on a mission…

I have decided that I am on a personal mission to get as fit as I can and clean up my diet as much as I can between now and June (when we go to the beach, haha!) and then carry on, of course, during and after my vacation. I am sooo looking forward to my vacation!

With that being said, I had a rockin’ workout today! I went to my BodyAttack class, which cheered me up considerably, then worked out on the floor with weights for another 45 minutes…today I did chest, shoulders and abs.  I was supposed to do triceps too, but I just didn’t have anything left.

• Machine chest press, 60 lbs. 3 sets of 8
• Machine chest fly, 60 lbs. 3 sets of 8
• Dumbbelll incline bench press 20 lbs. 3 sets of 10
• Bar military press 40 lbs. 3 sets of 8
• bar upright row 30 lbs. 3 sets of 10
• dumbbell lateral raise 8 lbs. 2 sets of 8 (uhhh, these are hard! Something to work on!)
• bench leg raise 40 reps
• incline reverse crunch 40 reps
• kettlebell side bend (15 pounds) 24 reps (12 each side)
• pulse ups 36 reps
• v-up 12 reps

I guess I did a lot today, I didn’t realize until I wrote it all out!

I have an instructor/national trainer at my gym who is eating clean and she’s been giving me a lot of food for thought lately.  It’s nice to know someone that you can bounce things off of and get ideas from in “real life”. 🙂 Plus, it’s great for support!  I know a lot of people who don’t have that kind of support, either in real life or online…I ran into that myself when I first started eating clean from my “friends”.  They thought I was obsessive/compulsive and my eating habits were strange. Eventually, they came to accept it; but it was kind of a long road.  I persevered, though, and believe that I came out stronger because of it!  Strong-willed…that’s me! 😉  Food for thought here….if it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Nothing is free.  You have to work at this like everything else.  The payoff is your health.  So eat clean, be healthy!!!

Enough talk today, I guess maybe you want to see what I ate? It wasn’t very exciting…but it was yummy…and I did manage to cut out sugars today, and felt a ton better and not so weighed down. 😉

I got home from the gym and decided I was going to make cut up sweet potatoes, but I burned them. 😦  Have you ever tried a burned sweet potato? YUCK. I really wanted to eat them, too.  In place of the burned potato, I had some foods that you’ve seen before but all together in one place for my lunch today:

Luuunch!

Leftover tuna fish from yesterday with the Santa Fe Marinade, cottage cheese (low sodium), raw peppers and Mary’s Gone Crackers.  Perfection in a bowl.

I must admit that I just didn’t know what else to eat today so I didn’t do the snacky-snacky thing.  Dinner was yummy and very filling:

Grilled pork chop, large sweet potato, and squash with craisins and fresh oregano.  Was fantastic!!! 😀

I love the squash.  I think I like it better with basil instead of oregano.  It was still good, though!

MASSIVE sweet potato. With cinnamon.

I plan on having a banana boat for dessert….it might look something like this:

Banana, coconut, natural peanut butter, golden raisins, honey.

Or it might look something like this:

Banana, raisins, raw cashes, cacao nibs, nut butter.

Who knows? We shall see! 🙂

Have a wonderful and healthy hump day!

Jessica xoxo

hmmmm. Maybe it’s spring fever!

I guess I’m going to start this entry by saying that I think I’ve been in a funk.  Not sure why… I just feel like I’m going through my daily routines but there’s not much, I don’t know, excitement? Maybe excitement isn’t the right word.  I just feel kind of blah all of the time.  There are periods of un-blah-ness, like when I’m at the gym taking class, or running.  So I’m not completely blah! Maybe it’s just spring fever?  That’s probably it. 😉

It helped today that the temperature in the Atlanta area hit 71 degrees.  It was fantastic, the sun was out, I took Biscuit for a walk, sat out on the deck…and prepared myself for the next five days of rain...:(

Biscuit training.

Breakfast this morning consisted of my usual standby on Tuesday BodyAttack class days…protein oatmeal.  Bob Marley oats this morning, with lots to sustain me through an entire class. 😀  Oatmeal, vanilla protein powder, pineapple, coconut, raw cashews.  It was so good.  I hadn’t had it in a while!  I opted to not put any natural sugars in it this morning, and I’ll tell you why in a bit… (and the recipe for the original is under the recipe tab)…

Yesterday I was thinking about going for another run but I had some inflammation issues where the bursitis is in my left hip from the run the day before, so I decided that it would be better if I didn’t run again today.  Wow, I just made myself feel old. (The bursitis was caused by a hip stress fracture I had months ago.)  Plus, sometimes what happens is that if I exercise the day before my classes, I can’t give 100% during class.  I hate when I can’t give 100% in my workout, because what’s the point then?

I really, really wish I had my heart rate monitor back.  I use it as a sort of guide, I can tell how hard I need to push myself if I glance at my heart rate every once in a while  (wanting to throw up means I’m doing fine, LOL).  Anyone out there who’s a “cardio junky” like myself knows what I’m talking about, for sure :D)

So instead I went grocery shopping at Walmart.   After I got home from Walmart I was hungry so I ate another Luna bar (and I must say, I think I’m going to stop eating them….that started a whole sugar craving that lasted the rest of the day).  Then I decided that I needed tuna fish:

That is tuna fish, in a little bit of Wegmans Santa Fe Marinade, with a slice of mozzarella cheese on homemade french bread.  It was really good!  Thing was, about an hour later, I was hungry again, and wanted more spice:

That mess on a plate is cottage cheese with the salsa that Jeremy got for me some time ago:

Yummy, and all completely clean.  I had cut up a bunch of peppers which seem to be my go-to vegetable for this week.

Please don’t be surprised if you see them in everything I cook this week, LOL!

Since I wasn’t headed to the gym tonight I made dinner…two dinners, because I didn’t want to eat what everyone else was having, a common occurrence.  Sophia was in the kitchen with me and since I always have my camera handy to take pictures of food I told her to take some pictures.  It occupied her for a couple of minutes, so maybe we have a future photographer in the house? LMAO!

Future photographer? Or maybe not 😉

She did manage to catch me cooking:

No, I’m not stepping on Biscuit.  Biscuit loves to sit there when I cook. 🙂

And Sophia even took a picture of what I was cooking:

That was Macaroni Grill boxed chicken alfredo or something similar (not sure what the exact name is).  That wasn’t my dinner (oh, and it goes over pasta).

This was my dinner:

Grilled chicken, broiled cauliflower with garlic salt and real parmesan cheese, and homemade bread with a little butter toasted.  It was fantastic. Bread x2.

So I have a confession, which is about sugar…it started with the Luna bar and morphed into a brownie and several Oreo-like cookies…all unclean and full of yuck 😦  and I’m wondering if the sugar isn’t causing my ho-hum mood, or vice versa (my ho-hum mood causing the cravings) at any rate, tomorrow will have no sugar! No Luna bars, for sure.  One thing I do know is I’m looking forward to working out tomorrow.  I hate “off-days”.

My fave class above pic 😀 😀

Hope you all have a fantastic Tuesday!  I can’t wait!

Jessica xoxo

fit and clean Sunday.

Hello my friends!   It was not a very exciting day in my food world today.   After all of the boys left from the sleepover last night, I really didn’t want to do anything, at all.  I knew, because I know myself, though, that if I didn’t go out for the run I’d been talking about that I would sit around and munch all morning.

Today’s breakfast (Monday) was the one of my usual breakfasts:

Eggs, onions and peppers, toast.  I wanted my whole egg to be over-easy, but kind of broke it when I put it on the plate. 😦

I salvaged some of it, though, so all was not lost:

Yesterday (which was Sunday), I was huuuunggggry before the run, but didn’t want a heavy meal to weigh me down, so I ate one of these:

Perfect pre-run snack.  I had originally planned on 2-3 miles, but once I was out there and ‘found my groove’ I ran a bit farther:

running stats.

4.68 miles in 48.52 and burned 567 calories.  Oh, yeah, baby!!! It was the perfect day for a run, too!  Sunny, and a little windy, so I wasn’t too hot…I wore workout pants, a long sleeve running shirt, and a t-shirt over it.  No jacket! It was 60 degrees out. 🙂

I came home and it was later in the day then I had planned, around 3:00, but I needed something to tide me over until dinner:

More turkey (it’s lasting forever) red hot, cottage cheese, and peppers.  I was having some water retention issues because of the Italian that I ate last night, which resulted in today being a  really low sodium, drink a lot of water day for me as I tried my hardest to flush the salts out of my system.

Jeremy made a loaf of french bread for us to eat with homemade chili (also a la Jeremy – I don’t make homemade chili, only chili from a box…;))

Chili and bread

and of course another picture of the awesome chili (he didn’t add any salt, so it was good for me)

Granted, I probably made up for it with the cheese. 😉

Then the aliens sapped my energy and I started crashing hard, so in an effort to not completely crash I made some coffee:

It didn’t help much. 😦

I can’t wait until spring is here to plant our garden…I love knowing where my veggies come from and that there isn’t anything bad on them (ie pesticides).  Here are a couple of pictures from the end of last summer of peppers and carrots that we grew:

peppers.

and

carrots.

Have a wonderful Monday!

Jessica xoxo

Eggplant Parmesan and Babies

Hello bloggy friends!  Happy Sunday morning!

I had a houseful of kids last night, (the last of Aidan’s birthday celebration that went on for 3 weeks, LOL!)  We survived (me and Jeremy) and he even had all the kids by himself for about 3 hours last night so I could go out with my girls!

Which brings me to a short story about the title of the blog today:  My friend Jenn is pregnant and due in about a week.  Well, there’s a restaurant here in Kennesaw that if you’re pregnant and eat the eggplant parmesan you will have you’re baby within 24 to 48 hours!  So we gave it a shot. 😀  We shall see….

Friends 🙂

I made a huge effort to eat healthy, but I didn’t see one healthy item on the menu besides steamed mussels.  I ended up with the veal parmesan with a side of spaghetti, garlic rolls, and salad with beets and chick peas:

I brought half of that portion home, because I wanted to partake in a 3-way cheesecake extravaganza:

Cheesecake. Split in 3!

ensalada.

This morning it was my job to make breakfast for the masses. 🙂  I decided that pancakes would be good for all of them (not the healthy kind):

pancakes!

For my breakfast, I made peppers, a gardenburger, and eggs with a Belgian waffle (all clean and healthy):

eggs.

There was a learning curve with the Belgian waffle this morning:

learning curve 😉

The rest turned out ok. 😀

Perfect waffle.

I’ve had the waffle maker since I got married…I plan on using it more, especially since I learned about the listeria outbreak at the waffle factory here in Georgia…and my kids eat a ton of waffles/pancakes for breakfast!!

Waffle Maker

and the inside pic:

And of course, Sophia had her first soccer game yesterday, and she scored! I love watching her play soccer! 😀

Have a fantastic Sunday! On my agenda today is a quick run, some ab work, and lots of sunshine outside! 🙂