The First 43: My Life Now

30 days of Awesome Arms completed.  Here is a little before and after. It is the same arm, Jeff just took today's photo instead of me taking a selfie in the mirror. Not quite as impressive as one of my friends (who did even better than awesome!) but you can still see a difference. We are now moving onto May's challenge "Mighty Muscle May." If you care to join me, here is the calendar care of Pinterest.  

  Southwestern Stuffed Peppers! I absolutely love stuffed peppers so I thought I'd give this recipe a try.  I changed it a little bit because of what I could find at my grocery store.  Here is how I made them. So delicious!  The recipe says it stuffs 4 peppers (8 when they are split in two) but honestly, they stuff 6 (12) peppers in total. It's a lot of mixture. Ingredients: 250 grams extra lean ground beef 1 small jar of salsa  1 cup of rice (dry, it will make 2 cups of cooked rice) 1/2 can of black beans 3/4 cups of frozen corn 1/3 cup of onion 1/2 cup of shredded old cheddar and mozzarella mix 1 tbsp Taco Seasoning (I used Old El Paso) Salt and pepper to taste. Directions:  Prep the peppers, cut in half and clean out the seeds. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Put them in a pan lined with foil. Cook ground beef once slightly browned, add onion and cook both through. While cooking that, boil water and make the rice. Add ...

The spring weather is finally on its way!!!! This means that it's time to get outside and get moving again. I'm actually really looking forward to breaking up with the treadmill at the gym for a little while, it really gets quite boring. I've only been running about 3km on the treadmill over the winter because I just get bored. Oh so bored. Running outside is much more difficult but it's also far more entertaining. I've been dog sitting this week and I've been taking her on walks daily which has really made me long for it to get just a touch warmer.  I signed up for a fun 5K in June with some friends, it's called Color Me Rad.  From what I've been told, it's more of a fun run than a run for time. Fine by me, and I look forward to being blasted with packs of colour! I've never run any kind of race so, I'm really looking forward to it and it gives me a really good excuse to keep up with my running over the next two months. https://www.c...

Who doesn't love a good Chocolate Chip Muffin??  I love them but really haven't made them in a long time - too much sugar, too many calories.   There was a recipe I was really wanting to try and lighten up and since our iron chef ingredient for the week was chocolate, it gave me the perfect excuse. The part that intrigued me about this recipe was that it called for sour cream. I'd never seen that before! These will now be a staple "goodie" in our home, I love them! I made a quite few changes to the original recipe, so here is how I made it:  Ingredients: 1 1/4 cups of all purpose flour 1 cup light sour cream 1/2 cup semi sweet chocolate chips 1/3 cup of sugar 2 tsp light margarine 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 3/4 teaspoon baking powder 3/4 teaspoon baking soda 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 large egg Directions: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Mix all the dry ingredients together in a bowl.  Set aside.  Mix all the wet ingredients together (I u...

Arm flab is disappearing. You can't see it in the photos but, I've got some pretty nice biceps going on. 10 more days of this Awesome Arms April calendar, wonder what fitness adventure I will take part in, in May! Jane (the doggie) photo bombed my photos. I couldn't get her to move so, you can see her sniffing around!

It's official, I've been working on my weight loss for 365 days!  I've lost just about 54 pounds in those 52 weeks. Here is a photo of me from last April and a photo from this past week.  So much has changed since a year ago and it's hard to believe that it's possible transform yourself in that amount of time.

Today marks 10 days of the Awesome Arms April calendar.  To be honest, I haven't done anything outside of the calendar exercises as I've just been running for exercise.  It's hard to see it in the photos but the little bit of jiggly bit beside my armpit is really tightening up. It's been one of my major trouble zones so, I'm really glad this is working.  20 days to go! I hope everyone else who is doing this is also having some good progress. My biceps are also looking quite nice but, I can't really capture it yet in a photo. Hopefully by the end of the month! APRIL 10 - 10 Days of Arms

  Another iron chef challenge recipe! The ingredient for this week was honey.  This is Honey Sesame Chicken . So good!  It's a recipe I found on Skinnytaste and you just throw it all in the slow cooker. Tastes great and makes your house smell great. I'll definitely be making this again! Here is the link to the recipe: http://www.skinnytaste.com/2013/02/crock-pot-sesame-honey-chicken.html The only changes I made to this recipe are as follows. I didn't use scallions, I subbed rice wine vinegar with red wine vinegar as I prefer it and I used Franks Red Hot instead of sriracha because I already had it in the fridge. Calories: 147/serving + rice of your choice and the recipe makes 8 servings. Enjoy!

  Bowtie Pasta Salad! Yum! What a delicious pasta salad this is!  It's really easy to make and quite versatile. Definitely worth making! Ingredients: 1 450g bag of Farfalle (Bowtie pasta) 1/2 Red Pepper, diced 1/2 Green Pepper, diced 3/4 cup of Carrots, diced 1/4 cup of Light Mayo 4 tsp Olive Oil 2 tbsp Red Wine Vinegar  1 cup shredded light Mozzarella Directions:  Bring a pot of water to a boil and cook pasta as directed.  While the pasta is boiling, chop up the vegetables and make the sauce.  Blend the mayo, vinegar and oil together with a whisk.  Grate the mozzarella cheese.  When the pasta is ready, strain and put into a bowl.  Add vegetables and sauce.  Once well blended, add the cheese. Mix.  Either serve it immediately or put it in the fridge to chill.  This recipe makes approximately 11 cups worth of pasta salad.  To make it even lighter, just skip the mozzarella but really, who wa...

Anyone decide to join me doing Awesome Arms April? I've decided to post a before photo so that I can do after photos later.  The first photo is from before I started focusing on arms in late February.  The other photos are from this week showing where I've started from for Awesome Arms April. The only real difference you can see for me is the "hollow" area in my arm pit, otherwise I didn't make much progress.  In my defence, I haven't been able to make it to the gym much the last month so any progress was good progress. I'm going to try to post weekly photos this month to show the arms progress I'm making (if any.) I will admit though that I am likely going to do more than the calendar as I focus this month on arms at the gym too.  Let's hope I can actually manage to sculpt a bit this month!