From there, I went straight to yoga. I’m really trying to incorporate it into my routine again, especially since running is picking up. I didn’t think anything of the Crossfit workout until I tried a chaturanga. Yeah. Low push ups? That was not happening. At all. So that was interesting. 

Since I was missing my post-early workout nap, I decided to walk over to Peet’s for an iced green tea.

It was STRONG. Way more so than Starbucks-which I guess I should have expected. But I’m not complaining! 

I picked up some groceries at Whole Foods-I needed coconut sugar for a recipe I’m trying in the near future. All the pastries smelled so good in there though-I was really tempted by the cinnamon raisin scones. However, I knew if I gave myself such a shot of sugar on an empty stomach I’d feel awful all day, so I settled on some plain yogurt and DELICIOUS vanilla granola. 

Then, I got a quick but much needed haircut, and headed to the mall to meet up for shopping with my best friends from high school.

One of my friends is the best shopper. She can pick a ton of cute things in about 10 minutes. It’s amazing. Both my friends are a lot of fun to shop with because they both try on and buy things. And I’m bad at picking things out. Which leads to the title of this post…

Wait, what? Me? Doing a fashion post? Think of this less as a recommendation, but more of an idea of what I like to wear. 

Here are my finds from the mall the other day:

I love this dress! 

So what’s my style like? Simple, slightly athletic. Mostly simple. Throughout high school, I wore jeans and a sweatshirt pretty much every day. Now that I’m in college, I feel like I need to make a little more of an effort. Sometimes. I’m lucky that my school is super casual. Nike shorts to class? 100% acceptable. It’s a good fit. But the biggest reason I’m getting away from wearing jeans and a sweatshirt is frankly because biking in jeans stinks. It just does. It’s not comfortable. So that combination of factors has forced me to be a bit more creative. 

Here’s one of my weird quirks-I don’t wear jewelry. At all. For some reason it kind of annoys me to have it on-hence the “simple.” So what do I wear?

I’m a big fan of loose sweaters. My favorite is a peach and white striped sweater that I seem to have no pictures of. I also love scarves-specifically infinity scarves. I could never figure out how to properly wear/wrap a regular scarf so at this point I exclusively buy infinity scarves. I love dressing up a simple crewneck sweatshirt with a scarf. Plus, in winter it usually keeps me warm enough to avoid wearing 2 jackets. (Yes, I’m a wimp. Weather in the 50s merits 2 jackets, and I still ‘freeze.’) 

This is probably my favorite scarf. I love the color and the subtle sparkle. I also have it in purple (they were on sale-how could I not??).

Here’s a really awful picture of my navy scarf. Simple, but effective. It would be good with a light or bright cardigan, depending on the season. 

Speaking of cardigans, these are my newest thing. In the winter they look great with a tank top and scarf (yes, this is a CA winter). This summer, I’ve been dressing up my workout pants with a cardigan. Yes, once again my school is casual enough I can wear workout pants to the lab and it’s totally fine. I feel like I do look a little more profession with the sweater though.

Here’s the full look-with my summery scarf and the lovely Kaitlin (old photo).

Here are a few more sweatered looks:

That’s one of my new tanks. I wanted something a little fancier looking. This could be dressed up a lot with a pencil skirt of some type.

In terms of skirts, I am a big fan of the high waisted skirt look.(Ignore the fact that I was weirdly tan last summer.)

This flowy type of high waisted skirt seems to be a bit last year (not that that stops me from wearing them). The new thing seems to be the a-line skirt, which I also really like and have a few of, I just haven’t worn them a whole bunch. 

In terms of fancier clothing, this is my all time favorite dress. And pretty much my only fancy type dress until I got that blue one yesterday!

Realistically, who knows what I’ll wear next year. When the weather gets colder I’ll almost certainly turn to the crew neck and scarf look. Once again, I’m a wimp in the cold-any breeze in the air and a cardigan just won’t cut it!

I hope you enjoyed this post. I’m not necessarily the most stylish person, but hopefully this gives you a sense of my ‘style’!

I’ve been waiting for an excuse to post the recipe for my favorite banana bread! Here is the recipe, it’s super healthy and low to no sugar, depending on your preferences. I got it from Nancy Clark’s Nutrition book (there’s also an app with all the recipes). So here’s the recipe, which I’ve modified slightly:

Ingredients:

4 well ripened bananas

1 large egg or 2 egg whites

2 tablespoons canola oil

1/3 c milk

1/8 c honey (or more to taste, recipe actually calls for 1/3 to 1/2 c sugar)

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1.5 c whole wheat pastry flour

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350

Mash bananas.

Add all ingredients except flour and mix well

Blend in flour, stir until moistened

Pour into 4×8 loaf pan, I recommend lining it in tinfoil

Bake for 45 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center is clean

Let cool for 5 minutes (in theory, i NEVER do)

135 cal, serves 12

For this particular batch that I ate from this morning, I added no sweetener, and added blueberries. Yum!

After enjoying my banana bread, I biked over to weights. In shorts and a sweatshirt. Bad idea. It was probably in the 30s, and I couldn’t feel my hands AT ALL by the time I got there. This is the first time I’ve done weights as part of rowing, and it was interesting. I’m really glad I’ve done a ton of weights already and know how to do all the exercises, because the trainer basically demonstrated what we were doing once, and expected us to do it. He didn’t teach the new people how to do snatches, or anything like that, and I cringed watching them. I just hope no one hurts themselves! The type of weights we did were endurance weights, which was different and kind of strange. Most of the exercises were with an empty bar, but we did a ton of reps of each exercise, without much of a break between sets. For example, we did sets of 40 squats with just the bar. I’m used to ding like 3-5 squats, with a heavy weight on. But it was a good workout. Immediately after weights, we had to do a timed run (it doesn’t have to be right after, but most people do it then because it was convenient). I finished the run in 34:08. The run is a loop of campus, and I think it’s probably around 4 miles, maybe less. It was a comfortable pace to me, and I think it compared decently to other people’s times. The funny thing was that I apparently do the run in the opposite direction as most people, so I passed post of the team at some point going the opposite way, and it was fun to give high fives. Great motivation!

After the run, I rushed to breakfast so I would have time to shower before class. Breakfast was a letdown. I was banking on a smoothie, and all the smoothie ingredients were out, but there were no blenders. And I wanted to grab bread for lunch because I didn’t think I’d have time to go to lunch, but all I could grab was a whole wheat english muffin.

Ok I totally forgot to take a picture of breakfast, but it wasn’t that exciting. I had a bowl of yogurt with frozen fruit (wanna-be smoothie), which was soooo cold, plus half a whole wheat english muffin with regular and strawberry cream cheese, plus some scrambled eggs.

After showering, I was getting my things together, and decided to make a peanut butter sandwich with the english muffin for lunch, when I realized I couldn’t find the english muffin. I searched everywhere! I mean, who the heck loses an english muffin?? My theory is that I left it at the dining hall, which would be preferable to finding it in 2 months.

I didn’t think I’d be able to return to my room before practice, so I tried to subtly dress for practice. Scarves hide all!

Like the new scarf?

I had 2 morning classes. I thought I was going to be booked through until practice, but I ended up not having a chem section so I was able to get a real lunch. I’m optimistic about my classes this quarter. I wasn’t a big fan of my classes last quarter. My math class (linear algebra) was the hardest class I’ve ever taken in my life, by far. It was also pretty painful. I’m actually looking forward to my math class this quarter. It is Multivariable Calculus, which I actually took in high school, and the topic just makes so much more sense to me.

Since I was planning on a peanut butter sandwich for lunch, I decided to do that at the dining hall.

Pb on whole wheat bread. I was planning on just having a garden salad with it, but I couldn’t pass up some type of brussels sprout salad either. Plus, I had to have one of the stuffed tomatoes, stuffed with breadcrumbs and cheesy goodness. And of course, I came prepared.

I brought my own peanut butter! I’ve probably consumed a ton of trans fat in the form of peanut butter at the dining halls here and at training camp, so I really want to prevent that.

Are you ever influenced by watching people eat? I have a bad habit of seeing someone eat something, and then deciding I have to have it, like it was somehow justified because someone else was eating it too. I never realized that would happen when I saw a stranger eating something. That led to this

:

It’s some type of raspberry crumble bar. It’s oaty with raspberry filling, and is pretty good, but nothing special, it’s at the dining halls all the time.

After lunch I stopped by my dorm to grab a jacket for practice; BEST DECISION EVER, practice was cold! I had one more class of the day before practice. I was a bit concerned about getting to the pick up location by 3:15 if class ended at 3:05, but there was another girl from my team in my class, and we made it no problem. Before practice, I snacked on this:

It’s by far my favorite NuGo bar. It has way more flavor than the other NuGo Slim bars, and the regular NuGo bars are too sweet for me.

Practice mostly consisted of re-reigging the boats. We had the world’s shortest row afterward. However, something did happen. We got stuck in the sand. I never realized that a) that was possible and b) I should be concerned about it. The tide was super low today, so I guess that was the problem. It was bizarre, we were rowing along, and then all the sudden it got heavy and we weren’t moving. Since I was in the back of the boat (but the front in terms of what hits the sand first), I was about ready to climb out and start pushing. We ended up getting out of it by backing, but in the process we came dangerously close to hitting a channel marker. It definitely didn’t help that it had already gotten dark. There’s something really cool about rowing in the dark, it’s so peaceful, but it can also be difficult when I can’t see the water. I’ve never rowed at night before, but I think I prefer rowing in the early morning.

We made it back in time for dinner (yay), although dinner wasn’t spectacular.

Spinach salad with raspberries, which was good, but eating spinach is difficult to do neatly. I had some steamed cabbage and brown rice, and some random roasted veggies with mushroom gravy, plus a few potatoes. I topped it with a piece of grilled chicken for protein. It was an ok meal, nothing to write home about. Dessert?

It’s definitely a dangerous thing to have unlimited access to frozen yogurt. I had half vanilla half chocolate, with cocoa puffs and peanut butter (yes, the trans fatty kind. ugh.). Some habits die hard, and apparently having chocolate peanut butter and cereal was a habit I developed at camp. I was feeling pretty decent about my day of eating, not too bad for a first day back.

However. Back in my dorm….I chatted with some of my friends, who happened to share my love of food, which naturally ended in snacks. They were reasonably healthy, dried fruit and nuts, plus naturally I had to finally crack open my favorite peanut butter! I also opened my new 99% cocoa dark chocolate. I love super dark chocolate. I will eat straight baker’s chocolate, but 99% is so much better because it was way smoother. But my roommate also brought back a Costco sized pack of Hazelnut chocolates….

I have the tendency to want to eat whenever anyone else eats. Sympathy eating, if you will. If I want to survive college, it’s probably not the best thing. Especially if I’m eating meals with my crew teammates who are a foot taller than me and outweigh me by like 50 lbs. At least if I want them to still outweigh me by 50 lbs! Tomorrow I’m having a Guacamole party with the avocados I brought from home, so I want to try to plan that into my day in terms of meals. What concerns me most is if my food gets in the way of my workout. And as my workout intensity increases, nutrition is key. As I said before, old habits die hard. So basically I just need to get back into better habits. As I think I’ve talked about before in another post, I’m a huge underdog in terms of rowing. I need to take every advantage I can get, and my knowledge of nutrition could be that edge I need. Interestingly enough, I find that when I’m better at resisting sweets, I’m also better at pushing myself through physical pain on while rowing. Go figure. Here’s to a healthy week! The good news? Tomorrow’s workout is on my own, and no class until 12:30 so I get to sleep in !

How was your day?