Some days are just three cookie kind of days!

Hah! And I should add "plus chocolate chip banana loaf" and "mini black and white cookie" and "cinnamon coffee cake" to my title, but it would have been too long. ;-)

In all seriousness, today was a crappy day. And I know I caved sweets more than normal, both because of the frustrating day but also because that's what my body wanted. And I can honestly say that I'm proud of myself for EATING what I wanted and not worrying that it was A LOT of carbs and not exactly nutritionally dense. I don't do that all the time, but it was definitely in order today. (Also I can honestly say it WASN'T a binge, because I've done that in the past many times but I'm finally truly over that). Additionally, I didn't end up going for a workout because I started to feel really hungry right when I was going to leave and I hate working out when I'm hungry. (I did that for LONG ENOUGH, thank you!)

So anyway, a quick recap of my eats. Get ready for one of my least nutritious days in a long time:

After my healthy breakfast, I got hungry for more real food. So I made a sandwich similar to the one from yesterday. One of my roommates got home as I was making it, so I'm using a recycled photo. The only difference is that I added cheddar cheese and BBQ sauce to it.


Then my sweet tooth struck!


This was about half of a chocolate banana loaf from Starbucks! One of my favorite things! So delicious!

And a mini home made black and white cookie:

And then I left the house and had over the course of the next several hours, while driving to and from gigs and teaching, *3* Kashi dark chocolate oatmeal cookies. *drools*


And finally, I had a teensy bite of a cinnamon coffee cake.

(This was the full amount I had).

Additionally, yesterday night I had 2 glasses of this red wine, and I'll be having another one shortly here:


And in good news, my doctor said they can forward over the antibiotic prescription to my pharmacy tomorrow so that I can start those for my finger, which should help. But I thought when you take an antibiotic, it should have gotten rid of the entire virus from my system! Why did it come back?!?! Well, it'll get better tomorrow, when I can start the next round of antibiotics!

Well, I think I'm playing Scrabble with my bf and drinking red wine tonight. I hope you're all having a great evening!

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! :)

I won granola!!

I'm so excited--I just found out that I won Jenna's MixMyGranola giveaway! I wanted to try the granola for so long but I knew it was out of my price range! But now I get to enjoy its deliciousness! I'll give you all a full report, of course.

The LifeLoveViolin mix was:

-organic muesli base
-dried strawberries
-dried raspberries
-cashews
-hemp seeds (I've wanted to try these for a long time!)
-chia seeds (also wanted to try these!)
-chocolate covered espresso beans (Ya'll know how much I love my coffee!)

I CAN'T WAIT FOR IT TO ARRIVE!! :)

For food reports I'm going to start with breakfast today and work backwards.

I made another omelet but it sort of fell apart. Oh well, it was still good. I sauteed:

1/4 purple onion
1 1/2 big swiss chard leaves
1 tsp (?) garlic

Then mixed it into 1 egg and 1/4 C egg whites, with a little curry powder, garlic salt (very little) and garam masala.


It was OK, but for some reason I just wasn't enjoying it much today. Hmm, don't know why. I ate it anyway for the nutrition, and I topped it with some hot sauce (NOT that hot!) and salsa (also not that hot--I'm not THAT bad ass!)


Meh-I had a banana with it for something sweet. Enjoyed it a bit more.



So yesterday I had a nice busy day. I had a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast with:

-1/2 C oats
(I MISS HAVING PUMPKIN--I will buy some at member day at my local food co-op on Sunday!)
-2 tsp remaining trail mix (mostly sunflower seeds)
-1/3 Gnu Foods PB bar


I added a banana, ff cottage cheese and a spoon of PB. With a side of coffee. :)


But I decided to slice the banana into the oatmeal, which I liked.


I was baby-sitting all day yesterday and it went well. Part of the good thing about watching two growing little boys is that there is meal or snack time every two to three hours. :-D Mid-morning we all had a stick of part-skim mozzarella cheese. And a couple of jelly beans. Then for lunch we made PB and jelly (they had "real" [i.e. natural] PB and jelly without HFCS!) with frozen veggies that I microwaved. Yes, the kids eat their veggies! And milk to drink. A pretty balanced meal, if you ask me. For snack time we had another string cheese stick and I sliced up an orange. It was slightly overripe, making it one of the most delicious oranges I've ever eaten! :)

I left there at 4pm and I wasn't really hungry, but I know I was running right through the afternoon to a performance that wouldn't end till late so I had this protein bar in my car. Rhyme not intended.


The show was AWESOME!! It was really refreshing as I've been feeling a little burnt out with the violin recently. Now, don't get me wrong: there's NO WAY I'm going to quit, and obviously I've had periods of frustration growing up with the violin. I don't want to give anyone the wrong impression here. I know that I'm not going to enjoy every minute of it, and I know that I still love the violin and can't imagine my life without it. But I've been so frustrated lately with a couple of things that I had started considering alternate careers. I am very young (22 years, and yes that's with my master's degree because I started college when I was 16) and I could definitely do something else a little more stable. I've always wanted to do something in the medical field and I wonder if I could at least look into a nursing degree, or maybe becoming a nutritionist/RD. I think I'm going to start looking for one or two classes over the summer at my community college to take; they'd be fun and it would be a start. Kind of just to get my feet wet and see if I like it.

Anyway, now that I've taken a huge tangent and gotten completely off the topic that I had been on, I should get back to that...which was the show yesterday. It was fulfilling to play and I actually enjoyed it, which was honestly the first time in a while. Part of this blog (and a reason for remaining relatively anonymous) is for me to be able to write about stuff that I'm going through/thinking about/having a hard time with and to be able to have your support without too much worrying about what colleagues in the music field would think. For example, I really can't tell anyone in the music field yet that I'm considering alternative careers. It would be too damaging to my reputation, because they'd think I'm not a "serious" musician or whatever! So thanks for letting me post honestly on here.

At the event yesterday, I had a small plate of goodies including some Terra chips, some sort of unidentified cracker (probably healthy, since it was sponsored by the local food co-op here in town--yes the one that is mentioned is having their member day on Sunday and which I am a member of!), some trail mix, and a Light Yuengling beer. (Bottle said 99 calories). Just to give you an idea of what a light weight I can SOMETIMES be, I was definitely feeling it about 3/4 of the way into the beer. Yes, that was WITH Food and it was a light beer. Haha, I'm an anomaly because then there are other days when I can drink 3 beers (or 3 martinis, like last weekend) and be fine. I don't really understand it. Does anyone know why this is? Does it have something to do with how much sleep you've gotten? How much exercise? Metabolism? Anything ideas?

I came home late (tried to go to my gym but it was closed!) and made a real meal of spinach, barley, 2 slices of ff cheese, and salsa. I mixed everything together and it looks kind of gross (apologies!) but it tasted good and was healthy.


I was craving some mad chocolate yesterday night so I had this:

(recycled picture, sorry)

And then I decided that I needed some REAL chocolate so I had some Sirius Icelandic 70% cacao chocolate (available from Whole Foods and really cheap in comparison to their other chocolate).

Plus, my roommate brought me home some Godiva chocolate to say thank you for feeding her pet while she was out of town. She totally didn't have to do that, but it was so sweet of her!!


Here were my two portions of chocolate that I ate.


Yes, that's my phone in the background. I was sitting on my bedroom floor, changing the strings on my back up violin (it's not a great instrument, but I play my traveling shows on it!) Haha, don't follow my example of eating chocolate while working on your instrument!!!

Alright, I don't think I have time to get to the gym! Augh, again! I really need to go, but I also need to practice and I think that's going to win out! I'm going to meet a friend to play a violin/guitar classical duet from 2-3:30, then teach from 4-5, then come home and meet another friend to go to a museum and a concert at a university here in town. So once again, no gym time. I MISS WORKING OUT and think tomorrow I'll actually be able to go!

For now enjoy this video of Nadia Comaneci. It's not the very first perfect 10 she scored, but it was at the same competition. (First one was on the bars!) I know the quality isn't great, but it was 1976, so what do you expect? ;-) I might start posting a series of routines that were all scored at a perfect 10, because I think we can all admire perfection in motion.



Practice time. Then a long, fun day! So see you all tomorrow!