Everyone has their favorite cooking tools and gadgets and mine is the crockpot (i.e. slow cooker). I love the crockpot. I use it almost every week in the winter. But I don’t discriminate with the seasons; I will bust out the crockpot in July as well because the convenience of it is applicable all months of the year. There are several brands of the slow cookers but I prefer the 6 quart crockpot. I have a slightly older version but the features are the same where you can set a specific time in 30 minute increments and it automatically goes to “warm” when it is complete. One word of warning:…

I fell ill on Sunday and thankfully Ryan was cool with me retiring to bed at 6:30; little did he know I wouldn’t get up until the next morning 🙂 It was well needed rest but I still couldn’t sleep because I was developing the world’s worst cold ever (ok I am being dramatic here). I basically had two days straight of feeling like someone was literally plugging my nose; it was horrible. It’s felt like a long week. I think it is because I was sick for a good chunk of it with a bad cold so I slept horribly most of the week. Not sleeping makes for long…

A key component to our weight loss success and on-going maintenance is meal planning and prepping. Planning out meals is a way to set ourselves up for success for healthy eating because we have a plan on what we are going to eat for the majority of our meals (we do usually plan to eat out once a week). When we don’t plan ahead, we find ourselves going out to eat or ordering pizza because once we get home from work and school, we are starving and tired and we barely have motivation to cook, let alone figure out WHAT to cook! To ensure that doesn’t happen, here are a…

The start of a new year is an opportunity to have a clean slate and start fresh. It is also an opportunity to set resolutions of what you want to accomplish or change in your life for the new year. Things like losing weight, exercise more and save money tend to top people’s list, including mine in years past. In January of 2009, my new year’s resolution was to lose weight for my wedding. At that point I had topped the scale higher than I had ever been and I was considered obese by BMI (body mass index) standards. Now we’ve all heard the stats on new year’s resolutions: “only…