Whole30:Vegan Day 1

Let's just talk about how much I need this reboot. July has been a crazy, out of control month! I started the month out with a move to a brand new city. While I managed to stay mostly healthy and happy during the car ride from Houston to my new home in Austin (I scored some of my favorite Larabars and lots of water), things went downhill from there. There are just way too many awesome vegan and vegan friendly eateries around here and that means way too many chances to make not so great choices. Guero's, Tacodeli, Mother's Cafe, and Magnolia Cafe have all quickly made their way to the top of my Yum List. I also live dangerously close to the amazebells flagship Whole Foods where, I admit, I have been purchasing lots and lots of prepared foods. Plus, home cooking means settling in enough to plan out a grocery list and then stay in town to eat the groceries!

On top of having just moved in, I have been back and forth from Austin to Houston lots starting with 4th of July weekend. Need I explain the amount of excessive consumption that happened during that weekend? I didn't think so.

I have fallen so far off the wagon that, when a friend came to visit last weekend, I thoroughly enjoyed a chopped beef sandwich at Iron Works. I know. I know. It was a very big cheat. And it was incredible. But it is time to pull it together.

I decided to start with a juice cleanse. It seemed like a good way to get all the cheats cleaned out of my system and get in some much needed plant nutrients. Plus, nothing hits the reset button on clean living quite like a good juice cleanse.

A juice cleans really just isn't my favorite thing. People who love them just can't seem to get enough of them, but I have not had that juice cleanse bliss experience yet - and this isn't my first rodeo. Anyway, to start this cleanse, I went to juicing guru Joe Cross and was pleased to see that he had updated things since I last visited his website. I downloaded the 3 day quick start plan and turned on my juicer.

I've had all the classic symptoms that juicers claim are your body detoxing - fatigue, dizziness, headache, digestive lovelies... I certainly had a lot to detox from, but I just can't decide if I buy the detox theory or if I just think my body is hungry! Also, juicing makes my teeth stick together and feel a little fuzzy. I guess its the sugar. Anyone else have this problem or other juicing woes, thoughts or feelings?

I had planned to head to my awesome new gym, Danes Body Shop, but knew I couldn't handle the intensity on just juice, so I went for a nice walk in Pease Park instead.

I can't believe I live here!

Day 1 of 30 - over and out. 

Whole30:Vegan

My Sister is pretty cool. 

But she's going to kill me for this. 

She has been getting into eating paleo for a while now and recently started a Whole30 program. For those of you who don't have a cool sister to teach you about these things, the Whole30 program is a program designed as a nutritional reset to calm, heal and restore your body and to help you create a healthy, happy relationship with food.

Happy Food

Now, this nutritional reset is based on the paleo diet. While I am not paleo and don't really endorse the paleo diet (for reasons we wont go into here), there are some things I really like about the paleo mindset and about this program in particular. I love the idea of eating cleanly, of eating in a way that is most healthy for your body and of eating so that you feel your best. Although whole foods plant based campers (Campbell, Esselstyn, Fuhrman, et. al) and paleo campers usually get there different ways, we both are of the healthy lifestyle camp and are striving to live our best lives with optimally functioning bodies.

My sister has been raving about how great she has been feeling during her Whole30 experience. She has also enjoyed expanding the idea from a purity of body to a purity of body AND mind experience by committing to limit her "plugged in" time by not watching TV and by refraining from using technology after a certain time. Listening to her got me thinking - there's no reason that this same concept of committing 30 days to reset and focus on obtaining a pure mind and body couldn't be applied to a vegan diet, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I made up some goals to aspire to for the next 30 days:

1. No alcohol

2. No peanuts, soy, gluten or refined oils

3. No packaged foods, frozen foods, imitation meet or cheese

4. No added sweeteners

5. Aim to make as much from scratch as possible

6. Buy local and organic when possible

7. Consider limiting or eliminating legumes and grains

8. No TV

9. No technology after 9:00 pm

10. Exercise for 30+ minutes 5 times per week

11. Drink 64 ounces of water

12. Meditate at least once per day

13. Eat when you're hungry

14. Stop when you're full

15. Maintain a pure whole foods plant based diet

Here we go!

A New Adventure, A New Reason to Blog

As my blog's title suggests, I'm all for new experiences, new chances and new challenges. Well, after almost two years working as a caseworker at the incredible organization Casa De Esperanza de los Ninos, Inc. in Houston, TX, I will be starting law school at the University of Texas in the fall.

In other updates, I have begun following a mostly vegan, whole foods, plant based diet and have been working on improving my health and fitness. I am down right determined to live my best life in my best body. While I have only been living in Austin for about three weeks now, I am loving exploring this new city and all that it has to offer, and the healthy life attitude that abounds here is right up my alley.

I can't wait to see how things unfold in my new life here:

actually, more like here:

and here:

I know it's going to be just like this:

I will be using this space to keep track of my thoughts and ideas including all things Austin, law school and mostly-vegan related. Stay tuned. 

I'm Back! - Chalkboard Painted Mason Jars

It's been well over a year since I've had any time for projects ... my time has been all consumed by studying for LSATs, writing graduate school applications, relationships, a new job, blah, blah, blah, blah ... but this morning, I woke up and found that I actually had some free time and it would be only marginally irresponsible - rather than wildly irresponsible - to use it doing something other than the aforementioned things.

So, I did a project! 

I've been dying to figure out a better way to organize the millions of different grains in my poorly organized, poorly planned pantry. While wasting time on Pinterest the other day, I saw lots of inspiration - mostly of the sleek, modern, mason jar kind - and I decided to create my own. My most important criteria was that I had to have some way to label my jars. It wouldn't due to go mixing up my couscous with my wild rice of-course!

Enter the ever popular among crafters, diy-ers and Martha Stewart wanna-be's everywhere - chalk paint!

Instructions:

1. Start by taping off the area on your mason jar that you would like to convert to an awesome chalk board surface.  Be sure that you tape up the entire bottom of the jar to prevent any drippage. I learned this the hard way. 

2. Mix the paint well and brush it on your jar in a thick coat. Try to use as few strokes as possible so as to get a nice smooth surface. 

3. Let dry according to directions on packaging. 

4. Remove tape.

5. Despite my thorough taping job, I had some dripping and oozing going on when I took off the tape. Nail polish remover worked wonders to touch things up. That stuff is amazing! A scraping tool was also helpful for cleaning up the edges of the painted area. 

Ta-da! You've got yourself some lovely, stylish, inexpensive new storage containers. 

Happy organizing

They don't teach that in Bio 101

Of course, with a new healthy-food-kick comes a new exercise-kick.

Like any normal American female... actually, these days I think that statement can be generalized to any American, in my constant quest to look like something that doesn't exist, I must obsess over exercise AND food... they come in pairs. So... like a life time ago, I bought a Groupon for an unlimited month of BCOR Boot Camp, and I finally cashed it in. I have been going to Spott's Park - which is beautiful, and I didn't know existed until now (probably because its in a valley that the boot camp people like to make us run up and down to the detriment of my gluteus maximus muscles) - at 6:00 AM a few days a week to get my tuchus kicked. A million sets of burpees, jumping squats and mountain climbers later I am plumb tuckered out. Try going to work after that! These are the days I wish my job was a little more like a desk job. Anyway, after all those fat burning calisthenics (mine hasn't seemed to burn so much) my entire body aches and feels like one giant human knot (I look like my grandmother for about two hours after getting out of bed each day). So, naturally, I've had to start taking yoga too.

Now, I like a good yoga class as much as the next gal, but I'm a little Type-A, Left-Brained,  whatever euphemism you want to use for uptight, and the loosey goosey flowy mumbo jumbo kinda gets on my nerves. The instructor is always up there talking about things like "heart space", which I take to mean chest - why can't he just say chest; "interlocking toes", I'm sorry, mine don't do that, I'm a homo sapien not a gorilla ; "sit bones"- the leg bone's connected to the what?; and so forth. This morning, I took a fabulous beginners yoga class at Joy Yoga, which turned out to be exactly what I needed - lots of stretching, but the language was all the same. This guy was up there going on and on and on and taking us from one pose to another via transferences of energy. I was totally lost - like Sandra Bullock trying to learn the Miss America dance in Miss Congeniality (If you're cool, you know what I'm talking about). While I'm feeling all nice and stretched out now, next time, I'll remember to take my translator 'cause they don't teach you where your "heart space" is in Bio 101!

Starting Fresh

It has been so so very very long since I have written anything here. I think I have quite forgotten how this is done. And, surprisingly, boy how I miss it. There was something that made life more interesting and creative when always looking for something new to post or considering the perfect wording of a sentence.

Things have been a little sad and dull without my blog juices flowing over the year, but every time I have considered writing recently, its seemed like such a daunting task... and nothing to write about anyway. Plus, the longer I post pone (no pun intended), the more I felt I had to catch-up on when I sat down to try again. OVERWHELMING! But finaly, here goes...

There has definitely (I can NEVER spell this word) been a lot going on in my life over the past year-ish... I won't bore anyone with the details, and I'll save myself the headache of a re-cap. Let's just say its on to fresh starts and new beginnings.

Fresh Start #1 - Get back my healthy lifestyle

While I have not considered myself an un-healthy person in a long time, I have recently, for various reasons, most of which can be labeled under omnipotent umbrella Stress, been a less-healthy person, and I was beginning to feel rather like one large, fatty, jiggly, sluggish butter-ball. So, in the name of fresh starts, I joined the Snap Kitchen 21 day Commit program.

I met with a nutritionist at Snap Kitchen - which was rather  uninformative as I (not to toot my own horn or anything, but you know...) have relatively few bad health habits. I eat a good breakfast. I don't drink sodas. I usually exercise regularly. I don't gorge on candy bars every night before bed, I know what the food pyramid - or plate or whatever - looks like, I know the difference between a vegetable and a carbohydrate etc, etc. Anyway, at the end of our meeting, the nutritionist and I picked a meal plan that would help me lose 1 - 2 pounds per week, and I paid a fairly hefty price for all of the food I would be eating for the next three weeks. I left feeling excited but rather worried that this was going to be like the Jenny Craig diet my mother went on a few times when I was a kid. I don't actually remember anything about Jenny Craig, these days it may be a wonderful program, other than that my mother ate unappealing frozen meals and complained about it every time she went on their program.

Well, seven days later, I'm not feeling Jenny Craig-ed at all. Plus, I've already lost some weight and certainly some jiggle, and I'm feeling pretty ding-dang awesome. Life's not so bad the Snap Kitchen way.

Lentil Curry soup and Vegetable "lasagna"
Yum!
( I need to work on my photography skills 'cause this meal was not photogenic)

Admittedly, the lentil soup was a little heavy on the curry, but I so love this lasagna. Instead of noodles, its made with veggies sliced and layered like noodles. Its delish. And TOTALY something I can make!

Here's to Fresh Starts!

A Journey I Thought I'd Never Ever Ever Ever Ever Ever Ever Embark On

This year, on the 4th of July, while millions of Americans were flipping burgers, grilling hot dogs, and generally putting it all into living up to the standards of meat consumption in America, I sat down to a beautifully browned, lavishly seasoned and mouth wateringly tender  brisket that my brother had been lovingly laboring over for 8+ hours and thought I was going to hurl. The idea of taking just one eencie weencie, teeny tiny bite of this hunk of meat absolutely repulsed me.

There were lots of things going on in my life at the time that contributed to my feeling of disgust for this slab of meat. I wish I could say it started out of something virtuous like a desire to save the environment or guilt for the poor animals I had so often cut into with out much thought, but I cant. There was very little higher thought connected with my disgust for this perfect brisket. I was just simply done. I could not put another bite of meat in my mouth. 


There I was looking in the face of vegetarianism in the carnivorous world of Texas hoping I could handle the challenge. No more beef fajita nachos at Ninfa's. No more chopped beef sandwiches from Goode Company or famous ribs a la my genius-at-the-BBQ-pit cousin. Not even a bite of Whole Foods chicken salad, a corned beef sandwich from Nielson's or a crazy irish-man role from Soma! My menu options had decreased significantly, but I still had cheese.


Cheese. The light of my eyes. The love of my life. By far the most wonderful, fantastic, delicious creation ever. Hard cheese. Soft cheese. Holy cheese. Melted cheese. Moldy cheese. I love all cheese. And now that I'm not eating meet, I thought it a fantastic idea to supplement my protein intake with the worlds most greatest, most amazingist, most yummiest food product ever - CHEESE! Life is great!!

Until .... lactose intolerance ruined everything.   


Now I found myself in the precarious position of being a lactose intolerant vegetarian .... basically a .... VEGAN! 


What?! Why?! Yikes!


To be honest, I'm not so stirred up about the whole egg thing. Really, eggs don't give me a problem. Especially modern eggs. I mean, it's not like they were going to turn into a baby chicken anyway. There's not even a rooster around most of these farms. 


But, for purity of the journey, I'll pretend to care about the egg thing ... as much as I possibly can. 


So, here's to the journey of veganism - a journey I never thought I, a meet eating, ice cream loving, cheese worshiping Texan would ever ever ever ever ever ever embark on.