Figuring it All Out

Date: January 24, 2013

Author: astottler

Tomorrow is Friday! I leave on my ski trip tomorrow! Yay! So much work to do though…My day today included a lot of food…and I definitely didn’t feel so great. Bah. So I’m just going to go through my food pretty quickly. It wasn’t a terribly healthy day for me, needless to say…

Preworkout was 2 granola balls.

Breakfast:

Smoothie, half a whole wheat bagel with blueberry cream cheese, scrambled eggs.

Close up on that smoothie! This smoothie was…interesting. I had a plan…my dark chocolate blueberry smoothie. First of all, there were no clean blenders, I had to clean one out myself, which is a little gross given I’m not sure how clean I could have gotten it…plus there were no bananas…which is the base of my smoothie. I threw in blackberries, peaches, plain yogurt milk, spinach, cocoa powder, vanilla protein powder, and a little apple juice (because nothing in here was sweet). Plus a spoonful of peanut butter. It ended up turning out ok…

Lunch:

Caesar salad, sweet potatoes, egg foo young (not really sure what this is), carrots and cabbage, plus something that I really don’t know what it is. The other thing was kind of like tofu…but it wasn’t tofu. Something with an “m” maybe? This meal seemed a little greasy, to be honest. I felt kind of gross after, and this is before I started overeating!

Plus a cute little bowl of fruit! I couldn’t figure out for the life of my what station this was, then I realized it was a fancy salad station, where you pick the toppings and they toss it up for you. I’ll have to try that if I see it again! Salads are way better when you don’t toss them yourself…

Ok, now let’s get into the trainwreck…I won’t go into detail…but hey, at least I didn’t break my challenge!

Pb&j crackers…ugh too sweet!

Have I mentioned I’m obsessed with cocoa powder? I was out of bananas (but I stole 3 today, mwahahaha) so I addded thawed blueberries to cocoa powder and mixed it up with pb…it’s not as good as you might think…

Plus half a granola bar. That made up my snack! Ugh. Stomachache for practice!

Dinner:

Don’t let the green on that plate fool you…there was a lot of salty greasiness…

Plus yogurt with raisin bran, mandarin oranges, pb, and cantaloupe.

And for good measure, back at my room, a granola ball and a banana with cocoa powder and peanut butter….

So I basically don’t feel so hot…My taste buds have been, shall we say, “overstimulated” the past few days. I think I need to just go a while with low salt/low sugar (low cocoa powder…) foods. I’m a little terrified about the foods over ski trip though. I’m not sure what my teammates meant when they said all they ate was cookie dough and cheese…I get the cookie dough, but I don’t know many college students that eat straight cheese…so we shall see…

Speaking of low sugar, I decided this Tuesday will be my day when I eat no added sugar! It would be impossible over ski trip…I’m doing this to raise awareness for all the added sugar in foods people wouldn’t even think of, in honor of Dr. Robert Lustig’s new book, Fat Chance. I’ll be documenting not only what I eat, but also what I don’t eat! It should be fun, so make sure to check it out! If anyone wants to join me, that would be awesome! It’s a great learning experience.

Ok, so back to my day besides food…

This morning was a 2x6k, which is the workout I’ve been dreading most of all. Well, I survived. It wasn’t that bad. I was able to get in the zone and kind of zone out. Unfortunately, my times were not where they should have been. On the positive or negative side, I’m not sure which, I finally realized that in the last 1-2 months I’ve been erging wrong. Or, in better words, I’ve developed a bad habit. Basically, I’ve been pulling only with my arms and not using my legs. So my legs won’t be tired after a workout. The biggest problem with rowing with mostly my arms is if you think about it, arms and much smaller than legs. And therefore aren’t as strong, and tire more easily. Which explains why I’ve gotten slower. So basically I have to really work on using my legs in the next few weeks, because this really needs to be fixed in time for a big erg test.

Yesterday, I talked about how pressed for time I am. In my math section today, I made a list of the things I have to do, and made a schedule for myself to do them by. Lists always make me feel better! Plus, one problem with my workload is I’ll often have a lot of big things lurking in the distance, so I won’t stay up late(ish) to work on them, because I’ll figure I can do that later. With my schedule, I’ll accomplish what I need to do each night. I must admit, I feel better already! (And I have yet to work on any items on my list…)

I don’t have much else to say today. My row on the water felt really good. I haven’t been in a bigger boat in a while, and they’re much more stable! And after practice, I ate dinner with some of the other walk-ons I trained with this fall who either quit or went light-weight, so that was a ton of fun! Here’s to a healthy tomorrow, and have a great weekend everyone!

No clue what happened to this…

Do you ever have train wreck days?

Happy Friday!

What was my first thing on the agenda after classes today? A 2 hour nap! It was glorious.

I was up bright (well no, it wasn’t actually light out yet) and early for weights. Beforehand, I had some Sweet Potato bread that I pulled out of the freezer the night before to thaw. I think I made this sometime in the fall. Ohh modern conveniences. You can find the recipe I used here. I stumbled across it on Healthy Food For Living a while ago, and I’ve made it a couple of times. This time, I reduced the white sugar to 1/4 c honey instead and it turned out great! I love low sugar recipes!

I drank some milk to go with this.

I enjoyed weights this morning a little more than last time. I think the workout was shorter, so I actually had time to finish without being super rushed through. We did power cleans today, which I was excited about. The trainer instantly knew I had done them before. 🙂 However, I had a minor embarrassment when I went to add more weight to the bar. I’m used to adding 25 lbs to each side and easily be able to do the exercise, but here, the plates are in kilograms. Which I forgot. And I added 25 kilograms to each side. I realized as soon as I picked the bar up, so it’s not like I actually tried to clean it, but still embarrassing. Other than that, the workout went well. After weights, we do a timed run of a loop of the campus. I finished in 36:16, slower than last time. My legs were more burned out last time, but I think I had more difficulty today because it was about 34 degrees out (according to weather.com) and I had a lot of trouble loosening up my muscles. Plus, I ran the loop the other direction than I normally do. It shouldn’t really make a difference, but who knows.

I didn’t get any pictures of breakfast because I went straight from my run, but I had a smoothie with banana, blueberries, peaches, mango, and strawberries. Plus milk and plain yogurt. One thing I love about smoothies is that I can make a different kind each day, and it almost always turns out well. My smoothies entirely depend on the fruit available at the dining hall, so that is kind of important. I topped it with a bit of peanut butter. On the side, I enjoyed half a whole wheat english muffin topped with cream cheese and scrambled eggs. Also, the dining hall had interesting fruit today. Kumquats and fresh blueberries. I had to get a few kumquats because, well, it’s KUMQUATS in the DINING HALL. I made the mistake again (I did this on Monday too) of sitting down to eat immediately after my run. The problem? My knees tightened up and I couldn’t walk very well for a minute after standing up. This is probably bad for me. I definitely don’t want any knee problems when I’m older. After breakfast I rolled out the muscles around my knees my a PVC pipe. It felt amazing. Lately, I’ve only rolled out with foam rollers because they are what is available at the gym/practice, but they don’t do a lot for me in comparison to the pipe.

Today was sooo cold. I wore 2 jackets, plus gloves. As it turns out, my hands get so cold when I bike, so gloves are a must. I was really tired today. I could barely keep my eyes open for half of my Chem class, but halfway through I got my second wind and powered through that plus Math. Then, lunchtime!

Mixed greens salad with tomato and mozzarella, apricot glazed chicken, brown rice pilaf, and a stuffed portabella mushroom. I love that the rice pilaf is made with brown rice. Everything was delicious. The chicken was the best I’ve had in a while. It was moist and flavorful. The mushroom was awesome as well. I’m not exactly sure what it was stuffed with.

I was super tempted to grab dessert, but luckily I got distracted by a text from my friend. When I finished texting, my craving was gone.

After lunch, I went back to my room for and amazing and much needed nap. For some reason, whenever I wake up, either in the morning or from a nap, my first instinct is to eat. Interesting. I had a granola bar.

As well as frozen cherries, and the tail end of my oatmeal and crackers with peanut butter. Today, again, I dressed for practice with the mission of not getting cold. Well, once again, I succeeded, because I wasn’t on the water. We were missing a few people today because they had dorm ski trips, so there weren’t enough people to make up my boat. Instead, I got to row on a rowing machine inside. My workout was 2×20 minutes on the rowing machine, and then 30 minutes on a spin bike. I was actually happy to be on the rowing machine. I had a couple of technique things I wanted to work on, and I wanted to work on putting more power in my legs, so this was the perfect opportunity to do just that. I was satisfied with my workout. Unfortunately, I was not prepared to work out inside. I didn’t have my iPod, but luckily I did have my phone which I was able to blast (well, as loud as an iPhone can blast). I’ve learned that I can’t listen to music on long rows. I just get too bored. Instead, I listen to health podcasts. Lately, I’ve been on a series called Nutrition Diva’s Quick and Dirty Tips. I really like it because it consists of 5-8 minute long segments, each about a different nutrition topic. The variety keeps it interesting.

The only thing about my workout was, well, remember how I dressed to survive a blizzard? That was what I got to work out in. I had my warm spandex pants, plus 2 long sleeves. I ditched one of the long sleeves, but still, I couldn’t exactly work out in my underwear. The experience kind of reminded me about a part in Seabiscuit (my team read this over break) that describes what the jockeys have to go through to make weight. They used to pile on warm clothes and run around a track to sweat the weight off. Yep, that was me right there. I didn’t feel super heated, but I was sweating buckets.

Tonight, I started my initiative of making more dinners in my room. Almost all the ingredients I had on hand, and the rest I took back from the dining hall yesterday.

I had an egg scramble with egg beaters that I had on hand, spinach and mozzarella from the dining hall, avocado which I had on hand (I get my hands on it anytime I have an opportunity), and pesto, which my roommate got from Costco a little while ago. On the side was a sweet potato.

Pesto is awesome! You can add it to almost anything and it will make it better!

This meal was entirely made in the microwave. Most of the ingredients are staples. There is no reason not to make a healthy meal when it is this easy! I challenge you to come up with one thing you can’t cook in the microwave! Well, I don’t know about meat, but hey, it might work!

Speaking of things made in the microwave, I believe I’ve mentioned before that you can make brownies in the microwave with brownie mix plus the add ins (eggs, canola oil, water). This was a very dangerous discovery, considering I have a Costco pack of Ghiradelli brownie mix in my dorm room (it was left over from a class project). I was craving something warm, chocolatey, and cakey after dinner. However, I usually feel pretty gross after eating a whole mug brownie. I thought to myself, there has to be a way of making this healthier. I may have mentioned this before, but one time I tried to make a freeform healthy chocolate brownie by throwing ingredients in a mug and microwaving them. Healthy, it was. And it certainly tasted healthy….to say the least. Well, this time I decided to use the brownie mix as a base. I started by mashing up half a banana and microwaving it until it was nice and soft. I stirred that up with some plain greek yogurt, cocoa powder, egg whites, and some of the brownie mix. Not a ton of the brownie mix though. Then, I stirred in some pieces of my 99% chocolate (because I may have picked out some of the chocolate chips from the mix a while back…), and popped it in the microwave with my fingers crossed.

The result?

It was good but not spectacular. It was more of a protein-y souffle, and it wasn’t that sweet (which was probably good). It had a very strong dark chocolate flavor, which was amplified by the addition of greek yogurt. I ended up eating it with some peanut butter, and it was tasty. The good news? I didn’t feel super sugared out or gross after! So I guess it truly was healthy!

Ok, that’s enough from me tonight. Time to go be social like all the other college students without a blog to maintain!

My Secret Dream

Date: January 11, 2013

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Can you believe it is already Thursday? I don’t seem to have any concept of days this week, with my new schedule and everything. There are definitely some kinks to be worked out. In case you’re wondering how my little sugar experiment went, I slept really, really well last night, and felt much more alert and awake during the day. It’s funny what an effect a little sugar can have on your body, in ways you would never think of.

This morning, I survived my tough workout, stomach contents and all! It was tough but doable. The goal times my coach gave me really helped me pace myself, yet push myself at the same time. The workout was on the rowing machine, 250m, 2500m, 750m, and 5000m, all a basically max effort. I didn’t eat much beforehand, just a few bites of leftover banana oatmeal. This was about right given the workout. Afterwards, I was ready for a real meal! Some people don’t feel like eating after a hard workout, but I’m always driven toward food. Even if I don’t feel well, it is like my body knows that food will replenish me.

Here’s breakfast:

A peach-watermelon smoothie. Hey, I have to go with what is available to me, right? And it was good too! This year I learned that watermelon can make an awesome addition to a smoothie. Another smoothie I like that I haven’t made in a while is blackberry-watermelon. Yum! I added some peanut butter to top my smoothie as well. On the plate is a chocolate chip pancake, plus half a whole wheat english muffin with a bit of cream cheese and scrambled eggs with mozzarella and green onions. I also went back for another chocolate chip pancake because, well, I deserved it after that workout!

For lunch, I went to a sustainability event that had food. It was basically to raise awareness of the sustainability efforts that go into the dining here. There was even a bike powered blender!

Some type of turkey sandwich on ciabatta (I ate it open faced because it was too dry otherwise), a salad with apples and cranberries, and yogurt with granola and fruit. The yogurt was so good; it reminded me of frozen yogurt! I had to grab an actual serving of it.

What a beautiful parfait! I forgot how good pineapple is in yogurt!

After lunch, I headed to my Animal Behavior class (which I absolutely love), which is soooo far away. I also realized that wind really does play a big role when one is biking. I felt like I wasn’t moving at all as I rode into it!

After class, I snacked on frozen cherries and a protein bar from the other day. Frozen fruit is such a good snack, especially since I have a full freezer! I also had a handful of trail mix from the other day.

I got super bundled up for practice, as it was super cold out! I decided to make it my goal to not be cold during practice. I had 2 long sleeves plus 2 sweatshirts! Well, I wasn’t cold; practice was cancelled due to excessively windy conditions. This has never happened before. We have rowed in all kinds of weather, including rainstorms, so it must have been pretty crazy out for it to merit canceling practice. Instead, we had 75 minutes of cross training assigned. I convinced myself to do 20 minutes of it on the rowing machine, even though I had a tough workout this morning, just to break up the monotony. We aren’t allowed many options besides spinning, rowing, and running, and I have to run tomorrow anyway. One thing I miss with this new schedule is having freedom in my workouts. I miss lifting weights in the way I am used to doing it, and I miss circuit and ab workouts. The problem is, I don’t have the time or energy for them with everything else I have to do. But I do love rowing, so it’s a tradeoff. I was thinking about going to a spin class today, but I couldn’t get the timing to work out with the specifics of our assigned workout, so I decided to make a pumping spin class of my own. I love spin classes, and I have a secret dream of one day becoming a spin instructor. I have no idea how to do that though. Maybe something to look into this summer? Anyway, here’s a rough outline of the workout I made myself. The numbers indicate the number of songs for each section (make an awesome playlist like I did!):

2 warm up

3 hill

2 downhill

3 flat road

4 hill

1 downhill

2 flat road

1 cool down

It was a good workout, and pretty fun too. I was definitely working hard! After I finished my workout, I went to the dining hall for dinner.

Mixed greens with olives, corn, and a few pieces of zucchini, topped with champagne vinaigrette. I also had grilled chicken, brown rice, and some type of white beans. Plus ketchup on the side!

For dessert I had a bowl of cocoa puffs with peanut butter and chocolate milk. I just can’t lay off the chocolate peanut butter!

After dinner I went to a career fair where I sampled half of a chocolate chip cookie and half of an oatmeal raisin cookie. Fun fact: I don’t really like the chocolate chip cookies here. In fact, I am not a big fan of chocolate chip cookies unless they’re homemade (not that I don’t still eat them). I really like the oatmeal raisin cookies at the dining hall. They’re not as spiced, and are pretty vanilla-y. Yum! When I returned to my dorm, I could tell my sweet tooth was still running rampant. In an effort to limit the damage, I had my last Special K peanut butter chocolate granola bar from training camp, plus a piece of chocolate. I think that did the trick well enough.

I want to briefly touch on the nature of this blog. One thing I really want to maintain in this blog is positiveness. Many of the blogs I ready are super enthusiastic and positive, and I want to maintain that in this blog. Sure, life may not always be perfect, but a negative attitude doesn’t help anyone. It is really easy to type up a rant and post it, without thinking about the impact. I’m not saying I want to be dishonest with you guys, not at all. I’m saying I want to truly be positive. I am in general a very positive person, but everyone gets angry at themselves sometimes. I definitely don’t want this blog to be a place where all I do is complain, because let’s be honest, my life is pretty freaking great.

All that being said, I don’t feel like what I am eating fully fits into the definition of a healthy lifestyle. After all, I love nutrition, and I want to share that knowledge with you guys, but I also what that knowledge to be reflected in my meals. The best way to teach is through example, right? I am truly going to work hard to maintain my healthy ways, and improve in areas that need work. For example, I want to make a better effort to remember to take my vitamins. (Ok, maybe that’s not totally related but I needed to remind myself of that.)

Ok, now that all that seriousness is out of the way, guess what I saw tonight? A cat. I’ve seen this one a few times, but never so close to my dorm. I was walking back to my dorm when I heard meowing. Naturally, my ears perked up. This cat is such a sweetie. I felt so bad because it was FREEZING out. And I know I shouldn’t take it into my room because it probably has a home, and maybe that’s not something I should spring on my roommate, but I was definitely tempted.

This picture is from last time, when it was actually light out. Have I mentioned I love cats?

A girl on my team hates cats, which in her case I can actually understand. Apparently she had a pet mouse that she brought to school for show and tell, and there was a class cat there, and well, you can infer the rest…

Before I leave here today, I want to end with something super interesting I learned in animal behavior today. Apparently, it is impossible to teach an animal to do something 100% of the time, because the animals’ brains are essentially programmed to check if anything has changed. The only way to get an animal to display a certain behavior 100% of the time is if when training the animal, after the animal has learned that it will get a reward for the behavior, only give the animal a reward intermittently. For example, if training a dog to bring you the newspaper, at first you give the dog a treat every time it brings the newspaper until it has learned this behavior, and then only give the dog a treat some of the time when it brings the newspaper. Although the relation to health may not be immediately apparent, bear with me, I promise I’ll make sense. Animals are more likely to do a command if instead of getting a small reward every time, they get a huge reward occasionally. Now this may be a stretch, but I’m going to connect his to the studies that have shown that mice who are restricted from sugar for a period gorge on sugar when they are exposed to it again, as opposed to the mice who have constant access to sugar who don’t do this. So why am I bringing this up? It directly relates to addiction, or more relevant to health, food addiction. We really are not that different from animals, so we can connect these behaviors to ourselves. The very nature of these behaviors is the underlying cause (ok, this is definitely an exaggeration) of binge eating. A huge reward some of the time, and nothing the rest of the time? Does this sound anything like binge eating to you? It’s so interesting the way our brains work, and the effects they have on our behaviors. If that connection doesn’t make sense to you, I’m probably making a big stretch, but that seemed like an “aha” moment at the time for me.

Happy eating!

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Date: December 9, 2012

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

I’m back! If you’re reading my second post, I am ever more ecstatic! I was planning on posting this about a week or so after I wrote it because I wanted to try my hand at writing posts a little before I completely jump into everything, but I’m so excited about this blog that I just couldn’t wait! I have already been practicing taking pictures of my food! I didn’t get a ton of pictures, but here is one I did manage to get!

Chocolate mint smoothie, before I added cocoa powder. The green is from spinach. Adding spinach to smoothies is my new favorite thing, you can’t even taste it! Into the blender went a frozen banana, vanilla almond milk, cocoa powder, spinach, a little honey, and peppermint extract. The result? A little too much peppermint. Ok, a lot too much. The smoothie was SUPER minty and I couldn’t actually taste anything else besides the mint…oops. However, I think this idea has potential!

I also did make rice crispies yesterday 🙂 I used brown rice cereal, and just made the recipe on the rice crispies website, and added holiday M&Ms. I partly wanted to make this because I got marshmallows at Halloween with every intention of making popcorn balls, but when Halloween came I was too lazy. Speaking of lazy, I truly believe that laziness is the mother on invention. So here’s an idea: don’t have a microwave safe mixing bowl to heat your marshmallows (I didn’t), or too lazy to do dishes? Enter creativity! I spread my marshmallows on a sheet of waxed paper and microwaved them on that, and then added them to my mixing bowl. But if you do choose to do this, make sure to watch them so that you don’t end up with marshmallow goop all over the microwave! And seeing as it is my roommate’s microwave, I don’t think she would appreciate that much. Anyway, the rice crispy treats turned out well and after a few minutes in my dorm’s lounge, they were totally gone.

On a similar note, as a lazy college student, I can offer all kinds of tips on how to avoid washing dishes, or avoid using dishes in the first place. Right now, I have been eating nearly everything out of paper cups with plastic forks because I am out of nearly everything else, or I simply want to avoid dishes. Mug cake in a plastic cup? Sure! Sliced apples? Why not! Life was certainly easier back before I ran out of paper plates…but seeing as I am going home in less than a week, there’s no point in buying them now! Hopefully you enjoyed hearing about my dish sagas! I better get my butt studying!

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