Long Day Tuesday

My workout this morning was so much fun. I stared doing workouts from BodyRock.tv. This morning I did this one and it was awesomely hard. One leg squats are really hard! Then I went to the gym and ran sprint intervals on the treadmill. I have always been a slow runner, mostly by choice. I just didn't really have much interest in going fast, I was more interested in increasing my mileage. Lately I started doing some tempo and speed workouts and I really like them! It makes the time on the treadmill so much more bearable. This morning looked like this:
0-.5 - warm up at 5.5-6.0 mph
.5-2.5 - alternated 'sprint' intervals of 7.0-8.0 for 60 sec with cool down intervals of 90 sec
2.5-3.0 - cool down at 6.0

I finished 3 mi in about 28:30.

I know that my 'sprint' intervals are some people's normal pace, but it was a great hard workout for me! Maybe someday I will be super fast. Or not, that would be ok too :)

Tuesdays are my 'long days' at work. I work for 8 hours, which for most people is a normal day of work, but now that I've gotten used to short shifts of 4-5 hours, it feels like a long time! People also stress me out after a while, so by 5pm I usually end up wanting to smack the gym members. The hardest part of these days though is planning meals and snacks for the whole shift. It takes effort to think that far in advance sometimes! I work out before work, so I need breakfast, lunch, and usually a couple of snacks.

All of my meals today were seriously so good. I love days like that!

This morning I made an AWESOME new breakfast. It might be my new favorite thing! I cooked 1/3c. oats with water and a banana. Once they were almost done, I tempered two beaten eggs with the oats and then added the eggs into the oat mixture. I added a pack of stevia also. I put the mixture in a ceramic container with a lid and topped with .5 oz of almonds. When I was ready to eat my breakfast at work, I just microwaved it for about 90 sec, and yummy! The eggs turned the oats into thick custardy goodness. I can't wait to have this again tomorrow. I will be eating at home, so I'll try to remember to take a picture!

I snacked on an apple in the mid morning, and for lunch I brought leftover orange roughy with asparagus and tarragon from last night. The recipe was from my most recent Martha Stewart magazine. The original recipe used salmon, but we had salmon for lunch, so we used orange roughy. I also had a salad with spinach, radishes, bell pepper, and a giant scoop of hummus.

As a side note, last night we had a really fun V-Day dinner (thanks for V-day $ from our moms!) and we made mussels! I have had these at restaurants before, but this was my first time cooking them at home. They were really easy to make - I just made a broth of sherry wine, olive oil, garlic, red pepper, and parsley and steamed the mussels in it until they opened. It was a lot of fun and made the meal feel 'fancy'. I took pictures, but apparently I did not have my memory card in my camera. Whoops.

Yesterday we had lunch at Red Lobster (we had a gift card courtesy of Andrew's dad!) and really really wanted to have leftovers to bring home to eat later, so I saved a tiny piece of salmon. I wonder if the waitress thought I was weird for doing that. She was really weird though, so oh well. I combined it with spaghetti squash, green beans, chickpeas, and a tahini dressing that i got from Kath's blog. The dressing was creamy and delicious. It was basically a big bowl of warm happy goodness. I also had another apple, and for dessert a little bit I am having chocolate tofu pudding! I know that the name is a little creepy. I must come up with something more appealing.


I just combine a block of lite firm tofu in the food processor with 6 packs of stevia, 1/4 c. water, and 5 T. unsweetened cocoa powder. It makes two servings and it does not taste like tofu. I discovered last weekend that if I put it in the freezer for about an hour, it gets a nice consistency kind of like a fudgesicle in a bowl! Pretty toppings are a must.

Andrew's contribution to this post is a picture of his bucket of cottage cheese and fruit!


On the agenda for tonight - painting my nails. Yay! I usually take it pretty easy on Tuesday nights. I had a hard day at work, after all.

I almost forgot - I got my body fat percentage taken today! I guess that is one of the benefits of working at a gym. One of the trainers had this nifty machine that uses electromagnetic current (I think) to approximate your body fat percentage. I know that these things aren't 100% accurate, but it's a place to start.


According to the machine I have a body fat percentage of 27%. Based on this chart from ACE, I fall into the 'average' range. Although, it seems like there is no standard for body composition; there are a lot of different opinions on the internet! At this point, I'm not sure what I want to aim for, just *less* is good enough for now. I'd love to be in the 'fitness' category. That would be like making it official that I am fit, haha!