Confession: I'm kind of a workout clothing junkie. Not only do I exercise nearly every day, I also work from home the vast majority of the time - where I mostly wear, you guessed it, workout clothes. I even sleep in comfy workout gear sometimes. Since I sport activewear so often, I like my clothes to meet the following criteria: 1.) cute, 2.) fitted yet not too tight, 2.) allow me to move without feeling restricted or constantly falling down, 3.) comfortable, 4.) breathable. <-- I have this one shirt that makes me feel like I'm immediately sweating in it, and I hate that! Now that you have an idea of my love for workout attire, you can understand why I was excited when Lorna Jane contacted me to try out some of their activewear. Lorna Jane is Australia's #1 activewear brand, ... [Read More]
Archives for November 2013
Banana Pumpkin Muffins with a Cinnamon Brown Sugar Topping
Hi everyone, happy Sunday! I have a few updates for you all on the blog front. I've updated my recipe pages to include all of my latest kitchen creations. I also updated my workout page, which now includes a new section for my hiking spot posts. Lastly, I added a 'travel & fun' page so that all of my travel posts, restaurant and winery experiences, as well as random adventures are in one place. Fun stuff! And now onto food - banana pumpkin muffins to be precise... After a morning yoga session, running errands, and going hiking with my hubby and puppy yesterday, I came home and decided that a bit of baking was in order. Since I had an open can of pumpkin and some ripe bananas ready to be eaten in my fruit basket, and I've been loving muffins lately, I whipped up some tasty banana ... [Read More]
Real Food Talk + Rosti Potatoes with Goat Cheese & Arugula
Over the past few years, I've really made an effort to add more real food into my diet, and less and less processed stuff. I've always loved my fruits and veggies, but I realized that I was also eating foods with long ingredient lists more than I'd like. Don't get me wrong, I eat things like protein bars all the time, but I've made an adjustment to eating things with more natural ingredient lists like this: (Source: Zing Bars) And look less often like this: An awesome perk to blogging is that people like to send you samples of products to try and blog about. It's always fun to get a package in the mail of a new product. As a personal rule, I only say yes to products that align with my beliefs and that I would consider buying in a store. Recently I received an email to try new meal ... [Read More]
Butternut Squash Ravioli with Sage Pesto
Recipe creation can be a funny thing. Sometimes I'll come up with a recipe, jot down my ingredient ideas, easily throw it together, and it'll turn out awesome. Other times a recipe will sound delicious in theory, but not turn out as great as I'd hoped for. When that happens, I either completely throw out the idea and call it a kitchen experiment defeat, or I keep thinking about how I can change the recipe to make it better. This week has been a case of the latter. When I bought a butternut squash recently and was trying to think of what to make with it, my hubby was the one who suggested ravioli. I took his good idea and ran with it, coming up with a meal idea of butternut squash, sage & parmesan ravioli with a buttery white wine hazelnut sauce. Though it wasn't bad, I just ... [Read More]
Ditching the Scale This Week
"Trust your first instincts, they're always right," the spunky yoga instructor at Yoga Inside Out said to me during a sweaty power yoga class I took with Gina last week. The instructor was talking specifically about my lack of decisiveness in finding where to place my hands during a pose, but I took her little reminder with me when I left class and applied it to life in general. Last week I was having a hard time on the weight loss front. I was working my butt off in my fitness regime and practicing portion control with my eats, but I kept stepping on the scale and seeing not a teeny bit of change. By the end of the week, I realized what I instinctively wanted to do: ditch the scale for a bit. It was only throwing my game off mentally, and the scale certainly does not tell the ... [Read More]
Unwinding
First off, Happy Veterans Day to all of the men & women who have served our country and made so many sacrifices to protect us! The USMC birthday was also yesterday, marking 238 years of its existence. It's kind of funny to think of my hubby as a veteran, since he only got out of active duty as a Marine earlier this year. You know what they say though: Once a Marine, always a Marine! Mother Teresa once said, "To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it." To me, this encompasses all of the things we need to/should do in order to keep our bodies healthy, our minds clear, our stress levels at bay and our relationships with both others and ourselves strong. Sometimes taking time just to unwind -- whether it be 10 minutes of meditation or two weeks of vacation -- ... [Read More]