Meatless Monday

This morning I got up at 6:15 (after only hitting snooze 3 times...), had a piece of bread and butter with water, and got ready for my run. I was supposed to run 4 miles with 7 minutes total uphill time. You have to run almost run 2 miles just to get to my hill so I knew I'd probably end up doing a little more than 4 miles. I was ok with that, though.

Starting out, my legs were really sore! Mostly my quads (I guess that's where the downhill gets ya!). I was also feeling some pain in my little bunion on my right foot. I had worried about that when I got the Bioms because they're a really narrow shoe, but it hasn't really bothered me until that last long run. If it doesn't get better, I'm starting to think about getting some wider shoes for the marathon. Of course, it could have also been aggravated by me wearing these new shoes on Sunday:

I don't know what would be worse, having to get new running shoes or not being able to wear these rad shoes again!?

Anyway, I hope it just gets better. I've had it bother me in the past to the point of going to see a foot doctor, and he said they could fix it, but that they'd have to fracture my foot to do it. Um, no thank you. I think I'll be ok. I hope.

My run was really hard, I went all the way up 300 north, and kept running past the capitol to get my 7 minutes of uphill in. That was serious uphill. Like the kind I would tip over on if I were on my bike. I managed to survive. Not only survive, I thrived going up those hills. I might have been slow, but it felt so good that I was pushing myself up there like that, and I knew it would make me stronger!

I also tried to keep pushing hard for the 2 miles home since those were the pretty much the same 2 miles that gave me such a hard time on Saturday.

Even with the hills, I managed a pretty decent time! Here are my splits:

1. 9:48
2. 10:06
3. 9:38
4. 8:56
5. 4:33 (half-mile)

Total Distance: 4.52 miles

Total Time: 42:59

Average Pace: 9:31 min/mile

When I got home, Ethan and Mindy were in the living room playing so good with Ethan's new Legos instead of watching TV like usual, and Pete was cooking eggs and bacon along with cutting up oranges for everyone. I was like, "Could I have a more perfect life?!"

I just have to say, since we cut out sugar and started having eggs instead of cereal, our mornings have been SO AWESOME. In our whole 9 years of marriage, I've only really eaten breakfast with Pete a handful of times before now because he's just always been so tired in the mornings. I had to drag him out of bed if I wanted him up any earlier than 9. Now, we've beed doing this for 3 weeks, and pretty much every morning (even when I've stayed in bed longer), he's up either making breakfast himself or ready to eat the breakfast I've made! It is so wonderful to actually see him in the mornings! It's also just so nice to have a real meal with the whole family before we all go our separate ways for the day.

Along with the extra energy, Pete's been losing weight. I don't think I've really lost weight, but I don't weigh myself very much, and I'm not doing this to lose weight. I just want to be healthier. We had a bunch of sugar on Ethan's birthday, and Pete couldn't even stay awake at the zoo. It was like night and day watching his body react to the sugar. I don't think it affects me quite as much, but I really can feel it when I eat sugar, and it's not good. The weird thing is that's how I used to feel all the time, and I didn't really think that I didn't have to feel that way. So, yeah, we've been doing this for 3 weeks, but I don't really see us stopping next week when our 30 days are up. This is going to be our new way of life, and we really LOVE it.

The other day, Pete and I watched a documentary called Food Inc. If you haven't seen it, you should go watch it right now. You can stream it from Netflix. It's about where our food here in America, mostly meat, comes from. It is really depressing, and I was literally feeling sick watching it, but I think it's good to see. Just how big and dominating the food companies are, and how they treat animals like a product is disgusting. Watching it, I was feeling really helpless, wondering, "what can I even do?"

In the end they tell you what you can do. Every time you go to the grocery store, you're placing your vote. We need to show the stores that we demand the good quality, real food. If we buy the crap, that's what they'll keep stocking for us.

They also link to this website at the end, and they give you these

10 Simple Things You Can Do To Change Our Food System:

1. Stop drinking sodas and other sweetened beverages.
2. Eat at home instead of eating out.
3. Support the passage of laws requiring chain restaurants to post calorie information on menus and menu boards.
4. Tell schools to stop selling sodas, junk food, and sports drinks.
5. Meatless Mondays—Go without meat one day a week.
6. Buy organic or sustainable food with little or no pesticides.
7. Protect family farms; visit your local farmer's market.
8. Make a point to know where your food comes from—READ LABELS.
9. Tell Congress that food safety is important to you.
10. Demand job protections for farm workers and food processors, ensuring fair wages and other protections.

One of those things was Meatless Mondays. Since I'm not quite ready to go vegetarian, and I don't feel like it's necessary, though I'm only going to buy grass-fed beef from now on, I thought it would probably be good to cut down a little on the meat we consume. I didn't really plan ahead to not have meat today, and Pete didn't know about it when he made breakfast so I just decided to try no meat for lunch and dinner.

Lunch was easy. Elle had a quesadilla (actually 2!) and a banana and I had a peanut butter and banana sandwich with my homemade bread.

Here the kids are showing you how yummy my homemade bread is. I make it with half whole wheat flour and half oat flour (which I make by just dumping oatmeal in the blender!), honey, yeast, butter, salt, and water.

For dinner I made that Cilantro-Lime Quinoa again, along with some pickles, cut up carrots and cucumber and artichokes. It was a fun dinner because the kids all like eating the artichokes, but I'm also afraid they didn't really eat very much. Oh well, I guess they won't starve themselves. I don't think it quite filled me up either, or maybe it was just the kids stressing me out, but as soon as I got the kids in bed I broke out the Thin Mints and ate half a sleeve! I consider it a victory that they sat in the cupboard un-opened for 3 weeks, though! I am such a stress eater. The kids get on my nerves and I start going through the cupboards! I'll try not to eat any more.

Here are some other (healthy) things we've been enjoying:

We made this beautiful fruit salad for lunch on Friday. We made it with kiwi, strawberries, blackberries, grapes and fresh pineapple. Fruit is pretty much Mindy's favorite thing so she's loving all the fruit we've been eating lately. She could be a fruitarian if I let her. That fresh pineapple was SO good! Not really a local thing, though. I am going to try to start buying local and organic when I can.

This photo was taken several days ago, but I've had this salad at least 3 other times since then. It's my new favorite thing! You can't really see the salad in this picture because I've kind of overdone it with the chicken.

First I bought some the Baby Spring Mix at the store (and you can get it organic) which is just so much more appealing to me than just lettuce. When it buy lettuce, it just sits in the fridge and goes bad. I melted some butter in a pan, put salt and pepper on the chicken tenders then let them cook. I cut up a lime and squeezed all that good stuff over the chicken before flipping it and letting it finish cooking. To the salad mix I added some chopped up yellow bell peppers (so good!), green onions, cucumber, fresh cilantro and avocado. I put the chicken on top then squeezed a bunch more lime juice all over the salad. You seriously don't need dressing with the lime juice for flavor and the avocados for creaminess. Mmmmm, it's so good!

This was my last bite, and I was so sad it was gone! I had even added more lettuce because of how much chicken I had. It's a great lunch, I'm pretty much in love with it.

Does anyone else do Meatless Mondays? Or are you Vegetarian? If so, share some of your recipes with me. I'm really not used to not having meat for dinner! Or really any healthy recipes would be great!