Bring on the weekend!

Happy Friday everyone! My weekend looks like this:

• teach one lesson today from 2-3
• drive 2 hours north to play an acoustic indie folk show at a small music festival
• drive home pretty late, probably getting home around midnight
• teach Saturday morning 10-12 noon
• attend a recital that two of my students are playing at
• go to a local concert/show that my wonderful boyfriend is playing at
• church on Sunday morning
• teach one violin lesson after church
• play a rock violin show on Sunday afternoon/evening

Whew, it should be an AWESOME couple of days. Obviously I won't have too much time to post or comment, but I'll try to read your blogs. :)

I had a delicious bowl of oatmeal this morning. All the usual stuff (pumpkin, flax, noni juice) and I added a splash of FF milk, some frozen strawberries, 1/3 FF cottage cheese, and a spoon of Sunflower Seed butter. (I also had probably one serving of cashew pieces while making this).


For lunch yesterday I made a great omelet with a bunch of leftover sauteed veggies, broccoli, 1 egg, 1/4 C egg whites, and feta cheese. I topped it with avocado, hummus and more feta. :) It was seriously delicious and healthy.

I cooked the veggies first.


Stuffed the omelet:


And folded it over with the extra veggies on the side.


I had a bunch of grape tomatoes while making the omelet.


And I ended lunch with a Breyers yogurt. (Added a bit of cereal for some crunch).


And a peach.

Right before the gym I had a FiberPlus Antioxidants bar. At the gym I did 28 minutes on the Expresso bike and beat my Ghost rider (previous best ride time) by almost 2 minutes! Yay! Then I had to hurry to meet my boyfriend and his away-from-home family for dinner. We went to a local bar where we had fried cauliflower, pizza and beer. I had two slices with veggies, chicken and lots of cheese on them. They were pretty greasy but delicious. I think a sweat session at the gym will help though. So I'm off now. I also need to do a load of laundry at some point.

My trip to NYC is coming up in less than a week!! I am so excited about it! We're going to catch a show, hopefully, walk around Central Park, visit Ground Zero and a church near there, walk around Grenwich (sp?) Village, see Times Square, attend a concert at Julliard (!), and eat at lots of adorable NYC restaurants. I don't know if I have any readers in NYC yet, but if so, or if there's anyone familiar with the city, do you have any recommendations of restaurants to eat at? Even if you've just visited there, what were some of your favorites?

Have a FANTASTIC weekend!

Attack of the sweet tooth!

Good morning and happy Friday everyone! Does anyone have any fun weekend plans? Mine include:

-two hour rehearsal with a friend today (he's a guitarist, and I'm practicing my jazz violin improv skills! woohoo!)
-dinner with friends tonight
-small local art festival tonight with other friends. :)
-quick grocery shop for fresh produce (and chocolate covered ginger for my boyfriend--he's never had it so I'm buying him the TJs kind and also some spicy ginger chews!)
-mail a contract for a festival I'm playing at this summer
-teach tomorrow morning
-play with a string trio for a wedding tomorrow afternoon
-teach a couple lessons on Sunday
-hang out with the boyfriend :)
-a couple workouts thrown in there somewhere

Breakfast today was a change of pace. I had two slices of whole grain bread with PB, cottage cheese, a drizzle of agave nectar (in the cottage cheese--this is delicious!) and an extremely overripe (but yummy) banana.


With coffee:


Yesterday my sweet tooth attacked hard. I'm not sure why, and it's really OK, but I ended up eating quite a bit more than I planned. Afternoon recap here. I had some leftover Chinese food for lunch. I actually broke open the egg roll and mostly ate the inside. I don't do this often (too ED-ish) but the egg roll wrapping isn't exactly healthy and I didn't see anything wrong with it.


After lunch I wanted something sweet so I had a Vitatop.


and I ended up also having a Vitabrownie (no picture), a lemon bar, a leftover bite of a cornflake chewy


and a coconut blondie.


In the afternoon I got my free sample of Barney Butter in the mail!!


I immediately had to try one, of course, so I ate a banana with the AB on it.

And a glass of milk on the side.


My workout was a 30 minute run (just under 3 miles) and 14 minutes on the Expresso bike (at a racing pace the whole time! I ended up beating my ghost ride [Ghost rider = previous personal best time] by over 90 seconds!)

My boyfriend and I had dinner together yesterday at a Middle Eastern food restaurant. It's one of my favorites in town because it's healthy, fresh, cheap and absolutely delicious! We split hummus and pitas for an appetizer and then each got the same thing (not planned!) of a charbroiled chicken pita wrap with turnips, tomatoes and some kind of yummy sauce. We also talked for a long time over a drink (singular!); I had a cranberry and vodka. And then we walked for about 20 minutes and talked while eating two squares of Lindt 85% dark chocolate.

During one of my lessons yesterday, the girl I was teaching (who has been studying with me for 3 years) mentioned something about not getting enough calcium and somehow we got on the topics of nutrition and then weight. And she told me (confided in me?) that she is scared to gain weight, despite being (at least up to this point) naturally thin. She is vegetarian (probably because it's the popular thing to do among her friends, which is fine; it's much less fine if she's doing it to restrict more kinds of food to eat) and she is very active. But a HUGE red flag went up for me when she said that. I have had one student in the past who was also a young girl, around 13 years old, who struggled with anorexia. I noticed almost immediately as I had those same struggles in the past. It's fairly easy for me to tell the difference between when someone is naturally thin (or even, God forbid, has an illness like cancer or something) and when someone has an ED. I don't mean to sound flippant at all but you can just tell by the look in their eyes; anorexia steals the sparkle and joy from them. Their vivacity and spirit are just gone, or very close to gone. I'm not talking so much about the physical appearance; I almost think the lifelessness is sadder to see. I remember in my recovery that people made comments all the time about how pretty my smile was, and how much happier seemed, etc. I realized the meant that, ESPECIALLY now looking back at pictures from that time. *Shudders* Anyway, the whole point of this is to say that I got a little worried about my one student from yesterday and I will DEFINITELY be keeping my eye on her. I talked to her (in a joking, non-lecturing way) about why it is GOOD to gain some weight while growing up, especially since her doctor is almost yelling at her now because she is a bit too thin, and I reassured her that ALL the guys I talk to (I have MANY male friends!) unanimously agree that they like women that look healthy, curvy and full of life! It's a good thing, and it's beautiful!

In giveaway news, Daily Dulcie is giving away Holey Donuts!

Have an awesome day and weekend! Hopefully I'll be back before Monday morning, but I'm never really sure of how my weekend will unfold!

Back from recording our CD and an International Conference!

First of all, thanks SOOO much to Aimee at the Healthy Lawyer and Shannon at Daily Goods for my first two comments! It's so exciting for me to read them, and I hope that you'll keep reading and commenting. :)

I apologize for lack of update but I had a crazy and fun week! I was at the Millenium Music Conference in Harrisbug, PA for a small-ish music conference. There were hundreds of bands but it was just poorly organized and suprisingly unprofessional. Regardless, I had a great time playing, and we were able to silence and entire restaurant on Valentine's Day as they listened to us, which was an awesome feeling! More excitingly though, we went from there directly to Nashville where we finished recording our upcoming CD. I play with an acoustic folk trio, with an emphasis on songwriting. Our guitarist writes his own original music and the bass and violin/fiddle (myself) build our own parts around it! I'm so excited for this CD to be out in early April! :)

THEN, to add to the crazy week, on Friday morning we drove from Nashville to Memphis for the 2009 International Folk Alliance Conference. It is one of the 5 largest music conferences in the the country! To say it was "exciting" somehow seems like an understatement! It was 2 great days of tons of different bands, fantastic music (I got about 15 FREE CDs which I am starting to listen to while I'm posting this blog), workshops, panel sessions, FABULOUS networking (which I love doing!) and a bunch of free chocolate. :) Seriously, every room concert (we overtook most of a Marriott hotel and there were concerts in almost every room on the 17th, 18th and 19th floors) included a bunch of free chocolate to snack on. Therefore, I had a pretty amazingly UNHEALTHY week, which at first I felt bad about (even still ED thoughts creep in once in a while, but not often!! Yay!) but then I realized that I was away from home and there was seriously NO healthy food available at the hotel (that wasn't WAY out of my price range) so I just didn't worry about it. I do think I gained a pound or so (over a 9 day period of time while eating sooo much chocolate) but I'll just eat lots of veggies this week and workout and I'll be fine. I think the fact that I am able to realize that and accept that yes, it was a CRAPPY eating week, and know that I don't want to do that on a regular basis mostly because I felt like crap by the end of it. Yesterday at home I was trying to eat as much fiber as I could to help with...digestion. Sorry to be gross, but I got constipated after a week of pizza and chocolate and restaurant meals; no matter how good it tasted, I didn't feel great.

So with a brand new start, here's breakfast:

-Very generous 1/2 C oats/oat bran mix (I think I like this the best, rather than all oats or all oat bran)
-1/2 C pumpkin (fiber!! yay! Haha!)
-3/4 banana (I just didn't feel like finishing it)
-New Apple Acai granola from the WF bulk bins sprinkled on top
-Cinnamon for flavor



Then I added some 0% Voskos Greek Yogurt for some protein (since I didn't add my usual Protein Powder) and I also sprinkled that with granola.


Then I realized I had almost NO fat in my breakfast so I got a spoon of Sunflower Seed butter:

OK, I'm off to run some errands including dropping off a job application (details later, if I get it!) and a quick grocery shop for:

-laundry detergent
-contact solution!
-some sort of whole grain bread
-FF cottage cheese

That should be all, since I went to WF yesterday and bought some much YUMMY, HEALTHY and FRESH foods, mostly veggies. Here's what I remember I bought (sorry for no picture!):

-1 red onion
-1 organic purple cabbage
-1 lb bag of organic carrots
-1 bunch of organic kale
-1 grapefuit (on sale for $1!)
-bunch of organic bananas
-4 golden delicious apples ($.99/lb, which is actually very good in Pittsburgh!)
-3 nectarines (also on sale, I think for $1.99/lb)
-1 bag frozen organic broccoli
-1/2 gallon of FF milk (I like fat free the best)
-1 bag of Tofu Shirataki noodles
-two small bags of their new granolas (Apple Acai and Pomegranate something--I just wanted to try them, since they were also on sale.)
-1 bag of puffed Kamut cereal to add bulk to the granolas
-2 eight ounce containers of 0% Voskos greek yogurt (on sale, 2 for $3)
-1 bag of chocolate chips to throw in banana bread that I want to make this morning

That's all, I think! I might be forgetting something? Well, the total was around $37 which isn't too bad, considering that I had tried to eat down my fridge before my trip. So I had to restock, and I'm pleased with the deliciousness that is now in my house. :)

Alright, I'm out. Enjoy the monstrous post! :) I promise to keep updating this consistenly!