Another Monday, another bowl of oats

Remember when I went to Minneapolis last year for Girl’s Weekend?  You can find recaps here and here.  These were a couple of my first posts because I started up Fuel and Fitness just a few days before heading out of town.  I thought of it because this coming weekend is the weekend of the annual trip and I can’t stop thinking about how fun it will be!  I looooooooove this trip and look forward to it all year.  I should have tons of great pictures.

Anyways I decided to randomly check the date of my first post because I didn’t remember the exact date but new it was sometime around this weekend and my blog’s first birthday is tomorrow!!!! Crazy how fast time flies, yes?  I may have to do something special tomorrow:-)

On to breakfast:

I used the stove to make banana oats today and it really does make for a much more volumous bowl.  Here’s what I threw in the pot:

• 1/2 cup OF oats
• 1/2 cup vanilla soy
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 banana
• 1 T flax
• cinnamon
• salt

I added a scoop of chunky PB and spread it all over the place once it melted a bit. Fabulous way to start a Monday!

Busy day ahead, better get moving.

Feelings on Milk

Good morning!

A nice and comforting, hot bowl of oats is exactly what I wanted this morning.  I mixed 1/3 cut old fashioned oats with 1/4 cup grape nuts to add some different flavor and texture.  I absolutely LOVE grape nuts (buy it in bulk from Sam’s Club), especially hot, so I knew I would like this.

I dumped in some milk, chopped up a banana, and microwaved for about 2 1/2 minutes on high, then topped with a scoop of PB, jelly, and rest of the banana.  Delicious!

Does anyone else feel like milk has gotten a bad rap in the past few years?  I started avoiding it when I moved away to college the first time and I’m not even sure the exact reason… Probably something to do with the antibiotic/hormone scare tactics at first, then I think I just lost my taste for it.

I’m definitely BACK ON the milk train. It’s such a nutritious and tasty food!  Also, it’s nice for when I feel slightly hungry at night time but don’t want to load up on snacks.   For those of you who don’t love the taste, oatmeal/other hot cereals are a great way to sneak some into your diet because the result is creamy oats and you don’t even taste it!  Vanilla soy milk makes the CREAMIEST and frothiest coffee.

Opinions?

Early Start.

I’m getting an early start today–a leg workout is on the agenda before my first class.  I want to start lifting weights more because I feel so strong when I do.  My roommate and I have been trying to get 4 early morning sessions per week to accomplish this.  So far, so good!

Breakfast-

Quick, simple, and delicious.  Fresh almond butter on Rudi’s HSWW toast, banana, OJ.

Happy mid-week!

The new and improved Fuel & Fitness.

It feels so good to be typing this post right now!

Although I had a wonderful summer (the best ever!), I missed blogging a TON and ideas for improvement have been brewing in my head the last few months. Here are some of the main ones:

1. I really want the blog to be exercise/food/health/wellness…etc. and less about me.  Now that I’m going to school for Dietetics and I’m working as a Certified Personal Trainer, I feel like this will be easier.
2. I’m going to try 2 posts per day… we’ll see how it goes!
3. I’m going to get more recipes and workouts posted.
4. I don’t want to focus on getting readers.  They’ll come on their own if they want to read.   That’s all–Enjoy!

Breakfast

• Old fashioned oats
• 1/2 banana
• vanilla soy milk
• Justin’s cinnamon peanut butter
• Amazing homemade granola
• Shredded coconut

With coffee, this was the perfect way to start a Monday.  Adios!

Queen of the house!

Did you all survive the week?? I think I just made it… Friday couldn’t come at a better time though because I was seriously not movtivated for school today.  I usually don’t have a problem getting to class, but for some reason I did NOT want to go to chemistry today.  I decided to just stick it out though and I’m really glad I did because it was a good lecture.

My day started bright and early with chocolate-covered strawberries/bananas… in the the form of oats!

I used the same method as I did a couple of weeks ago… mocha hot cocoa powder, flax, soy milk, water oats, deliciousness.

Lunch was a really tasty veggie and hummus wrap.  I have finally figured out the secret of these Ezekial tortillas! I let it thaw by just leaving it out for a few minutes while I got ready for school INSTEAD of microwaving it.  The microwave makes it rubbery and hard to wrap up, but I just set this on a clean dish towel on the stove top and it was perfect!

Finished off my hummus:-(

I also had an apple with lunch and snacked on a cheerio/raisin/walnut mix mid-morning during class.

After surviving the chem lecture I mentioned earlier, I headed to the video store to rent Marley and Me (!!!), the mall for some freebies from Bath and Body Works, and Target where I ended up buying a Peanut Butter Pretzal MOJO. I’ve come to the realization that I’ve been eating way too many bars lately!  I need to start being more prepared when it comes to snacks so I don’t have to resort to whatever is near by.  No more bars for awhile!! Hold me to this!

When I finally started to get hungry for dinner I decided on a salmon patty, baked sweet potato chunks and an arugula salad. Really hit the spot!

For the potatoes I used cinnamon and cayenne pepper.  The  patty was just 1 packet of flaked salmon, egg white, bread crumbs, dill weed, and dijon mustard.  I topped both the patty and the salad with goddess and it tasted really good all together!

So I’m excited to have a relaxing weekend because I have the apartment all to myself!! I love you roomies, but it’s nice to just sprawl out and do my own thing for a couple of days. My weekend plans include some of my favorite things… Running, baking, cleaning, reading, movies plus whatever else I can come up with.  Most of my friends are home for Easter weekend but my rents are in FLORIDA livin’ it up for spring break! LOL… So yeah, I won’t be going home.  I plan on doing my own take on Easter brunch Sunday morning:-)

Hopefully I’ll have a baked good to share with you tomorrow. Enjoy your Friday!

This is how you clean the fridge.

Hey there!

I hope everyone’s hump day was superb and went by as fast as mine did!  I couldn’t be happier that it’s Thursday tomorrow… I feel like it was just the weekend!!

If you haven’t noticed already, I enabled comment threading in the discussion section so you can now reply to other people’s comments.  This can make it a little bit easier to answer questions and things… Just a little something extra I guess.

ALSO, I noticed that Miss Julie GoLean gave me a Kreative Blogger Award today! I’m excited because it’s my first Thanks, Julie!

RULES: List 7 things that you love, and then pass the award on to 7 bloggers that you love! Be sure to tag them and let them know that they have won. You can copy the picture of the award and paste it on your sidebar letting the whole world know…you are Kreativ!

1. Watching a good movie on a Saturday night… in my PJ’s!
2. Mini-vacay’s with my best friends.
3. Les Mills classes
4. The morning… Breakfast + tea + Today show = happiness
5. Blogging
6. Learning about nutrition/fitness
7. The 4th of July. We do this holiday up GOOD in my hometown!

I’m tagging Leah, Erin, Sarah, Melissa, Ashley, Lindsay, and Gina!

On to my day of food…

Walnut, Raisin, Flax oats w/brown sugar with a side of the last two pieces of my Veganomicon Banana Bread!

Lunch was this packed sammie of pesto (the last of it), tomato, spinach and Dijon mustard.  I threw in a honey Oikos and a banana too.

I snacked on some pecan pie LARABAR goodness (which was DE-LISH!) after Step to tide me over to THIS dinner…

Homemade White Bean and Vegetable Soup. I threw everything I wanted  to get rid of in the pot and it turned out great! Here’s what went in:

• 1/2 onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 zucchini
• 1/3 large bag of spinach
• About 10 baby carrots
• 1 can diced tomatoes
• 1 can great northern beans, about 1/2 cup of black beans
• Fresh basil
• dried oregano & thyme, salt and pepper
• About 2 cups of water?

I’ve never really had great success with soup besides chili so I was excited that this tasted good!

Pepperjack cheese quesadilla on the side for dipping… YUM!  I loved this meal…

I think my chem exam went well today.  One less thing to think about, but there’s always something to fill that void:-)

Good night!

Random eats

So I’ve had a crazy day today and I’m going to do a super quick post so I can watch the Biggest Loser and do “research” for my class.  Thanks for all of the great opinions on the show!  I really appreciate the ideas… I basically agree with what everyone said, so we’ll see if anything crazy happens tonight.

FOOD TIME
Super early breakfast of PB and Banana oats:

Throughout the morning, I had a snack from our National Nutrition Month table (which I helped set up for my internship).  You may remember this item from the first week of my blog!  We served this dish at our health fair back in February and it went over so well, we had it again:

Flavored tofu wraps with mango salsa.  SO DELICIOUS!!  I had 2 of these plus an apple for a snack to hold me over until lunch, which I unfortunately couldn’t get a photo of today because it was consumed during Human Disease!  I had a great new sandwich though which included tuna, Sarah’s guac, and raisins.  If you haven’t tried raisins mixed with tuna, I highly recommend it!  I had a blueberry Oikos as well.

Moving on to random eats, I snacked on a few piece of banana bread (recipe from Veganomicon, my favorite!)  for study fuel …

… and made a smoothie before lab which was soooooooo green today.  My favorite combo yet!

This guy contained:

• The rest of my mango (YUM)
  
• 1/2 frozen banana ( I see a banana theme today??)
  
• Handful of spinach
• Vanilla soy milk
• Flax
  

Since I didn’t end up getting home from lab until after 8:00 and since I’m not super hungry, I’m chomping on a mug of the Optimum Bound cereal right now and I think after TBL I’ll just call it a night.

Tomorrow I’ll have something more exciting, I promise!!!!!!

Heat Wave!

So as you may or may not already know, I live in an EXTREMELY cold part of the country.  We typically get a few hundred inches of snow each year, and the average temperature in February is somewhere around 10-15 degrees!  I can handle snow and cold, but the thing I’m not very fond of is how long winter really lasts… We usually get our first snow around Halloween, and it stays until mid April.  Once we had a snow day during finals week!!

Anyways, I’m pretty happy about the heat wave that is 39 degrees today! Honestly, I could go without a jacket and feel comfortable.  Yes I know, crazy.  After hearing Caitlin, Meghann, and Jenna talk about Florida weather all the time, I get a little jealous!

So enough about the weather, on to breakfast!

Mmmm… Peanut Butter and Banana oats. This is usually what I eat when I’m really hungry in the morning or I need breakfast to hold me over for a long morning.  I just microwaved:

1/2 cup oats and water

1/2 banana

1 spoonful Peanut Butter

Cinnamon

And then added a splash of vanilla soy milk, granola and the rest of the banana sliced on top.  So delicious!

So here’s a link that I thought some readers may be interested in: Fit Zone from MSN health.  I just came across it this morning and it’s pretty cool.  You click on a muscle in the body, and the site gives examples of exercises you can do for this specific muscle.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

See you later!