So be sure to check out the newly revamped www.AHealthyVegan.com

Photo by Mr_Stein

We are currently in Provo, Utah visiting my sister-in-law and her beautiful family.  It is always a little worrisome visiting some place new.  At home we know the stores and the places to find our go to vegan things, visiting a place we have never been makes this a bit harder.  I try to do a research before we go, but it’s never as good as just visiting the stores in the area and finding out for yourself.  We have only been here a day and we have already found some amazing grocery stores, places like the Sunflower Farmers Market (which is not actually a farmers market, but is kinda like a Trader Joes or Whole Foods) and Good Earth Foods.

We are on vacation and it is so hard for me to stick with a healthy lifestyle.  So often I just say to myself, “Hey you’re on vacation it’s ok to have that extra cookie, or that extra whatever.”  Now I haven’t really been working out much lately but even if I was this would also be put on hold while on vacation, but I don’t know why.  For me, at this point in my life exercising is still a chore, it’s still something I would rather not be doing.  So vacation equals no workout, but I want to be a person who does workout on vacation (I know that sounds weird).  There is even a trail right next to our hotel room that goes past mountains and a river and I thought “I should go out and run on it in the morning.”  But, will I?  Probably not, how do I get the motivation?  Motivation is absolutely the hardest thing for me to keep up with, even after I weighed my lowest ever this past friday.  How do I stay motivated?

Anyway, I will try to be conscious about eating while here in Utah even though it is tempting to slip back into more processed food that is easier to prepare.  It is really beautiful here with all of the mountains around, it is really makes me want to get outside and go for a hike or something.  We’ll see if that actually happens, for the time being my five nieces and nephews are keeping me plenty busy.

Picked fresh from our garden

Fresh picked right from our garden.

I made a lot of raw food pasta, some soup, and I had a smoothie for dinner one night.  I even went to the movies and took raw food popcorn in the form of bite size cauliflower covered in nutritional yeast and old bay.  I did wish that I had more things to snack on during the day as I did get hungry in between meals.  Overall I would be willing to doing another week of raw but I should probably have more plans in place for meals, snacks and stuff like that.  The meals that I prepared were very tasty and easy to do but often I was missing one or two ingredients so I made do.

I decided to go back to some cooked foods today so that I could eat some things that were potentially gonna go bad in the fridge.  I went overboard, ate too much for lunch and now I feel over stuffed, which is something I never felt when eating only raw.  Previously in the week I could eat a huge bowl of raw pasta and sauce and not feel guilty.  This is not the case when I eat a bowl of rice, lentils and caramelized onions.  I need to learn moderation which I knew from the beginning would be the hardest thing for me.

It’s a process right?

An organic gala apple

raw tomato and basil bisque

Check out this quick video on how I generally make my green smoothies.

Green Smoothie; 2 apples, 1 banana, whole head of kale, frozen raspberries, 2 dates

Photo by Jill Clardy

I am all by myself this week.  Michelle is off at a Montessori conference and the cat and I get to spend some quality time together.  Usually when Michelle goes away I take the opportunity to eat really bad food.  I would go out and eat really crappy food.  To be honest I was kinda looking forward to doing it this time as well, but something changed.

The Raw Food Lifestyle is something that has intrigued me for a while.  We have a couple of raw food recipe books and I have always wanted to go raw for a couple of days.  At home, I do a lot of the cooking and I didn’t really want to experiment with raw food on Michelle.  Since she is away until Friday i’ve decided to spend the week and focus on simple raw foods.

After I dropped her off at the airport I came home and made a big green smoothie that I drank for breakfast and lunch.

Another thing that I tend to do when Michelle is away for a couple of days is spend a lot of time at the movies where I can eat a lot of popcorn.  While I was initially sad that I wouldn’t be able to eat popcorn and drink soda at the movies I decided to make my own.  I cut up cauliflower into bite size chunks and mixed it with nutritional yeast, salt, and old bay seasoning.  It was delicious.  Luckily I was able to sneak it into the movies.

For dinner I made some raw pasta out of a zucchini with a spiralizer and made a cheesy sauce for it out of cashews, a red bell pepper, cayenne pepper, and salt.  It was so amazing, luckily I had some left over for lunch today.

After dinner I did have some dark chocolate and a beer, so it wasn’t a completely raw day, but today will be.  So far today I have had an apple and leftovers from dinner last night.  For dinner I am gonna have a nice big smoothie with greens and fruit.