Good run! And a horrible meal!

Yay! I'm pretty proud of myself. I went out tonight around 7:30pm, just to get a run in, no matter how short, since I really wasn't in the mood to run at all. Well, for some reason I was able to run much longer than I usually can and I ended up being out for 1 hour and 20 minutes, including two 20 minute running segments (plus many shorter ones, in fact most of tonight was running!!) I don't know how far it was or my speed, but I do know that I ran farther than I ever have and I'm honestly really proud of myself for not giving up, even though it doesn't come naturally to me! I'm trying hard not to compare myself also, because I know that running for 20 minutes at a time in the blog world isn't very much! I had made a new play list (Caitlin inspired me to mix things up!) and in the words of Jimmy Eat World (one of my favorite songs ever!):

Hey, Don't write yourself off yet.
It's only in your head you feel left out,
Or looked down on.
Just try your best,
Try everything you can.
And don't you worry what they tell themselves
When you're away.

[Chorus]

It just takes some time,
little girl, you're in the middle of the ride.
Everything, everything will be just fine,
Everything, everything will be alright. (alright)

Hey, You know they're all the same.
You know you're doing better on your own, (on your own)
So don't buy in.
Live right now.
Yeah, just be yourself.
It doesn't matter if it's good enough (good enough)
For someone else.

[Chorus x2]

Hey, don't write yourself off yet.
It's only in your head you feel left out, (feel left out)
Or looked down on.
Just do your best, (just do your best)
Do everything you can. (do everything you can)
And don't you worry what their bitter hearts (bitter hearts)
Are gonna say.

This part is my very favorite of all, because it's so true and such a good reminder:

Live right now.
Yeah, just be yourself.
It doesn't matter if it's good enough (good enough)
For someone else.

Anyway, before the run, I had a lot of carbo-licious good eats. Hah! The first part of my day wasn't exactly the healthiest ever. Here we go.

Breakfast was a bowl of two kinds of cereal with half a banana and a spoon of PB.

The dry mix, with ground flax sprinkled on top:


And with 1/2 a banana, PB, and milk added--much better!


And with my beloved coffee. Better still!


After church I had a wheat-ish (they're never actually whole grain, are they?) bagel with cream cheese and a Luna bar in my car. I have had WAYYY too many of these--like 5 in the past 3 days! (All this flavor which is my favorite!) I don't do moderation. But I don't feel too bad about these, especially because they're low glycemic, so they really don't adversely affect my blood sugar. In fact, they keep me full for a long time!)


Then I bought a frozen yogurt from a new shop in town on a whim just because. It was OK, but it was very plain and really over priced. ($3.20 for a small without mix-ins--definitely not worth it!) It said it had live and active cultures, so I'm going to take that and run with it, at least in terms of how I didn't waste my money.


And I went to a local Italian street festival with a friend where I had a HUGE slice of thin crust cheese pizza. It was sooooo good! :) No picture of that either. Sorry.

After running tonight I was craving brussel sprouts. Go figure. I'm so weird! But I had probably about 8 of these.


And a few minutes later when the real hunger set in, I had (yet another!) rice bowl.


Same basic idea as the ones I've already blogged about:

-brown rice
-zucchini w. tofu
-1/2 can of tuna
-rest of the avocado (but I have another one! Woo! Expect more of these! :)
-cheddar cheese
-salsa

Seriously, this is the easiest, most customizable meal and it's really healthy (and cheap!), too! You might be seeing more of these, just to warn you. ;-)

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Now for the weekend recap. I had a busy day on Saturday. After teaching in the morning (9-12:15, including driving times during which, yes, I had another Luna bar!) I could have gone home but I only had a little time and it would have been extra driving, so I decided to stay out and hang out killing time at Starbucks and Whole Foods. I'm terrible. Hehe! I got a large black coffee at Starbucks and for some reason drinking it was even more pleasurable than usual. I got tingles through out my body and goosebumps all over my skin. Who knows?! But I seriously love coffee. It's like a spiritual experience for me, and very calming!

Onto Whole Foods, where in addition to picking up a few groceries, I also bought myself lunch (which I need to STOP doing simply for budget purposes! But seriously, this came to a little over $8 and I'd spend at least that much getting a Quizno's sandwich. When I'm out and about this seems like a reasonably good option, even as far as price as concerned, as certainly superior in the nutrition department!)

-tikka chicken (lower left)
-curried chick peas (far right)
-Indian tofu (upper left)
-lemon cilantro tofu (upper right)
-steamed broccoli and peppers (throughout)

Anyway, I then taught from 2:30-4:45 and came home to make work-related phone calls from 5:15pm to 7:15pm non-stop. (I had like 9 people to contact!)

And finally, on Saturday night, the bf had a show from 9pm-1am and we got there by 8pm. (I didn't want to be out that late and definitely should have driven my own car!) But I was HANGRY at that point and I needed to eat, but the place said it would be a super long time for our food. Well, this wasn't an option for me, so we politely told them that I was with the band and eventually I could order a salad.

It looked promising:


But honestly, it was HORRIBLE! It's never a good sign when you're expecting to be sick after a meal! The veggies were soggy, the dressing was way too heavy, the goat cheese seemed old and worst of all: I think I saw two gnats in my food!!! I should have sent it back at that point (diseases? Hello?) but I'm the ever way-too-polite girl who didn't want to make a fuss, so I choked down as much of it as I could and luckily got full because it had a lot of fat in it. But it was nasty! (And by the way, I didn't get sick!)

What about you? Do you have a hard time voicing needs, especially complaints?

I am NOT good at this, obviously from the above example and I am trying to work on it. I even have a hard time bringing up issues to my roommates, like if they owe me money or something. I rarely ever send back anything at a restaurant because I feel bad, like I'm being rude.

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Well, I got another sample in the mail this weekend:

I can't wait to try them!

Finally, check out this rockin' giveaway of some really delicious food stuffs!

OK, it's 2am. I should go to bed. Good night, all!

New and different food, finally.

Thanks for your comments on yesterday's post about my running frustrations. As soon as I finish this post, I'm heading out again to run. I'll monitor my heart rate again, to see if it's still just as high as it has been. I'm doing the 3rd week of the "Couch Potato to 5K" running plan which means that each workout is a 5 minute warm up, followed by a 90 second running interval, then a 90 second walking interval and then a 3 minute running interval and a 3 minute walking interval. You repeat this one time for a total of about 18 minutes and then finish with a 5 minute cool down walk, although mine is always a lot longer, because I find myself far from home and I have to get back. :) Plus, I plan to do upper body strength training at my gym today, so I'll end the walk/run at my gym (which is about 15 minutes away from home).

Anyway, on to my food and as promised in the title of this post, it's actually new and exciting! :)

On Wednesday afternoons I now teach violin from 2pm to 8pm with an hour break from 3-4, so I will probably routinely treat myself to Whole Foods, since I teach about a 5 minute walk from there! :)

This included:

-spinach
-dandelion
-Asian tofu (upper left)
-chicken salad (upper middle)
-sweet potatoes (upper right)
-two kinds of quinoa salad (middle-ish)
-antipasto salad (lower middle)
-balsamic marinated mushrooms (lower left)
-Parmesan cheese sprinkled all over!

Then one of my students brought me this:

This particular family is very close to my heart. Their child, who I teach, is a very bright little girl who is also a perfectionist, and very hard on herself, just like I was at her age! I think the ABSOLUTE best part of my job is having a lot of young girls look up to me! I have had MANY parents tell me that their child loves having me as their violin teacher! I want to be the best possible example to them that I can be and I want them to know that I care about them as wonderful individuals, not just as my violin students! I want to give them the tools through music, to succeed in life, using skills that I can teach them such as mental toughness, persistence, patience, self-forgiveness, work ethic, and determination. I care about my students so much that I send many hours during the week thinking about them, their needs, their personalities, and how I can best help them. And the return of knowing that I have and am continuing to inspire them is the best pay off ever!

What about you? What is the BEST part of your job?

Ok, back to food stuff now. Sorry, in case you couldn't tell, I have a passion for teaching! :)

On Wednesday night I made myself a bunch of leftovers.


This was the other Indian-spiced sausage from Whole Foods (needed to be eaten!), leftover butternut squash (that was also about to go bad!) and some more sauteed cabbage/tofu/red pepper. With a glass of white wine. I've really been going through a wine phase recently. Oh well, there are many worse things I could be consuming, right? ;-)


Then yesterday morning I woke up thinking about an omelet so that's exactly what I made. And what an omelet it was!!

This included:

-1 egg, 1 egg white
-sauteed mushrooms and spinach (with garlic)
-avocado
-cheddar cheese!

with salsa on the side!

Along with coffee and a banana!

Then I caught up on blogs and for the first time in a long time my Google reader was empty!


For a late lunch (after I ran!) yesterday I made this creative concoction!


Layered:

-brown rice (can't really see it)
-sauteed cabbage
-one can of tuna
-melted Cheddar cheese
-avocado
-salsa all around

This was honestly SOOO good! I'm going to do something similar to it today later on! (Brown rice needs to be used up before it goes bad!)

I definitely had TWO Luna bars while out teaching yesterday. I'm addicted to the chocolate raspberry kind! They're like a decadent brownie!

And I came home to this sugar free fudgesicle:

(While reading blogs.)

Finally, last but not least, my most scrumptious breakfast this morning was this bowl of oatmeal:


-cottage cheese
-almond butter (finished the jar! Not even close to the 11 servings it said was in there! *smirks*)
-a few remaining raspberries
-leftover nut mix with a little sugar that was in the bottom of the bag sprinkled on
-freeze-dried banana and pineapple Gerber baby mini-fruits! These:



Don't judge. I found them at Big Lots yesterday and they were $1.00! I figured that they'd be good on oatmeal (I was right!) and the don't have any added sugars!

Don't forget to enter my Nut Clusters giveaway! If nothing else, the name of them is so dirty that you just HAVE to want to try them, right? *Thanks to Michelle for pointing out the innuendo here! Hah!*

Finally, congratulations to Caitlin for all of her successes and life changes. This woman inspires me so much! I totally believe in her Operation Beautiful campaign and her attitude through all of her hard work is so positive! I admire everything about her!

Alrighty, I'm off to workout then I'm teaching just two students later on, so I have a pretty light day today.

Happy Friday everyone!

Leftovers!

Just a quick recap of today's breakfast and yesterday since I have a lot to do this morning to get ready for two out-of-town shows tonight and tomorrow. I had been pretty tired yesterday because of two nights in a row with 5 hours of sleep. Like I was actually falling asleep as I was teaching! Tonight I got 9 hours though, and I feel so much better!

For breakfast today I had a slice of WW bread with PB Loco Jungle Banana Peanut Butter, some FF cottage cheese, and a banana. (And coffee!)


Yesterday's workout was 22 minutes on the treadmill and just 10 minutes of quick legs conditioning, because I had to be home to teach a lesson. After teaching I made my lunch, which is what inspired the title of this post.


This is one can of tuna with Miracle Whip, the leftover sauteed cabbage and kale and the leftover corn and black bean salad! Quite yummy!

I also had this bar from Mi.

I started it in the car on the way home from the gym and I finished it after lunch. It was SOOO good! It had a dense texture and was pretty sweet, but also had quite a bit of protein (like more than Larabars, which is good!) and was very large for just 200 calories. I really enjoyed it!

Then I taught 3 lessons at a nearby church and came home to teach one more lesson! It was a long day yesterday! Between them I had one more of the bars Mi sent me! I can't get enough of them and I love trying new things!

And as a random snack yesterday evening I had a handful of almonds with carob chips.

OK, I'm not going to have time to comment on your blogs until Monday morning because my weekend looks like this:

• Pack/shower/lunch/leave by 2pm today
• Show tonight, stay overnight somewhere, not sure where
• Show tomorrow night, drive home (3 hours!) VERY LATE for my schedule
• Teach Saturday morning
• Play a wedding on Saturday at 4pm (be there by 2:30pm)
• *Hopefully* look at apartments on Saturday night!! It's the only time I have this weekend!
• Church on Sunday morning
• Teach a private lesson from 1-2pm (plus driving time)
• Drive two hours out of town to meet my boyfriend's parents. We'll be home later (10pm-ish) on Sunday night.

So yeah, that's it. I'm excited to meet his parents. Not nervous at all. They seem like really cool people and he assures me that they'll love me! So it'll be great! :) My parents are much harder to meet up with since they're on the other side of the country!

This will be my last post until Monday morning.

I hope everyone has a fantastic day and upcoming weekend!

Monster post!

Thanks for your patience with my lack of posting over most weekends. I'm BACK and I have a monster post for you! It's amazing how much food I eat in 4 days! Haha, and that's not even including all the stuff that went unphotographed because it was eaten with friends. But I do have pictures of almost everything I ate when I could take pictures.

I think I should start with breakfast today but then go back to Friday night and work my way forwards. So this morning I woke up wanting protein, so I made scrambled eggs (1 egg, 1/4 C egg whites) with a little milk in the eggs (makes a better consistency) and stirred in some frozen spinach. I topped it with a little LF feta cheese and some salsa (hellooo, lycopene!)


I also had a cute star-shaped muffin-type thing that my roommate made. It was coconut citrus flavored and really good! It was also reasonably healthy with applesauce and some whole grains. I had coffee on the side and was going to have the banana, but I didn't end up needing it. (I ate it two hours later, while blogging!)





Before I drove 2 hours north for a show on Friday night I had a great workout. (30 minutes on the Expresso bike --check out their website! These are seriously the most amazingly fun form of exercise!) Afterwards I made a quick tuna sandwich before a student arrived for her lesson.

I mixed this dressing into the tuna and ended up finishing the bottle. (There was less than 1 TBSP left).

Plus a few leftover veggies on the side.

A word about fat free dressings. I know that you need fat, especially with some veggies in order to better absorb the fat-soluble nutrients. I think you all know from my blog that I eat quite a bit of fat, mostly healthy sources, and some less healthy choices. I do however buy low- and non-fat dressings because I don't taste a difference and I'd MUCH rather eat more PB, cashews, olive oil, avocado, CHOCOLATE (hehe!), and the like. It is definitely not an attempt to eat low fat because 1) I'd be failing miserably (haha, that's my lame attempt at humor SkinnyRunner style), and 2) On a serious note, I do NOT believe in low fat eating AT ALL! In fact, I personally feel WAAYYYY better on quite a lot of fat. This might sound strange, but it's true. I've long stopped counting how many grams of fat I eat each day, but I'm guessing it's up around 80. That being said, I need to start looking for dressings with fewer chemicals in them and I might need to find ones with more fat instead. I don't know and I'm not too worried about it. Wow, that was a long paragraph about salad dressing.

Back to Friday evening. I ended up eating 3 nutrition bars in the car! (One Clif Z, one FiberPlus Antioxidants, one Smores Luna). Wow, guess I was hungry.

(Sorry about the shadow).

I obviously relied way too heavily on bars on Friday, but they were there and easy to grab and reasonably healthy. This one was eaten right after the gym, before I started driving north.

When I got up there the guys were eating pizza, so I had two smallish slices. I felt just fine after them. Full, but not too full and it was good to play a show not hungry. We played well to a pretty full house! :) And I ended up driving home late (10pm-12:330am) and had another Apple Cinnamon Clif Z bar. Yes, I realize I ate 5 bars on Friday. This is NOT a normal habit, but it happens once in a while with my lifestyle. I also ate this apple on the way home.


Saturday morning I woke up nice and early and made a delicious omelet. It was pretty simple with feta and spinach and topped with avocado and low-sugar ketchup.


On my drive to my students' recital I ate this PB and banana sandwich I packed.

Plus a Chocolate Chip Clif Z bar. This is why I love summer:

Woo! Yay for melted chocolate!! The chocolate chip flavor is BY FAR my favorite. Like hands down, absolutely no questions. It has TONS of chocolate in it for only 130 calories and it's whole grain with quite a few vitamins and minerals. If Clif wants to send me any more products of theirs, I'd be happy to review them! :)

Here's the top of my students' program. I can't show you more for privacy reasons. But the whole recital went really well, and I am so proud of my students!

At home I snacked on some yogurt and cereal. The current open box in my cupboard is this:

With yogurt.


I did another 25 minutes on the Expresso bike on Saturday (think racing the whole time, trying to break my previous best time, which I did!) and then went to the boyfriend's house for 2 slices of pizza (cheese stuffed crust! OMG, holy yum and the blog phrase goes! :) And then we went to a social event (his friend's going away party). There were snack foods there and I had 4 bite sized cookies, some black coffee, a blondie type thing, and half a very large, dense and delicious PB/chocolate rice krispie bar! Again, holy yum!

Onward. Sunday morning's breakfast was pretty non-descript. I barely even remember what it was. I think it was cereal with a peach cut up and skim milk. I came home to teach just one lesson and headed to my local food co-op for their member appreciation day, where they take 10% off your whole order. I was going straight to play a rock band show, so I couldn't buy anything cold/perishable. I spent around $18 on the following:

(Up close of some whole grain spelt sticks and carob chips).

I've been snacking on these a little bit here and there. For example, dipped in hummus:


Plus this incredible lentil salad for $3, which I ate in the car on the way to the rock show.



I also had a few of the Food Should Taste Good chips. I hadn't tried the Jalapeño chips before and they are EXCELLENT. They are not TOO spicy, but do have a good zing to them. I'm sure I had at least 2 servings because they're pretty addictive. I would be MORE than happy to review other flavors if they wanted to send them to me. :)


I need to finish up reasonably quickly here, so I'll just give you a few pictures from yesterday's food. I ate this banana and PB for breakfast and had a second breakfast of scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese at my boyfriend's house where we were rehearsing.



I was craving protein, so I ate half of this.


I am a fan of the fruit + PB combination! :)

I love biting into mild peppers like you eat an apple. No need to cut them up. Just enjoy the flavor and the crunch! :)

For some musical inspiration. I borrowed this from a friend and am going to listen to it to try and become amore familiar with jazz! I'm excited about the jazz rehearsals and THANK YOU for your sweet comments about my branching out on yesterday's blog post. :)

This was on my camera from a few day ago. Don't remember, but it was delicious.

I taught 3 lessons yesterday and got 2 contracts for wedding gigs ready to be mailed. I also packed a box of the giveaway winnings to mail out today. Which means it's time for another giveaway VERY soon! Stay tuned! :)

OK, way too long of a post, but I hope you enjoyed it! I'll try to leave comments on all of your lovely blogs soon! Have a great Tuesday! :)