Day in the Life of a Second Semester Sophomore

Posted on February 3, 2016 by Alison @ Daily Moves and Grooves

A Tuesday in the life of a second semester college sophomore…

8:10 AM // First alarm goes off. Shut it.

8:15 AM // Second alarm goes off. Snooze.

8:25 AM // Third alarm goes off. Roll out of bed. {Should not have spent useless minutes scrolling Insta so late the night before.} Bathroom, brush teeth, put in contacts, etc.

8:35 AM // Morning prayer.

8:40 AM // Change into athletic clothes, just for the morning while I’m still studying (I try to wear real pants as little as possible).

8:50 AM // Head across the street to the dining hall for breakfast! Work on my nutrition project while eating.

hard boiled egg (with sriracha) + whole wheat toast with pb and banana + frozen blueberries

9:40 AM // Go back to my dorm building and read biomechanics in the study room.

10:20 AM // Head back up to my room for some foam rolling and a 30-minute yoga video.

11:00 AM // Change into real people clothes, tweeze my brows, and put on makeup.

11:20 AM // Film this week’s “Five Minute Friday’s” vlog and re-watch it. It’s over five minutes, dang it.

11:35 AM // Leave the room and walk to another dining hall for lunch with Rachel and Kelsey!

salad with beets, peppers, and some sort of marinated potatoes + grilled chicken with eggplant relish, sautéed collards, and couscous

plus an orange!

12:30 PM // Nutrition lecture. We learn about the basics of digestion, which isn’t the most exciting, but the professor is still awesome.

1:20 PM // Get out of lecture early! Walk outside to the river for some fresh air since I have 30 minutes to kill before my next class. Re-film my vlog to see if I can get it under 5 minutes (spoiler: didn’t succeed).

THIS WEATHER!!!

2:00 PM // Behavioral biology of women lecture. Such a fascinating course! Eat a snack before the lecture starts.

half pb sandwich packed into napkins during lunch #resources

3:30 PM // Walk to the Catholic Center for a meeting.

4:10 PM // Send some messages to people and study exercise physiology (gotta keep on top of that) in the CC study room.

5:00 PM // Attend daily Mass in the upstairs chapel.

5:40 PM // Descend into the basement for the beloved free Tuesday pasta dinner! Have a grand ol’ time catching up with friends.

6:45 PM // Start setting up for our weekly “Catholics on Campus” talk.

7:00 PM // Kick off the talk. Last night, one of the most hilarious nuns I’ve ever met came to talk to us about Catholic Church history. She transformed a history lesson into something that had my abs and cheek muscles hurtin’!

8:15 PM // Help clean up after the talk and walk back to my dorm. Eat a peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chip cookie (compliments of my Aunt Sharon from Christmas!).

desperately need to do something about my nails/cuticles

8:45 PM // Shower, make appointments, write out my to-do list for Wednesday, brush teeth, chat with suite mates for a bit.

9:50 PM // Go up to the study room to take my online exercise physiology quiz.

10:20 PM // Finish the (easy) quiz and curse myself out for getting one question wrong because the directions said “place in order from low to high glycemic load” and I put them in order from high to low. I deserved that.

10:30 PM // Start typing this blog post!

11:20 PM // Finish up the post, head back to my room, pray.

11:45 PM // Hit the hay. Feeling ever so slightly hungry, but I already brushed my teeth and I’m lazy. I DO THIS EVERY NIGHT UGH (9/10 times I just eat and brush again).

Every day is so different, but this is the gist of life right now. Some days I’m ultra productive, and other days I let myself get a little too distracted with friends/social media. Some days, it’s a nice balance of both. I like to think it’s “mental health”.

I’m having fun though! I’m feeling more comfortable with tackling the work in each of my courses, and I’ve been blessed to encounter so many people from whom I can draw inspiration and motivation. Including you guys!!

Some new Tori Kelly therapy for you all today:

Hope you all have a lovely Wednesday!

So tell me:

Do you have on and off days in terms of productivity?

What was the best thing you ate yesterday? The chicken with eggplant relish and couscous was pretty darn delicious!

A silly mistake you’ve recently made. (← for my own selfish, empathy-seeking purposes. 😀 ♥︎)

Overcoming My Fear of Being a Couch Potato

Posted on July 27, 2015 by Alison @ Daily Moves and Grooves

I just realized that the past three photos on my Instagram all include peanut butter, banana, and carbs.

Well, anyone who goes to my profile will immediately know the top three foods that sustain me. Truly, there is rarely a breakfast of mine that does not include all three of those things: peanut butter, banana, and carbs.

Friday morning breakfast: Greek yogurt with cinnamon, nutmeg, chia seeds, banana, berry banana muffin, and peanut butter

You know how carrots + onions + celery = mirepoix, and celery + onions + bell peppers = “The Holy Trinity” in Cajun cooking? Well I hereby proclaim that peanut butter + banana + carbs = The Breakfast Trifecta.

Saturday morning breakfast: mango banana overnight oats

I’ve been watching the CrossFit Games this weekend, and I have nothing to say but “WOW”. I could actually say “ouch” because I’d probably be out of commission for a week (or dead) after just one of the thirteen grueling events those athletes completed.

While I was watching the fittest people on Earth doing their thing, I was eating dessert and being a couch potato.

Friday night’s sweet treat was Cookie and Kate’s vegan banana nut scones that I un-veganized with 2% milk, butter and honey. I think I added too much milk, resulting in more of a cookie-cake texture, but they were still fantastic topped with peanut butter and almost-burnt pecans(<— SO TASTY.)

Back to this whole couch potato situation. Now, I still generally do not like sitting for long periods of time because my butt starts hurting or I get very antsy.

That being said, up until very recently, I would almost never let myself just veg out on the couch for a night, even if I really wanted to just kick my feet up and relax. I would try to get up and do some squats, push-ups, burpees— all to “stay active.” No matter how much activity and exercise I had done during the day, I just forced myself to keep moving. That’s what healthy people do, right?

[source]

There was definitely an underlying, insanely irrational fear that being horizontal on the couch for a couple hours would somehow make all my food turn into fat or that I would get out of shape.

[source]

Crazy stuff happens in my brain sometimes.

(All the time.)

Seriously though, literally giving my body REST— not just active rest— has done me more good than making sure I’m moving and grooving at all times. I have overcome my fear of being a couch potato.

Moving on to dessert numero dos. Saturday night’s CrossFit Games grub of choice was vanilla ice cream with mangoes, cinnamon, nutmeg, and toasted pecans.

New favorite thing!!! This combination blew me away.

I also tried some of this Righteously Raw dark chocolate that I won from Jessie’s birthday giveaway.

I ate that little piece on the top right. I’m sure dark chocolate lovers would very much enjoy Righteously Raw chocolate, but speaking as someone who doesn’t like chocolate that much in the first place… EW.

How do people like dark chocolate??? It’s like chocolate that you would give to someone for April Fools’ Day. “Jokes on you! It’s dark chocolate, not tasty milk chocolate!”

I guess you could say it was not smart of me to enter a giveaway for dark chocolate, but I thought I’d give it a try. Ya never know if you might like something you thought you hated, but this time, I still hated it. Don’t worry though, I’ll be sharing these!

Okay, I’ll just finish up this long post with some other scenes from the weekend.

grilled pesto chicken for Saturday night dinner

Amanda’s chunky monkey Greek yogurt pancakes for Sunday morning//HOLY MOLY DELICIOUS

Dad and I went to (yet another) local Italian festival yesterday, but this one had even more food and fun!

cups of mini meatballs // Dad’s cacciatore meatballs and my caprese meatballs

sun gear: sunglasses + cowboy hat

pistachio and hazelnut gelato

the best batch of strawberries we’ve ever bought

Food photo dump complete.

Hope that you all had a fabulous weekend and you have a kick-butt week ahead! But don’t forget to kick your feet up every once in a while.

So tell me:

Are you okay with being a couch potato sometimes?

Which three foods do you always eat together? Bread, avocado, and eggs is the Lunch Trifecta.

What is the best thing you ate this weekend?

Fascinating Friday Links #13 + My Afternoon Off

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Alison @ Daily Moves and Grooves

Hi there!

Yesterday’s half day of school was just fabulous. Despite being super sleepy, I spent the afternoon with my momma at our favorite Japanese restaurant, a local bakery, and Marshall’s. Food and shopping— how could you go wrong?

My usual: tuna and eel avocado rolls

We weren’t planning on going to the bakery, but here’s how that happened: I brought our county magazine that had just come in the mail to lunch to check out some of the restaurants and shops featured in it since it was the special “Food Lover’s Guide” edition. That headline obviously spoke to me. I came across a page with a picture of beautiful, freshly baked breads from a bakery that was pretty close by called The Kneaded Bread, so my mom and I decided to take a spontaneous trip there! Boy, was it worth it.

The smell of a bakery is one of my favorite things ever. It’s so homey and comforting, and it makes you want to eat, even if you just ate. We decided to get a bunch of different loaves to try, especially since we wanted to save some for Thanksgiving h’or d’oeuvres. We walked outta there with a sunflower seed loaf, pumpkin bread with raisins, potato rosemary loaf (super excited for that!), and cinnamon swirl raisin loaf. Just call us carb masters. For a little extra treat to enjoy as lunch dessert, we got two honey raisin scones. We had been craaaaving scones, and these were just perfect!

A little piece of scone in the car (can you spot the magazine on my lap?)

These are SO BIG! I had half of this as a delicious afternoon treat 🙂

After shopping at Marshall’s, we came home to more goodies from Naturally Nutty! We put in a huge order of nut/seed butters to give away as gifts (and for us to eat) at the beginning of the week using a code they emailed to us (as past customers), and the package arrived yesterday. Some of the new-to-us flavors:

Cherry butter toffee peanut butter(!) and pepita sun oatmeal seed butter

White chocolate coconut peanut butter and chocolate sunflower seed butter

You can also call us nut butter hoarders….We also ordered lots of regular pepita sun seed butter since that’s our favorite and we wanted to give some away to our friends and family for the holidays.

Mom had the best of the bakery and the nut butter:

Her snack was toasted cinnamon raisin swirl with chocolate sunflower seed butter! The smell of it was SO tantalizing.

Now that I have you salivating, it’s time for some Fascinating Friday Links! (Those two things have nothing to do with each other…Guatever) Enjoy!

Health and Fitness

[Great info and fun visuals] Interesting (Health) Infographics via Life’s A Bowl

[Helpful] Five ways to deal with anxiety via Mrs. Murphy’s Law of Fitness

[Work those backsides!] Exercise Alternatives to the Deadlift via Your Trainer Paige

[Love these] 5 Fitness Myths via Lindsay’s List and That’s What Domi Said

[Sign up for some fun! I did!] Elf for Health 2013 via The Lean Green Bean

[Always love their quick workouts] 16 minute interval workout with kettlebells via Purely Twins

[Great tips for optimizing your fitness] What’s in the way of your goals? via The Fitnessista

Food for Thought

[Be generous with your dream] One Way to Be Sure Your Dream Is Too Small via Goins Writer

[Check this out] 18 Things Everyone Should Start Making Time For Again via Thought Catalog

[It’s real] Blog World Bullying via A Big Man’s World

Food for Belly

[Holy moly] Sweet Potato & Gruyere Mac ‘n’ Cheese via Yeah…Imma Eat That

[I love things in cake form] Cheesy Apple Farro Cakes via Spoon Fork Bacon

[Convenient and delicious] Crock-Pot Fajita Tacos via Fit Foodie Finds

[Want] Sweet Potato Cornbread Cupcakes with Whipped Cream via Family Fresh Cooking

[This looks sinful] Peanut Butter Speculoos S’mores Skinnier Hot Cocoa via Steph’s Bite by Bite

[Perfect healthy Thanksgiving dish] The Ultimate Fall Wheatberry Salad via Kath Eats Real Food

More Super Awesome Stuff

[Super heroes can be tiny too] Everything You Need to Know About Make-A-Wish Foundation’s Adorable, Crime-Fighting Kids via BuzzFeed

[Two amazing women and their marathon experiences] I finished! (Richmond marathon recap) via The Real Life RD + Boston Qualifier via Nut Butter Runner

[This is awesome!] How to Create the Perfect Thanksgiving Menu Infographic via Savvy Eats

[Can I have this dog? So cute.] Boston terrier dog likes his belly tickled! via RockinRobinzo’s Youtube

Happy Friday!

So tell me: When was your last spontaneous outing? What do you like to buy at a bakery? What are you doing this weekend?