Uff. I am soooo full of sugar right now. I spent all night baking, and sampling those baked goods :\ At least I had a decent day leading up to it.
I fell asleep watching “The Goods” with Chris last night. Not a very funny movie. However, we watched “Zombieland” before that and it was awesome. All together, I think I finally got 8 hours sleep. Yesss!! Went for a simple breakfast.
Everything bagel with crunchy PB on one side and strawberry jam on the other. In the back is an egg white pillow to round the meal out. I was scared a bagel wouldn’t fill me up – but it totally did!! I think I’ve finally found the secret to a filling breakfast for me. It’s got to be around 400 calories and have significant amount of each protein, fat and carbs.
I had a stellar gym visit this morning. I think the extra sleep put more of a bounce in my step.
Warm-up:
Walk/jogging on the treadmill for 5 minutes
HIIT:
incline = 1%
0:00-1:00 – 6.0 mph
1:00-2:00 – 6.2 mph
2:00-3:00 – 6.4 mph
3:00-4:00 – 6.2 mph
4:00-5:00 – 6.4 mph
5:00-6:00 – 6.6 mph
6:00-7:00 – 6.4 mph
7:00-8:00 – 6.6 mph
8:00-9:00 – 6.8 mph
9:00-10:00 – 6.6 mph
10:00-11:00 – 6.8mph
11:00-12:00 – 7.0 mph
12:00-13:00 – 6.8 mph
13:00-14:00 – 7.0 mph
14:00-15:00 – 7.2 mph
A1 – Front squat push/press:
3 sets @ 40 lbs x 8
B1 – Underhand-grip lat pulldown:
3 sets @ 55 lbs x 8
B2 – Barbell upright row:
3 sets @ 15 lbs (ea) x 8
C1 – Seated cable row:
3 sets @ 50 lbs x 8
C2 – Dumbbell fly:
3 sets @ 20 lbs (ea) x 8
HIIT:
@ 0.0 incline - 2 min @ 5.5
@ 0.5 incline – 1 min @ 6.0
1 min @ 6.5
1 min @ 7.0
@ 1.0 incline – 1 min @ 6.0
1 min @ 6.5
1 min @ 7.0
@ 1.5 incline – 1 min @ 6.0
1 min @ 6.5
1 min @ 7.0
@ 2.0 incline – 1 min @ 6.0
1 min @ 6.5
1 min @ 7.0
@ 0.0 incline – 1 min @ 3.5
Plank: 90 sec
Side planks: 30 sec each
Stability ball rollout: 15 reps
Jackknifes: 15 reps
HIIT:
incline = 0%
0:00-1:00 – 3.0 mph
1:00-3:00 – 3.5 mph
3:00-4:00 – 8.0 mph
4:00-6:00 – 3.5 mph
6:00-7:00 – 8.5 mph
7:00-9:00 – 3.5 mph
9:00-10:00 – 9.0 mph
10:00-12:00 – 3.5 mph
12:00-13:00 – 9.5 mph
13:00-15:00 – 3.5 mph
Cool-down:
Stretching
The HIIT was tough, but I felt sooooo good when I was done :)
Came home to a wonderful lunch!
- 1 cup garbanzo beans
- 1/2 cup cottage cheese
- cherry tomatoes
- onion
- cumin
- lemon juice
- pepper
- minced garlic
- Bekah’s maple cinnamon cumin almonds
- spinach
It was delightful! I love cumin :)
Today’s plan was to pick up the last of my presents and brave the grocery store the weekend before Christmas for baking ingredients. It called for a solid snack.
Three light wasas, soy nut butter, honey, raisins, cinnamon. This is probably one of my favourite snacks and always fills me up :)
I survived the grocery store and got straight to baking!
Warning: a plethora of pictures featuring baked goods devoid of any nutritional value follow.
You guys. It’s Christmas. Healthy treats are for the rest of the year! :P
First up: peanut butter cup cookies that I actually first saw on Hallie’s blog.
Mmmm….hydrogenated oil…
Generic PB cups, no Reese’s to be found!
My first mini muffin pan :)
Slice up cookie dough into inch-thick rounds. Then cut each round into quarters and drop into greased pan. Baked for about 5 minutes at 350 F until just slightly golden.
They naturally started to sink into the pan!
Don’t forget to unwrap your PB cups ;)
Drop PB cups into fluffy or sunken dough, and bake for an additional 3-ish minutes. It smells crazy delicious. But you have to wait until fully cool before removing from the pan. Don’t want to mangle all that doughy chocolate nutty goodness!
Then it was onto Brie’s famous cake balls. Aka Bakerella’s red velvet cake balls.
Except I’ve never seen red velvet cake around these parts. So I grabbed the yummiest cake flavour I saw. People were trying to hustle me out of the aisle – I almost lost my ankle to a shopping cart!
I followed the box instructions exactly. While that bad boy cooked, I sat down to a healthy dinner of a tofurkey + jarlsberg lavash wrap. At least I got lots of veggies with my sugar today ;)
Dessert was… what else!? A peanut butter cup cookie!
I’ve been obsessed with trying these ever since I first laid eyes on them. And with good reason!! I mean, how can you go wrong? Chris loved them too. He promptly popped two whole ones in his mouth.
Thankfully, he brought the bulk of the cookies back home to his parents. That is, if they made it there :P
Somewhere along the way, my cake came out of the oven and had the chance to cool.
I then got to rip it all apart and mash it up with this even healthier product:
I then rolled the mixture into a gazillion little balls, and stuck them in the freezer to harden.
While my balls were hardening (I’m not going there) I got started on my next baking project! This one I’ll call “homemade turtles” and got from Zesty’s blog.
I looked everywhere for waffle-shaped pretzels and could only find giant ones and sticks. I went with the latter.
More cups!! This time in caramel.
And the final piece of the puzzle – pecan halves. Which I quickly threw in the oven to roast first.
I tried to shape my pretzel sticks like pretzel waffles, but Chris said they looked like pretzel rafts :P
Put this in a 300 F oven until the first sign of melting (2 minutes maybe?) Then take out and squish the pecans on top!
I did three batches of this, then stuck it in the fridge to harden. While those babies were hardening in the fridge, I pulled my now hard balls out of the freezer (seriously guys, I am not going there).
More chocolate was needed to coat my cake balls. I couldn’t decide on milk chocolate or dark chocolate with almonds. So I chose both and melted them together :)
Two chocolate bars weren’t enough to coat all the balls though! I ended up melting one of my beloved Lindt 70% bars (cause ya know, I happen to have a lot of them lying around). But that wasn’t enough either! So I dug around my cupboard and found some yogurt chips that I melted with unsweetened coconut. The result was a variety of balls…
Butter pecan cream cheese cake balls in a chocolate almond coating, dark chocolate coating and yogurt coconut coating.
And as those dried, I wrapped up my hardened homemade turtles!
These packages are going to the kiddies in my family. Grandparents will be getting cake balls, and any leftovers are going to buttering up my new coworkers ;)
I don’t know how all of you bake without licking/sampling. I actually did good on the spoon and bowl licking front (kept it minimal anyways). But I still had to sample one of each of my goodies. Way more treats than I usually have and now I’m in a sugar coma. And maybe a hydrogenated oil one :P Uff.
On the bright side, I have a 90 minute spin class to look forward to for tomorrow!! Seriously. Can’t. Wait.
Question of the Day: What’s your favourite holiday goody? Mine are candy canes and my Grammie’s peanut butter balls :)
