Gut Update

The Ann Arbor Marathon may have been a shit show endurance-wise. But, in the grand scheme of my running life... it was a total and complete game changer. Discovering that GLUTEN could be what was sabotaging my races/long runs is probably the most important/beneficial thing that I have ever done for my running. Since that race, I've been continuing to experiment with eating gluten free (mostly) the night before long runs and the morning of, and (knock on wood) I've had nothing but success!

And you know what... it's really fucking easy to eat gluten free. For one... lots of delicious vegetarian things are gluten free... Veggies, Rice, Quinoa, Potatoes, FRENCH FRIES, etc. And two... apparently "gluten free" is a pretty big movement right now... so.. like.. everything that is gluten free has a label announcing it.

Friday I realized that I had nothing to eat before my long run the next morning and instead of fighting the traffic/people/general hell that is Whole Foods on a Friday afternoon, I decided to to just pop into my local grocery store to pick up something for breakfast.

I stood in the breakfast aisle and checked out a few gluten free things. And because I'm cheap... I chose the one thing that was on sale:

In case you didn't know nuts and sugar are gluten free, 

there's a handy dandy label there.

I like nuts! I like sugar! Around 200 calories a bar! Sure!

The next morning I opened one up and nearly broke a tooth. When they said "crunch" they meant CRUNCH. I mean, these bars are essentially nuts enrobed in sugar and I actually have to bite into them with my side teeth, because I'm literally afraid it's going to break one of my veneers off. Not good.

I mean, they taste fine and all... but, yeah... I won't be getting these again. However, it did give me an idea of making them myself and not cooking the sugar so much that it turns the nuts into concrete. Maybe throw some peanut butter in there too. I'll let you know if I come up with something good. (Although, honestly... lazy Amy will probably win out and I'll just buy some gluten free pop tarts or whatev).

The love affair with gluten free (before runs/races) continues!

Dig

Some random shit that I'm into these days...

Earnest Bars

The apple ginger flavor is my favorite by far. They taste like an apple oatmeal cookie. DELICIOUS. And healthy-ish.

Swiftwick Socks

I haven't bought new socks in YEARS. It's actually the next thing in my running wardrobe that I'm going to upgrade. But, it's funny, I've had to sacrifice one sock from two different pairs in the past couple of months. And I was sad. Socks make for expensive toilet paper, y'all. BUT, it's like the universe is putting BETTER socks into my life to make up for those sacrificed pairs. I've recently gotten two pairs of Swiftwick socks from races (schooling bitches has it's perks) and I LOVE THEM. I'm going to buy a few more pairs. Plus... bonus...the socks are made here in Middle Tennessee.

B Complex Vitamins

So, the truth is, I'm new to the vitamin/supplement world. I used to be one of those people who thought they were a waste of money that you literally just flushed down the toilet. But, over the past few months, I've started to realize that while my diet is pretty dang healthy, when you eliminate certain food groups in their entirety, you might be missing some things. After talking to the woman at my local health food store, she convinced me that I'm not getting enough B vitamins and probably zero B-12. So, she set me up with a regiment of B Complex pills and B-12.

And something wonderful has happened... I've started taking one B complex pill in the afternoon along with my other usual suspects:

And then at night I take an additional Holy Basil pill before bed and I've started adding a B-complex pill and you know what? It's so much easier for me to get up in the morning. It's like I can't fall back asleep even if I wanted to. BRILLIANT.

I should note here that you should ask your doctor before you start taking random vitamins/supplements/minerals. I have my yearly doctors appointment on Monday, so I'll see officially where all my numbers are at.

Tristan Prettyman

It's your basic "you dumped me, and I hope you regret it some day, but you probably won't, because it's just an urban legend, that people sit around a year later and are like... hmmm.. ya know.. that girlfriend last year... I shouldn't have broken up with her." Anyway... it's good shit. Not like Taylor Swift break-up shit. But good break-up shit.

Speaking of Music...
 

Stubborn Love by the Lumineers

Scroll to :50 in the video to start the song.

I am obsessed with this song. I cannot stop listening to it, singing it, thinking about it. 

You bitches into anything worth sharing lately?

Food Review: Cedarlane Low Fat Macaroni and Cheese

Official Review: Yuck. Save your money.

Food Review: Kashi Thin Crust Pizza

I'm a fan of Kashi. I really am. When I check out the ingredient list of any Kashi product, I can pronounce every single ingredient. They make good tasting food with natural ingredients. An added bonus is that they package their food in green, recyclable materials. What's not to love? Well maybe there are just a couple of things...

Kashi is expensive, no doubt about it. I rarely, if ever, pay full price for anything. I swear, you've never seen someone get so excited about coupons, rebates and clearance items like I do. I seriously love cheap and free things. I'm forever checking websites like http://www.weeklyfreebie.com/, http://www.shortcuts.com/, and http://www.slickdeals.net/ (don't say I never gave you anything) and read the store ads that come in the newspaper to check for deals. Yes, this takes time and effort, but for me its actually kind of fun. (Boy, do I need a life or what?) So anyway, like anything I buy, full price isn't an option for Kashi products. However, when they run a sale or I find a coupon, I definitely stock up.

Ok, uncool Kashi factor #2-They are owned by Kellogg's. Did y'all know this? I recently found out and had to deduct points from Kashi's coolness rating. Not that I really have issues or problems with Kellogg's, because I don't. Kellogg's is just too big, if that makes any sense. I'm just a snob like that, I guess.

Back to the review at hand. I wasn't aware that Kashi made pizzas and so when I saw them on sale in the frozen organic food aisle, I picked a couple up to try-spinach/mushroom trio and roasted veggie. Last night I had the spinach and mushroom.

It was pretty sparse on the ingredients-sauce, cheese, mushroom and spinach so I doctored it up a bit, as I usually do with frozen pizzas. I sauteed some spinach and added that with some shredded cheese to the top.

It was very good (thanks to the help of my added ingredients). I think it could have stood a little more time in the oven and I should have put it directly on the oven rack instead of a pizza pan to make it crisper, but the taste was good. The best part was the crust. It had a nice flavor that I cannot describe because I suck at finding the right adjective for food and wine. (My food adjective vocab. list is pretty much either: good, great, gross or just ok). So my official rating is: GOOD. It didn't taste like cardboard as so many frozen pizzas do.

Best of all, there are only 9 grams of fat and 250 calories per serving (unless you add cheese like I do) and a serving is 1/3 of the whole pizza. So if you love pizza, but feel guilty about all the calories, definitely check this pizza out. It'll get the job done.

Food Review: Kashi U

I was perusing the cereal isle on Monday night, looking for something new and interesting and hopefully, on sale. And then I saw this:
It kind of jumped out at me because the box is so different-kind of cardboard box-y and natural-y. Then I saw it was a new Kashi cereal and I loves me some Kashi cereal. It was rather pricy at $4.99 a box, but I thought, what the heck...It'll be good blog food review material...so I got it. I splurged for you:)

I had my first bowl this morning and thought it was pretty good. Not the best cereal I've ever had, but pretty tasty. I loved that the flakes were very crunchy all the way til the end of the bowl. There's nothing worse than soggy cereal. (Although, Greg prefers soggy cereal. Blech.) I also thought the flakes were full of flavor, without the sugary sweetness of most cereals. And the walnuts were nice, too. I was most curious about the black currants and acai berries. They weren't chewy, which is a negative for me, because I'm all about some chewy raisins, cranberries and dates in my morning bowl. I could really only see one kind of fruit and I'm not really sure whether they were acai berries or currents, but whatever they were, they were sort of crunchy and very tart. One spoonful had something like 5 or 6 currants/berries and it was like ZING!!! I'm officially awake!

The best part about Kashi U is, of course, the healthiness of it. It was designed to promote the vitality of the 5 body systems: Heart, Bones, Immunity, Digestion and Mind. It is so refreshing to look at the ingredients of your food and see that it's packed full of vitamins, antioxidants, whole grains and fiber. More companies should look to Kashi as an example.

Another really cool thing about Kashi U is the packaging. Not only does it promote vitality of the body, but it also promotes vitality of the environment! The box is made from 100 percent recycled paper, and also contains 80 percent post-consumer content - the highest Kashi could source. Furthermore, the printer that produces the Kashi U box offsets all electricity use with non-polluting wind power and uses 100 percent biodegradable vegetable inks, which means the box is completely compostable.

Very cool. I just hope they put some coupons in the paper!

And here is another cool something that I stumbled upon. Our review of Wild Garden's hummus got a little notice. Click the link to see it and look at May 2008. Yeah, that's right. We're a "Young Generation Website Blog." Y'all better recognize.

Saboteur...

Whatever you do... stay away from these chips. If they are in your house.... they will call you from the couch... they will awake you in the middle of the night...

Fight the urge.

Or... go to World Market where they are on sale for $2.50 this week... but don't say you weren't warned.

Product Review: G2 by Gatorade

Allow me to introduce you to my new sports drink of choice:

Gatorade G2. In Orange flavor, preferably (I had to drink the grape flavor in the Eugene Marathon, and it worked alright, but it's no artificial orange flavor, I tell ya).

Sure, I was put off by the hype, too. Especially those commercials where the grass was following Derek Jeter as he walked and sipped. Ugggh. Anything with Derek Jeter in it turns me off. Oh, and the general gatorade commercials, where they've got beloved Keith Jackson talking about the origins of gatorade. Please. That's the LAST thing that makes me want to drink gatorade. Knowing that it was originally made for the Florida Gators. Blech. (Although, I must admit... if my alma mater had discovered it would be called Cockade... and I'm not quite sure that would have caught on.)

Okay, digressing... I didn't want to like the watered down, splenda infused sports drink. I really didn't. I mean, I know that drinking some type of sports drink is good for profuse sweaters like myself (yes, I'm one of those runners that end up with the white, gritty face mask after a long run). But... I bought some on a whim awhile back and I kinda fell in love with it. A bottle sat in my fridge for about 2 weeks until one day... while on a long run, I encountered a can of sunkist lying on the side of the road. I immediately started thinking about how yummy an orange soda would be. For the rest of the run, I fantasized about drinking an orange soda. When I got home and realized that I didn't have any orange soda... I remembered that I did have that bottle of orange G2 I had bought awhile back. I opened it, expecting not to like it... but, I loved it! It's not something that I want to drink more than 3-4 gulps of at a time, but it refreshing and remarkably thirst quenching. I always have a bottle in my fridge and love taking a big ole gulp after these steamy, summer runs.

Good Stuff on a Friday: Sweet Tunes and a Cranergy Review

I was a little tired getting up this morning for my run. Yep...this was my 4th morning in a row to run before work. I'm pretty sure that's hasn't happened since training for the last marathon. (knock on wood, knock on wood, knock on wood).

Sometimes I run with my ipod and sometimes I go without. Well, since I was still feeling pretty sleepy, I decided that this was a music kind of morning. But instead of grabbing my ipod, I grabbed Greg's for a little something different. His mix of tunes came from his dad's (humongous) CD collection and woo boy that really got me movin! Pop aka Papa Tone aka Rap Master T aka Paw Paw has got some sweet runnin jams! I knew he had great taste in music, but I didn't realize how much his favorite songs would pump me up.

Right now, I've been running slower than a 10 minute pace. I know it's because I've been out of training mode, but it's still a bit disappointing because I know I'm faster than that. Well, I think I may have found the key. This morning I ran my first mile around 8:30 and the second mile around 9:00. I did slow way down for the third, but overall, I'm happy to know that my short little legs can still move when they want to. All I need are some Papa Tone old school jams. Here's a sampling of what got me movin:

Ain't No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell

Maneater by Hall and Oates

Bad to the Bone by George Thorogood & The Destroyers

Get off of My Cloud by The Rolling Stones

Do You Love Me by The Contours

Some good stuff, right there. I'm going have to get him to make me a running mix for my own ipod!

The second good thing today is this:

This is Ocean Spray's new Cranberry Energy Drink. In addition to healthy cranberries, it contains green tea extract and B-vitamins. It contains only 50 calories and 12 g of sugar. Now I know that some people aren't too keen on cranberry juice because of the sour bitterness, but this is very light and goes down smooth. I'm not a huge artificial sweetener fan and this does contain Splenda, but after the first sip or two, I got used to the Splenda taste. I'm a fan.

I gotta tell ya...after my rocking morning run, a Cranergy and my usual two cups of green tea, I'm feeling pretty hyper and energetic!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (exclamation points to illustrate this fact) I'm thinking that I might need to run up the 24 flights of stairs in my building and do a few hall sprints to get some of this out of my system!

Woooooooooo! Have a great Friday:)

Food, Glorious Food

Lately, food has been center stage in my life. I think, by now, it is clear to long time readers of this blog that I'm all about some good food-especially good Italian food. Well, lucky for me, I spent the last four days here:

Memphis Italian Fest. This year, we were invited to be a part of a great team. Now before I get to the food stuff, let me first say that the best part of Italian Fest was our team--Oliveus. Team Oliveus is full of fun and crazy people that I'm now proud to call friends. All weekend long, we worked, cooked, ate, drank, laughed and danced together (in near 100 degree weather!!) I even found a new running partner who runs at the same pace as I do! That's hard to find!

Greg was on the cooking team and had some delicious stuff coming out of the kitchen all weekend long...vodka cream pasta (his specialty), pizzas, grilled eggplant sandwiches, spaghetti, spinach, bruschetta, seafood lasagna...YUM, YUM!! I'm just hoping the weight gain from food put in my mouth was equal to all the sweating that I did in the heat. Somehow I'm doubting that though...so now I'm trying have a couple of weeks of good, healthy food to get back on track.

Which brings me to the latest food review:

Wild Garden Hummus Dip. In case you don't know what hummus is, here's the Wikipedia definition-Hummus is a dip or spread made from cooked, mashed chickpeas, blended with tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and garlic. Hummus is a popular food in various local forms throughout the Middle Eastern world.

It's delicious, healthy and goes great with fresh veggies or pita chips. I also love to toast some good whole grain bread, spread on some hummus and stack on the tomatoes and sprouts. That's just what I like, but you can be creative because hummus is good on so many things.

There are only 35 calories per serving. It's low and sodium and is packed with protein, iron and fiber. It tastes so good, that it's hard to believe how good it is for you!

Drink Review: Zola Acai Power Juice

Every now and then, Amy and I write product or food reviews on this blog. As I think back, it seems like all of our reviews have been positive and written because we felt the need to share the love with our awesome readers. Well folks, today is the day that I'm gonna have to end those positive vibes. Today I'm a critic and I'm sorry to say that this juice downright sucks.

Mostly, I stick to water, green tea and milk. Ok, ok...beer and wine, too....there's no getting past you, is there? sigh...

But sometimes, the juice aisle in the grocery store just seems to be calling out to me. Maybe it's because the aisle is so pretty with it's bright colors and attractively shaped bottles.

Or perhaps it's because there are so many dang choices of flavors and brands these days. We can go the exotic route, with fruits like the pomegranate and acai, that have been the latest craze. Orange juice? Grape juice? Apple juice? No way!! Only babies drink those juices! I'm way too hip for that, man.

......You will now be hypnotized by the pretty colors and bottles.......

The other big thing with juices these days is the health aspect. When we started to hear warnings of the insanely high sugar content of juices, there became a rash of "All-Natural," "Organic," "Packed Full of Antioxidants!" and "Superfood" type juices. Now you could have your cake and eat it, too. A cake that was super-healthy and would cure all your ailments! Woo Hoo!

I love buying foods and drinks that are good for me and taste good. I will even admit that I love Odwalla's Superfoods juice, which looks like mildewed slime (sorry to put that image in your head). I'm not admitting to loving it, but the secret feeling I harbor within. It looks disgusting and people think you are some health-nut that has the willpower and determination to do anything it takes to be healthy...but, really...just between you and me... it's all for show. Secretly, I know that the stuff tastes darn good. It's a win-win situation.

Ok, right now I know that you are thinking...

Um...Isn't this supposed to be a review?

Will she ever shut-up about juice? Jeez.

Yes, this is a review of Zola Acai Antioxidant Power Juice.

Great name, huh? That's probably half the reason I bought it. The other reason was because they were on sale for 50% off. I guess there was a reason for that...

I tried the Acai + Blueberry flavor and it was chalky and bitter. A friend commented to me that it must not be good since I made a sour face every time I took a drink. I probably only had 5 sips before it went down the drain. So sad.

It's possible that acai is a bitter fruit anyway...I'm not sure, but I was not a fan. I was disappointed that I didn't like it because it also has added Omega-6 and Omega-9 fatty acids, 8 of the 9 essential amino acids, calcium, iron and replenishing electrolytes. Plus it has Guaraná powder. I have no idea what that is, but it sounds healthy so I like it.

Maybe the Original or Acai & Pineapple flavors are better, but I let you be the one to try cause I'm done with Zola.