on a lot of muscle weight, so it is not a hard and fast goal at all.

(Why are dining hall sweet potato fries so good?)

And I’m not in any hurry. If it takes 3 months, great. If it takes a year, great. It is what it is.

I know this may not be the post anyone was expecting after my last one, but this feels right. And exciting. I’m ready, and I hope you all will follow me on this journey!

Authenticity

Date: November 5, 2014

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

First of all, fair warning that today’s post may be sort of word vomit (ugh I hate that word).

So, I feel like I haven’t been very real on the old blog lately. At this point I probably have a pretty different set of readers as I did 2 years ago, but if you read any of my old posts, the tone is pretty different. I don’t know exactly what it is. Maybe I’m burned out on blogging. I think a lot of it is I don’t really want to psychoanalyze my eating habits on the internet anymore, because when I go back and read those posts, I feel ridiculous. Maybe I’ve read too many blogs and feel like I’m just adding white noise to the world of blogs. I think healthy living blogs in general have changed a lot in the past 2 years.

(Baby HLBer Aurora)

I also think that somewhere along the way, I lost my passion. I became apathetic. And honestly, I feel sort of lost. I’m having a hard time finding inspiration for something I used to be so passionate about.

(Totally should not have been eating this, totally allergic to it. But baby HLBer Aurora didn’t exactly know this.)

College is a pretty big transition in life. I think I’ve become apathetic about a lot of things. To be honest, I also feel lost without a sport. Softball was my life in middle and high school, and rowing was my life freshman year of college. I honestly feel like food is my only extracurricular and source of fun.

I feel like another reason I’m losing my passion for fitness and nutrition is I feel like I don’t live up to it anymore, if that makes any sense. The more I lose it, the more unhealthy I get, which makes me lose the passion even more. When I read my old posts, it makes me happy yet sad because I feel like I’ve lost a lot of that.

(I don’t miss the freezing cold days on the water though.)

And since we’re being honest here, I guess I’ll talk about the one thing I never talk about but occasionally mention and complain about and then never change anything.

(One of the first food-y things I posted. That smoothie had WAYYY too much mint extract.)

Yeah, gaining weight in college is real. I feel like my eating habits have become apathetic (yeah, totally overusing that word in this post). I’ve gained weight, and I’m not comfortable with myself. To be honest, ever since that happened, I haven’t really felt like myself. And to be even more honest, I feel like living unhealthily is sort of wasting my college years. I feel like this has leaked into other areas of my life. And I really, really want to change, but it seems so impossible and far away.

And I feel emotional even writing this post because it saddens me how much I’ve changed since coming to college. I feel like I just care less about things in general, and that’s no way to live your life. I was going to do a whole post about how I feel like I lost my Type-A-ness and how that’s a bad thing but I guess that will come up here too. So I don’t know what this means for me. I’m not sure what to do. Maybe if I start being more authentic on here that will help reignite that spark, but I also don’t want to be ashamed or embarrassed by anything that the whole world can see. So that’s where I am right now.

(My gosh I love cats though.)

WIAW-College Year 3

Date: September 23, 2014

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Happy Wednesday! How crazy is it that I started this little blog when I was a freshman and now I’m a junior? Craziness. I should do a throwback WIAW at some point to compare the years. But for today, we’re doing WIAW with this week’s food!

First of all, I want to give a little update on my plantar fasciitis. It’s been 4 days now with no running and my feet are feeling sooo much better. Yesterday, I felt like they had returned to their normal pain levels and the outside of my foot wasn’t really hurting, but today they actually felt good. I think there were a number of factors that went into the improvement. Not running was a big one, but I think also returning to a normal routine with my normal shoes also helped. Plus, I’ve tried to cut back on sugar lately because I was hoping that would help reduce inflammation-I know it’s a long shot but I wanted to try everything! So maybe it helped. I’ve also been wearing the night brace which means I wake up feeling better. I can tell I’m getting better flexibility in my ankle/achilles as a result as well.

Ok-onto the food!

In terms of breakfasts, yogurt bowls have been the name of the game. The first one was plain yogurt with canned peaches and sun butter. I’m really loving that the nut-free dining hall nearby has sun butter!

Yogurt bowl #2 was back in my room and was plain yogurt (whole milk, non-greek) with sun butter, raspberries, and a drizzle of brown rice syrup.

In terms of other food, I packed some lunches from home before I left.

Each one contains grilled chicken, cumin roasted yellow cauliflower, and brown butter sage mashed sweet potatoes.

As I have said before, the dining hall closest to me now is the best one on campus. The food actually has flavor, which is pretty revolutionary. For one meal, I had a mediterranean salad with grilled chicken and some cream of spinach.

The cream of spinach was so, so delicious.

I also tried the dining hall’s most famous dish-Death by Chocolate.

Honestly, I wasn’t a big fan. It was a little too much for me. It was super rich chocolate cake covered in fudge, and it’s fairly dark chocolate.

Another thing I’ve been making is chocolate milk for post workout. Well, technically it’s hot chocolate. I got some really good quality whole milk from my favorite local dairy at Whole Foods. It even comes in a bottle. Butttt it’s non-homogenized, which means the fat isn’t really mixed in. In other words, it’s full of chunks of fat. It really freaks me out. I have to drink it hot to really mix it all up. My chocolate post-workout drink is milk, cocoa powder, and brown rice syrup!

But hot, it’s so delicious! Although I may have consumed enough cocoa powder to make me a bit jumpy.

What kind of milk do you buy?