So here’s the truth, it’s been really hard to get motivated to workout. Everyone says once you get into a workout routine, that it gets easier but I’m having a hard time believing that’s true. It’s so easy to convince myself to not go workout, between the kids schedules and my night job. On a regular basis I find myself justifying the lack of workouts I’ve been doing, simply because I’m tired or there seems to be no time.
Which I know is ridiculous because there are tons of people, that have more hectic and stressful lives than I do. I won’t deny it as much as it pains me to say, it really boils down to me being lazy. I’ll be honest though there’s never been a time, when I’ve regretted doing a workout. I just loath cardio it’s so boring, it’s like torture.
It’s actually the biggest reason why I bought myself, a Fitbit Charge 2 at the end of November. I wanted and needed to see how many calories I was burning during my workouts, and it’s been giving me a little bit of a motivational push to walk more.
It keeps track of my heart rate, my steps, how many calories I’ve burned, and you can even set it to notify you during the day to remind you to get walking between certain hours. When you download the app, you can track your food, your calories, your water intake, your weight and even challenge friends to step matches.
Inviting your friends to a step challenge is great, especially if you’ve got a competitive personality like me. I can’t even count the times, I found myself pacing back and forth in the apartment an hour before midnight. Just so that I could beat the people, in my challenge group it’s some competitive fun.
I bought my Fitbit on sale during a Black Friday deal, I was nervous about the purchase since I read so many mixed reviews. So far I love it and the only thing that bums me out, is the fact that it’s not waterproof. It’s awesome and since I do a laborious job, I’m able to keep track of my calorie burn. At the start of my shift I just turn my watch onto “Workout” mode, then it tracks me as I go.
I never knew until I bought myself this Fitbit, but I burn an average of 2900-3200 calories per shift. Those are calories I’m burning, just by doing my job! During an average shift, I walk between 10,000-13,000 step depending on how busy we are.
My second nemesis is food prepping, it’s so easy to say “were tired, we can just go eat somewhere or order in”. It’s a pretty hard habit to break, when I come back from working and it’s 7am I don’t feel like making myself breakfast. Keera and Zaden eat some breakfast, then their off to school during the week. Once they’ve gone I usually give Emilee breakfast, and once she’s finished eating we head to bed for a bit.
More often than not, I don’t eat breakfast and I don’t have food in my system until after lunch. This is a terrible habit, and it doesn’t help with weight-loss. The body goes into fat storage mode, because it thinks that it’s starving. However I’m trying to change this habit, so this morning I decided to prep a couple of things. I know that it won’t be enough for more than a couple of days, but it’s better than nothing for now.
I decided to make some breakfast wraps with some leftovers we had in the fridge, cheese, tomatoes, green and red peppers. I don’t know if this is how I’ll make them in the future, or even if I’ll like them after they’ve been frozen and reheated. I’m thinking this might be a learn as I go type of thing.With my first wrap I cooked three eggs scrambled, then I added all my toppings together. I ended up sprinkling on shredded cheese onto my eggs, after they were cooked and on my tortilla.
With the other wraps that I made, I ended up adding my shredded cheese to my eggs before I scrambled and cooked them. Then I put everything in the tortilla wraps, like before. I figured out that I’d probably want to eat two for breakfast. I ended up making five of them, and then I ran out of peppers. So I ate two for breakfast, and then wrapped the rest and put them in the freezer.
I know that’s probably not enough, but the whole process takes quite a bit of time. It also doesn’t help running out of ingredients for them, which was okay honestly because I wasn’t really feeling up to making anymore of them.
Once I finished eating breakfast, I washed up some blueberries and layed them out on a baking sheet to dry. I’m trying to get better with eating breakfast, so I recently started getting into the habit of having oatmeal for breakfast. I’m guilty of buying the maple and brown sugar oatmeal packets, I know that eating the plain stuff is probably better for me but I’ve eaten worse things.
Oatmeal is much more filling than most of the other stuff I’d eat for breakfast, and usually I add fresh berries. Most of the time it’s either blueberries, raspberries, or strawberries. Which works out because we buy all of our berries in bulk, it’s budget friendly since we buy from a local place. When we buy berries most of the time we end up getting more berries, than we can eat in a week.
To reduce waste I like to wash and cut up the berries, then put half of them in the freezer. I’ve done this in the past and I even wrote a blog post about eating healthy on a budget CLICK HERE.
It seems like common sense now, but when I first started to freeze my berries I did it completely different. When I first started freezing my berries, I would wash them then dry them and store them in Ziploc together. Now I wash them, and dry them then put them on a baking sheet. Once they are on the baking sheet, I put them in the freezer just long enough for them to freeze slightly. Then I transfer them to a Ziploc bag, this process prevents them from sticking together.
In the future I’m planning on storing the berries in my reusable containers that can go in the freezer, so that I can reduce the waste of Ziplocs. Overall I’m pleased with this system, because it prevents our berries from going bad before we can eat them all. This reduces wastes, and gives us fresh frozen berries at our disposal.
Since a lot of the berries are in the freezer, what I’ve been doing lately is when I go to cook my oatmeal I add the frozen berries right away. This gives them time to defrost while the oatmeal cooks, the unfortunate part is that the berries do bleed the juice but it doesn’t change the flavour. Also frozen berries can give your smoothie, or milkshake an extra cold touch.
Just think the possibilities are truly endless, when it comes to experimenting in the kitchen. I know that I’ve got quite away to go as far as knowledge to cooking, and different types of food prep etc. That just makes me excited, because I’ve learnt so much so far. I’m just starting my journey, and I’m hoping that you’ll tag along.
The best thing that can happen is, we discover things that simplify our lives and new foods we love… And I suppose (I’m going to be optimistic here), that the only con would be figuring out foods you don’t like.