Berry and yogurt salad dressing

Here is a super easy salad dressing that I have been making every day.

Ingredients:

6 oz berries

4 oz homemade soy yogurt

1/2 Tablespoon balsamic or apple cider vinegar (optional)

1 T flax-chia seeds (optional--actually tastes better without)

Blend in a blender.  Pour on your salad.  I make a huge salad for lunch with lettuce, spinach, kale or arugula, maybe a little raw cabbage, mushrooms, onion, red bell pepper, bean sprouts.   that's been my winter salad anyway.   I fill a big bowl and then dump the dressing on.  mmmmm.

Fitness Update

I mentioned in a previous post that I joined a 60 day fitness challenge at my gym a few months ago.  I am shocked, shocked to tell you that, guess who won the challenge?   the wimpiest one in the class!  yeah, me!  Here is the white board showing my victorious accomplishments:

I just found out yesterday that I won prizes too.  I got 3 personal training sessions, and 1 month membership to a climbing gym.  Those will be fun to cash in on.

One thing that helped me win is that we earned points for eating a Whole Foods Plant-Based diet!    I also improved my fitness, attended the classes regularly, converted some body fat to muscle, and took a lot of yoga classes, all of which earned points.  The best thing I learned from the challenge was that, by golly, I can improve!  Our classes are repeated 3 times each month.  Before the challenge, I was content with just showing up to class and getting through it.  Now I log my exercise, time, weight, etc, and try to improve each time the class is repeated.  I made some substantial improvements in areas that surprised me, like some challenging core exercises and weights.  I had a mindset that I'm weak and there is nothing to be done about it but now I'm thinking I can get a little bit stronger.

Now I have a new challenge.  I'm hoping to do a backpacking trip next fall that I had to cancel this fall.  So I signed up to climb the Hancock building in Chicago on Feb. 25.  That's 94 floors.  I started training about 3 weeks ago with my basement stairs.  I started with 10 flights in a day and am increasing by 1 flight a day.  I'm up to 32 flights right now.   Fun tools to help me with that are my clicker and my stair log posted on the refrigerator.
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Here are the stairs that I am becoming close personal friends with:

Opportunity to Participate in a Research Study

I signed up to participate in a "Nutritarian Women's Health Study" run by the Nutritional Research Foundation.   If you follow a Nutritarian lifestyle (Dr. Fuhrman's plan) and want to participate, go to this link.

Monkey Bar Gym 60-Day Challenge

I had to cancel my planned backpacking trip due to an injury of my travel companion.  To keep me motivated for next year, I joined a 60-day challenge at my gym.  It's fun.  And the best thing of all is that the gym owner promotes a whole-foods plant based diet.  You get points for attending classes and improving fitness, but I think you can score the most points for each day that is plant-perfect. Is that cool or what?  We also get points for logging our food.  We can do it simply by just writing down what we eat but they also suggest we could use myfitnesspal.  So I started doing that just for the challenge.  You can see my food logs there--I'm barbarawhitney182.  I don't know if I want to lose weight or not.  I'm at Dr. Fuhrman's recommended weight but I still have a tummy.  But maybe that's just life for a 55 year old who weighed 30 lbs more a year ago.   I think I won't focus on the weight, just staying on my food plan and scoring points with the exercise classes.

Updating the Blog

I’ve updated my links to the right to reflect my current thinking.  I now believe that healthy fat is an important part of my diet so I took off the links to sites that promote extremely low-fat diets.  I’ve recently discovered some vegan Registered Dieticians (RDs) whose recommendations fit very well with my experience and make a lot of sense to me.  I’ve read the new edition of Becoming Vegan by Brenda Davis and Vesanto Melina, and think that is an excellent resource for anyone who is vegan.   I’m still exploring these sites.  The Reasonable Vegan site is not even about health.  Even though my blog is about health, I’m an ethical vegan first and this blog has many articles of interest for me.  This reminds me that I have noticed that most of the vegans I know are not any healthier than the general population and I’m concerned that some appear to be less healthy.  I think many vegans lack some knowledge of simple ways to make their diet much more healthy.  I think it’s important for us to thrive on a healthy diet so we don’t feel the need to go against our core values and start consuming animal products again.   The Vegan RD website has a few easy-to-read articles that tell you pretty much all you need to know to get enough protein and calcium, and to thrive on a healthy diet.

I'm also updating some of my featured posts that are linked at right.  It will take a few days to get through all of those.

Tostadas

This is a fun lunch I make for housemate.

Ingredients:
2 corn tortillas
some beans seasoned with chili & cumin powder
little bit of tomatoes chopped
little bit of cilantro chopped
little bit of lime juice
little bit of avocado

Use these to make the shells:

My tortillas are in the freezer.  I thaw for 10 sec in the microwave, then smash them between two of these pans and heat in the oven (350 F) for, say 10 minutes, then take the top pan off and toast for, say 5 minutes--the longer the better without burning.

Training Plan

I am hoping to do a backpacking trip this fall.  There is a situation out of my control that may cause me to cancel.  But in the hopes I can go, I've started training.  Here is my training plan.  The top table is a plan, the bottom, what I actually do.  I'm having fun doing it.  MBG is Monkey Bar Gym, where I go for exercise class.  Devil's Lake is a state park with some 500 ft bluffs.  That's as steep as it gets around here.  I do a 5 mile walk around the lake climbing 2 bluffs.  It's very pretty.

Update:   The trip was cancelled.  But I'm hoping to go in 2016.  I should be in even better shape by then.  I'll keep training.