Healthy eating – don’t over complicate it!

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I think when it comes to healthy eating, quite often people go for the easy quick take out option as they assume it is too hard to make a fast, easy and healthy meal.

Let me tell you this is not true.

The majority of my meals take 30 mins to prepare and cook (unless I get sidetracked listening to music and dancing around while I cook – which does happen often)

*Side note – dancing around while you cook is a great way to burn some extra calories and is oh so much fun 🙂

The key to quick and easy healthy meals is not to complicate it.

Chop up veggies and add fresh herbs and garlic for flavour.

If I am chopping veggies – I always chop extra so I can use them for lunch and or dinner the next day (depending on how hungry my husband is and how many left overs I can keep).

Cooking meat and veggies separately allows you to only have to cook fresh meat for the 2nd night.

Some easy meat ideas:

Fry chicken with garlic, lemon and honey.

Bake salmon just with lemon and pepper.

Fry meatballs with cumin and or cinnamon.

Fresh herbs, turmeric, cumin, garlic, pepper go a long way to making things absolutely easy, and tasty.

Here’s an easy lunch bowl I made up over the weekend (not going to lie was pretty proud of this one)

 

QUINOA BOWL

 

Cook quinoa as per instructions on packet.

Fry asparagus, tomatoes, kale with a dash of balsamic vinegar & half a small garlic cube.

Mash up 1 x avo add lemon, pepper and other half of garlic cube.

Add a bit of salmon, a few nuts

Arrange nicely for a photo then moosh it all together and eat 🙂

Who am I?

Today; in between getting up at 5am teaching two morning fitness classes, doing remedial work with a lady at a nursing home, learning choreography, doing my invoices, meditating for 20 minutes and mentally preparing for the next two classes of the evening, I caught my reflection in my blender and wondered who the frick am I ?

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I mean seriously, look at this blender filled with green goodness, when did I turn from the KFC eating high school punk to the exercising, spiritual, kale drinking smoothie I have become?

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Who is this fit, flexible girl I see staring back at me from the pictures, this same girl who used to hate the gym who now teaches at them promoting fitness on a regular basis.

This small framed girl who is suddenly (without warning it feels ) is covered on muscles.

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This girl who is still me, who is still the same but is also completely different.

This girl who just went to Perth with her girlfriends and ate her body weight in cheese, bread, chocolate, coffee and wine~
~ and would do that every weekend if she could 🙂

This girl who teaches yoga to people to relax, then blurts out words excitedly, quickly in an anything but relaxed manner.

This girl who teaches body balance, then trips over nothing on the way out of class.

This pilates trainer who has a strong core but can not do a handstand.

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This girl who lives life with reckless abandon who craves adventure yet yearns for serenity.

This girl who feels so young at heart, yet knows she is growing older.

Who am I ?

A walking contradiction, or simply a girl wanting to experience everything, to be everything, to feel everything.

To be the best person I can be inside and out.

To be who I am without even really knowing who I am myself!
So my advice to you all, should you find yourself staring at your reflection through a green mush of kale, don’t question, don’t stress, don’t judge – just be!

When you can’t be stuffed preparing a fancy meal why not try stuffing a capsicum instead

Do you sometimes crave a meal that is a little different, but the idea of putting thought into a meal just seems too much?

I do; often!

I love cooking, I love creating in the kitchen, but there are times (normally when I am tired or have limited time) that I just can not be bothered.

A few weeks back I was tired, I was hungry, I opened the fridge about 5 times, I opened the cupboard and I repeated this process a few times, stomping around the kitchen sooking to myself that I had nothing to eat, when I decided it was time to stop being an idiot.

I grabbed the two red capsicums from the fridge and pretended I didn’t notice the haggard looking carrots, I willed myself to be creative and before I knew it I was preparing stuffed capsicums and if I may be modest, they were terrific.

Here is what I did.

Cut the capsicums in half take out the middle bit.

Put a little bit of olive oil on the top and  place them under the grill until the top changes colour.

While these are cooking, boil some water and make some couscous.

In a saucepan fry a little bit of garlic, mushroom and tomato chopped into cubes (I add a handful of fresh herbs from my garden) then when almost cooked add a tiny bit of balsamic vinegar.

Mix this all together with your couscous and I add pine nuts as well.

Then take your (hopefully not too chargrilled)  capsicums out from the griller, stuff it with your couscous combo and put a tiny bit of cheese on top.

Place it back under the griller until the cheese melts and goes a little bit brown.

As I type it all out, it seems a little more time-consuming than it actually is, trust me it really doesn’t take long at all.

I did try it with green capsicums the other day, which actually wasn’t as nice as the red ones, green ones take longer to cook and are not as sweet.

Please let me know if you try this and have any other suggestions, additions etc.

Happy stuffing and happy eating.

x

Kale – super food

It’s the start of a new year, and I like millions of others around the world are busy making plans to “eat better and get fitter”.

Well as a fitness instructor, I have the fitness bit all sorted, and while my husband and I eat very healthily already, there are always things that can be improved.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not (and never will) one of those girls who drinks water only when out and has nibbles on a few lettuce leaves and thinks that’s enough…..

Sure if that lettuce was a comfortable bed for a range of other veggies and meats then count me in.

I love a good steak, and recently I read that kale is the “new beef”. I knew it was a superfood but it has cow like properties – amazing 🙂

So off I went to buy my bunches of kale amongst other things as I figure putting that into a blender rather than a chunk of porterhouse steak makes way more sense.

I made (thanks to a recipe from a friend) a healthy, and surprisingly refreshingly delicious drink of kale, green apple and coconut water.

Kale is not only super it is versatile, throw it in your omelette, put it in your stir-fry, make some brown rice with kale, avocado and mango.

These are just some of the super things I have been doing recently with my super food.

Here is an interesting article I read recently on the top ten health benefits of Kale.

Resting your body is just as important as moving it – true story

Anyone reading this post who knows the amount of classes I have already done this week, may find this hypocritical and as my mum reads my blogs and always worries I am overdoing it (hi mum, love you) I am not going to actually tell you how many classes I have done.

What I am going to tell you is how I am coping with doing x amount of classes.

Aside from walking like a zombie, speaking as though English is my second language and spilling things all over myself frequently I am in fact coping!

I am coping by resting in-between classes.  In fact this week has felt like a crazy blur and I think on Tuesday I had convinced myself it was already Thursday.

I have been doing 5:45am classes, I will then come home and sleep for an hour or two then do my next class, rest, eat, teach again and repeat the process all over again.

As much as we all like to think we are invincible, and as much as I promote the theory of pushing and challenging yourself, there are limits.

We are human, we need rest, our muscles need the correct nourishment to thrive, and that nourishment comes in the form of eating well, drinking water to re-hydrate and resting.

It is counter productive not to do so!

As always I learnt that the hard way.

If you are exercising frequently you NEED to eat and rest frequently or I dare say you are without knowing it, undoing all the good work you set out to do.

Think about your computer, your smart phone – they perform well until they don’t! We reboot them and then wallah, they leap back into action refreshed reawakened.  Our bodies are the same!

The more we work them, the more we need to treat them with the rest they deserve.

Resting your body is just as important as moving it!