Challenge Follow-up

So to say we failed the start of our home cooking challenge would be an understatement.  We ended up cooking a fantastic dinner on Tuesday and Thursday but ended up eating out on Wednesday, Friday, and all of Saturday.  We probably spent our entire month's dine out budget just over the weekend.

D wasn't feeling well Sunday so I made Whole Food's Chicken and Wild Rice Soup for dinner and decided that in addition to trying to cook more at home to be successful at weight loss personally I needed to track my food.  I started on Monday and so far have tracked each day.  We had obligations Monday evening that kept us out of the kitchen and had special Valentine's plans for Tuesday so today we are back to cooking at home.  After dinner we're heading out to the store to pick up food for the rest of the week.

Every day is a new day to do things better.  We're not going to beat ourselves up over the last week, we're just going to reset and try again.

Healthy Eating Challenge

We've decided to put a priority on eating healthier.  Overall we don't eat poorly, but we do make bad choices at times and eat out more than I would like which is not good for our budget or our bellies.  To help D and I improve our health and spend quality time together we've been trying to cook at home more.  Since I have a slight obsession with cookbooks, I thought I would challenge us to make home cooked meals 6 nights a week starting with tonight.

D had a teleconference this evening so I was in charge of making dinner and it was ah-mazing!  If D is sitting over the pan eating it, it has to be good right?

Tonight's dinner was Shrimp with Capers, Garlic, and Rice and Greek-Style Green Beans from Cooking Light's Fresh Food Fast Weeknight Meals cookbook. 

You can run! You can run! You can run!

It's no secret that I love half marathons.  When Disney announced the Tinkerbell Half Marathon at Disneyland there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to participate.  Not only did I sign up for the race, but my mom decided to sign-up too.  With this race, we took the opportunity to take our first ever mother-daughter trip.

This wasn't a first half for either of us, but I realized it was a special opportunity for us to share the experience.  In the other two half marathons that mom had done, I had run and cheered her on at the finish line but this time I wanted to be by her side the entire time.  Mom was so excited about this race and her energy was contagious.  She had picked out an outfit (because you can't run Tinkerbell without a little bling) in the fall and was ready to race.

We knew we'd be cutting the race time limit of 3:30 close so we planned to get as close to the front of our corral on race morning as possible to give ourselves as much of a lead as we could.  In order to ensure we made it across the line and got the medal I had us jog a minute after every 5 minutes of walking.  With the walk/run strategy we finished the race in 3:26 and what was even better was that I had a fabulous time with my mom and memories to carry with me.