Moderation is not my strong suite.

What do I mean by my title? Well, I've always been a bit of a black and white thinker. When I was younger, I'd either not practice for a few days or practice for 5 hours at a time, never taking a day off. I wanted to "lose weight" and was diagnosed with anorexia. My eating fluctuates from quite clean to pretty unhealthy every few days or weeks. And when I exercise, I either don't do it for a week at a time, or I do it every day for an hour or two. Case in point, yesterday I wanted to go out for a 30 minute jog/walk (which I am now calling a wog!) and it turned into about 1 hour and 45 minutes. Haha, I did the 30 minute wog, but I also did 25 minutes of expresso bike (racing--so sweaty after this!), 20 minutes of leg strength training and another 25 minutes of walking.

I need to work on being able to do more things in moderation. Even the little tiny things that I catch myself doing, such as only setting my A/C in my car to either be THE coldest or THE hottest (when I get too cold). I never set it in the middle, until I've made myself start doing it (for moderation practice!) and it was actually very uncomfortable for me.
What about you? Are you and all-or-nothing thinker? If so, in what ways does that manifest itself? And how would you like to get better at that?

But onto the food. My recent love is eggplant. It's so easy and so good. I slice it width-wise and rinsed the discs in saltwater then stuck them in the oven with EVOO for 20 minutes (?? I don't remember how long I baked them--sorry!!) But afterwards, I almost used them like bread (loving the texture!) and topped them with lunch meat (free range, grass fed, humanely raised turkey meat). Like this:


And this:



(with butternut squash fries)

I finished the eggplant, but I bought another one, so expect to see it soon. :)

I had my go-to snack of PB and carrots at some point. (On my camera, maybe from Thursday?)

And for the past two nights I've treated myself to the WF salad bar because it's the ONLY thing that has sounded good and (confession) I was tempted to just skip dinner, which I knew was NOT a good option. So I figured that spending a few extra bucks to be good to myself was definitely worth it.

Here's the first night's salad and the second one was similar.

-spinach
-organic dandelion greens
-red bell peppers
-Parmesan cheese
-2 chunks of vegan chicken stuff (mid left)
-balsamic tofu (upper right)
-curry tofu (lower right)
-quinoa salad (bottom middle)
-and my FAVORITE, poppy seed tarragon (??) chicken, the purple-ish stuff on the right! This stuff is sooooo good! It has almonds in it to and I'll probably be picking some up just to make sandwiches with.

Now for three different mornings' breakfasts:

Which is:



And the second day was similar, with half a peach:


Diced it and saved the other half.

Then I decided that bowl of cereal and yogurt needed something else...Carob chips!!

Much better! :)

And my breakfast today was DELICIOUS!


I had one slice of healthy homemade banana bread (recipe follows!!) with ~1/2 C cottage cheese and the other half of my peach from yesterday.

Here's the lovely loaf of banana bread, with the inaugural slice already having been cut and shared by me and my boyfriend. :)

And here's the recipe:

3/4 C honey (the recipe called for Splenda)
3/4 C flax meal
5 ripe bananas
1/4 C skim milk
1/4 plain yogurt (the recipe called for 1/4 C sour cream)
2 tsp eggwhites (I used one regular egg's egg white)

2 C whole wheat pastry flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Pre-heat oven to 350.

Mix together the first 5 ingredients.
Combine the next 3 ingredients in a separate bowl, then stir into the wet mixture.
Pour into a regular (large) loaf pan and bake for 1 hour, 10 minutes or until a knife comes out clean.

~~~~~~

There you have it. It's super easy!! I'm not exactly a baker extraordinaire, so if I can do it, I'm sure you can, too. :) And it's delicious! Even my bf liked it and I didn't tell him what I had done to make it more nutritious!

OK, check this out for a free sample of Dandy-Lyon bites, an impressive raw foods snack.

I know there are several giveaways happening in blog land, but I don't have time to hunt them down. I'll try to post again tonight with those. Right now though, I'm off to shower then go to and help with the registration event for one of the music programs where I teach and I'm teaching a private lesson at home later today.

I hope everyone is having an excellent Saturday!