I am in the middle of four trips within a two week time period. With so much travel, I really try to simplify meals because it makes everything easier. When I am traveling for enjoyment, I like simple meals because I don’t want to spend vacations in the kitchen. When I am traveling for work, I plan simple meals for my family while I am away. This makes things easier on me for prep and my husband for cooking while I am gone. Here are my trips and meals plans for each: Trip #1: I went to a friend’s cabin in northern MN where we went to Fargo, ND so…

One of my new year’s resolutions was to be “part time” vegetarian. I have actually kept this up, for the most part, this year. The surprising thing is I am not missing meat anymore when I’m eating a vegetarian meal. Sometimes I definitely crave a burger but I think that’s because I need some iron. I’ve been more deliberate about eating spinach (and other iron-packed veggies) and those burger cravings have decreased. Let’s be honest though, I still want to eat a burger sometimes which is why I am only a “part time” vegetarian. This past week though, I started watching “Eating Animals,” a documentary about the farming industry and…

Hope everyone had a fantastic week! I’ve been running off the “high” of completed my yoga teacher training all week. I think taking 5 yoga classes over the weekend put me in a really good mood. Especially since I hadn’t been able to practice as much as I would have liked since I threw my back out. I finally had a “normal” week this week so I actually have sufficient time to plan and prep meals for the week. I am loving all of the salad and spring recipes that I’m seeing in magazines, on blogs and on Pinterest. Now we just need the Minnesota weather to act like spring…

It’s been a crazy busy week of work travel and now I am in the middle of my last yoga teacher training weekend. I seriously can’t believe that my training program is pretty much over! I wanted to get this post out yesterday but flying back from NYC, working and then prepping for my yoga weekend left me little to no time. Although, as promised last Friday, I am going to start sharing my weekly meal plans with all of you. For next week, I have limited time to do any cooking prep so crock pot and simple meals are my plan. I also am focusing on healthy recipes as…

First off, let me state the obvious: everyone has very busy lives that are consumed by working, parenting, maintaining homes, kids activities, exercise, etc. This leaves very little time or energy to be put into meals and healthy eating. The largest component of losing weight and maintaining a healthy weight for us is healthy eating. I find that having a healthy eating meal plan is crucial to success so I plan out our meals every single week. This allows me to have more control on what I put in my grocery cart and more control to ensure we are eating well balanced, healthy meals. OK but let’s get real here.…

There are many debates in the diet world of what is healthy and what isn’t….calorie counting, macronutrients, keto, etc. One of these debated diet rules is around snacking. According to a “clean eating” diet, you should have 2-3 snacks a day; while in the Whole 30 diet, snacks are frowned upon. Many other diets have similar stances on both sides so which is correct? I am no scientist nor nutritionist, but I am a data nerd so I’ve read up on a lot of the articles about the snacking debate. One of the clean eating diet’s rules is to have 5-6 small meals per day where 2-3 of those may…

I’ve written before about how important meal prepping is for us to keep us on track with healthy eating. Each Sunday afternoon, I spend a chunk of time prepping food for the week and this past Sunday was no different. To prep for the week, I made the following things: Chopped Thai Chickpea Salad with Curry Peanut Dressing from Ambitious Kitchen Snap Pea Salad with Radish and Lime from Eating Well A large batch of brown rice A batch of steel cut oats (bobs red mill quick cooking steel cut oats) Marinated Grilled Shrimp (made up recipe using inspiration from Pinterest) Since I have a 21 month old and a…

I hope everyone is having a good week! I am super pumped because I stuck to my goals for the week and I am feeling great! I’m already seeing some initial results too: I am down 3 lbs this week! (likely just water weight from not eating out or drinking but I’ll take it 🙂 ). Here is my progress against each of my goals I set for myself this week: I’ve been eating 1,500 calories per day focused on veggies & fewer carbs while keeping up my part time vegetarian lifestyle. We’ve made all of the meals that we planned out and stuck to eating those. I’ve gone on…