Author: Jade

Finding Motivation

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It’s hard to stay motivated and want to do anything when the world we are living in has basically been turned upside down. Everything is cancelled and we have been ordered to stay home. I don’t normally mind being home but now that I’m being told I have to, I’m climbing the walls….

So how can we stay motivated and positive while everything around us seems so negative?

Surround yourself with people that motivate you!

In my opinion, the most important thing is to surround yourself with people who are positive, encouraging, and motivational! People feed off of one another. Positivity breeds positivity, in my experience! Those are the people that will pick you up when you are down and be your biggest cheerleaders when you need them. They will remind you that set backs aren’t the end of the world.

Identify triggers and work to reduce them!

If you are like me you know what causes you to fall off the band wagon…..Stress can send me into a downward spiral in a heart beat if I let it. And my day job is extremely stressful. I stress eat and lose motivation to workout because what’s the point when I can’t stop shoving food in my mouth. This is something I actively have to work to control daily.

Can I just up and quit my job? No that’s not realistic! But I have found that if I practice good self care, my stress levels become manageable. Taking that “me” time, and forcing myself to complete my daily workout starts my day off on the right foot. Does it sometimes derail by lunch time, yes, but setting up clear boundaries when it comes to my job has also helped. For example, I will not take work calls from anyone but my boss, or someone higher in in the organization after 5pm.

Remember change is hard!

My mom and I recently had a conversation about this exact topic! When people start trying to get healthier they want immediate results….which rarely happens! Remind yourself often to make small changes with small goals and settle into those new routines before changing something else.

“Aim small, miss small”

This will help your sense of accomplishment as you hit those smaller goals! It also helps to prevent setbacks from derailing you. Just remember tomorrow is another day and you get to start over!

Practice gratitude!

Lastly, take time every day to acknowledge the good in your life and what you accomplished that day! This will keep you in the right state of mind to accomplish great things! When you focus on the positives in life you just are in a better mood over all!

Freezer Meals 1

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With everyone stuck at home and shorter lunch breaks I’m finding myself digging thru the freezer to find something quick and easy, which often means not on my meal plan. On Sunday’s I meal plan and prep some times that means simply figuring out what we are going to eat for the week and writing it down. Other days like to day it means spending a few hours in the kitchen cooking multiple meals!

This weeks meal prep was freezer meals that I can share with my mom and grandparents and focused on ground meals that use ground meat as well as using up some bananas that are starting to get kinda old.

First up was Low Carb Lasagna Meatballs, these are a great make ahead meal that you can freeze. Today I made a single batch but that still gives me 3 meals worth of meatballs. I plan to serve them with Dreamfield spaghetti noodles for a meal that will make the whole family happy!

Secondly I made Cheeseburger Pie from Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook page 149. I cut this recipe in half and made 6 lunch size meals out of it using 3 steamer bags of veggies. I made smaller portions for my grandparents and mom and larger ones for me. These can either be frozen or eaten this week.

I also wanted to throw together some meatballs that we could pull out and server either as subs or with pasta for quick dinner options. My meatball recipe of choice is from Cooks.com. I doubled the recipe and made up bags of 15 meatballs that I can freeze and pull out for a meal!

Lastly I had bananas that needed used up so I threw together 4 batches of Bam Waffles from Trim Healthy Table page 342. These waffles are amazing and easy to throw together, since you simply put all the ingredients in the blender mix it up and cook! They freeze and reheat well making them a perfect weekday breakfast

Homemade Basics

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What a crazy time this is right now! Grocery stores emptied of basically everything! Amazon Prime is taking days to fill Prime orders because most of the control has been told to stay home as much as possible! I’ll be honest, I work from home full time and this whole situation is taking a definite toll.

All that being said, I figured it might be a good time to talk about some of my favorite recipes for some homemade basics. Bread, butter and pasta!

Bread

I’m just gonna admit it, I’m a sucker for homemade bread! I did narrow it down to a few basic recipes for you though.

I absolutely love recipes from Jill at the The Prairie Homestead! I haven’t tried one of her recipes that I didn’t like and, purchased her cookbook as soon as it was available!

Jill Winger from The Prairie Homestead

Check out these bread recipes from her:

  • French Bread – nice and crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside this is favorite of Ray’s
  • Honey Whole Wheat Hamburger Buns – I love whole wheat and my grandparents are diabetics so this is a pretty healthy option for them

Butter

Homemade butter is easy and only really requires one or two ingredients, and some elbow grease or a stand mixer! Think back to elementary school, I bet most of you made butter. Pour some heavy cream into a glass jar and shake, and shake, and shake! I actually had one of my boys do this for Christmas dinner this year, he lasted about 30 minutes before we decided to pour it into the stand mixer. And it was super yummy to eat on the fresh baked bread!

For good measure here are the instructions for making butter from The Prairie Homestead. I always make the sweet cream butter, but have heard that cultured butter is excellent.

Pasta

Now pasta can be a little harder depending on what type of noodles you want. But, if you just want basic pasta and don’t care, what shape it is you can get away with just a rolling pin and no other special equipment. (However pasta rollers definitely make it easier!)

As a child, I got spoiled by my grandma and as a result there are certain dishes that I will only server with homemade pasta. The first being my chicken noodle soup and the second is turkey gravel with giblets the day after Thanksgiving!

This recipe from Shaye at The Elliott Homestead is the closest I have ever found to what my grandma taught me from memory!

Check out her book From Scratch! You won’t be disappointed!

Hope you stay safe and healthy as do your families!

Self Care

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Self Care is more important than ever as we are all more cut off from our social lives than ever. This social distancing has so many side affects that you don’t even really think about!

What is Self Care?

If you google “What is self care?” you get the following definition

self-care
/ˌselfˈker/
noun
The practice of taking action to preserve or improve one’s own health.
The practice of taking an active roll in protecting one’s own well-being and happiness, in particular during periods of stress. “expressing oneself is an essential form of self-care”

Oxford Dictionary

To me it means taking time out of my busy life to focus on my needs. As a working mother of two very active kids, with a husband that works long hours, this can be a real challenge!

How I Practice Self Care

My boys are eight now, and I still struggle with finding time for self care! I’m definitely better at it now than I was when they were little. I remember having a conversation with a friend when they were little, and talking about how guilty I felt about taking time for myself and how anxious it made me feel. But over time, I have found that a lot of that anxiety was actually being caused by the fact that I was totally burnt out!

I started small, I would go on a walk daily. When I first started, I actually loaded the kids in the stroller and took them with me. Then I increased the distance and added jogging. My goal at the time was to be able to do 5ks with friends. I did several, and was pretty happy with the finish times I was getting.

Then life changed and my priorities had to change with it. As a result, I started paying way more attention to my diet. The better I eat, the better I feel over all.

For the last year, I have been doing Beachbody workouts at home off and on, and since Christmas, I’ve been pretty consistent about making sure I get them in daily with my mom! So not only am I getting in my workout, but I’m also getting in some important mother daughter time.

I also watch YouTube in my down time. Mostly farming vlogs. My favorite is Justin Rhodes and I can’t recommend them enough. The channel is family friendly and teach awesome permaculture concepts! With the addeded bonus that my kids really enjoy watching their 4 kids.

I also feel that taking on volunteer roles revolving around in my kids activities, is self care for me. Because I work from, home my social interactions would be limited if I didn’t have those outlets.

Self Care Ideas

  • Set aside a dedicated amount of time daily/weekly to journal or read
  • Take up a hand craft (knitting/crochet/sewing)
  • Set aside time to watch something you really enjoy weekly.
  • Get a massage
  • Purchase and use an adult coloring book (these are super fun)
  • Listen to audio books
  • Work in the garden
  • Take a long shower/bath

This list can go on and on, but the point is to stop and take time for you to do what you enjoy and give back to yourself.

What are you doing to practice self care?

Third Generation on the farm

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Moving Back

While I always wanted to move back to the farm, I never thought moving back to the farm with my husband would be a possibility. Don’t get me wrong; life in Mercer was amazing. We had just enough land to do what I wanted and amazing neighbors that let us hunt and hike on their property. We gardened and had ducks that we butchered ourselves. But it wasn’t the farm life I grew up with.

We moved back to the farm in 2017 before the twins started school and have slowly taken over the farm. My parents still help us a lot, and we wouldn’t be able to to do what we do without their help and guidance. But they also tell us often that it’s ours and that we have to make the final decision about new projects.

It’s funny how as a kid I hated the farm work, and now my happiest days are those spent with family and the animals putting in a hard day! Maybe it’s because farm work is tangible compared to my day job. At the end of long day baling hay, the barn is stacked full of hay. When we cut wood, the trailer gets full. Even something as simple as working in the garden harvesting or weeding provides a sense of pride and satisfaction.

We have added turkeys, rabbits, goats and ducks to the farm since moving home and learned a lot. The turkeys and rabbits have since gone to the freezer/dinner table, and we have had several batches of ducks as they are our absolute favorite meal. We are still debating the goats, but we will likely get rid of them this year in favor of other projects we would like to do. I don’t consider any of these things failures–just learning experiences! And we may come back to them later. For right now, my only real concern is raising kids that know and understand where their food comes from and and at what cost!

History

Krazy Achers was purchased back in the 70s by my grandparents as a place to escape with their three children and to keep them out of the trouble that went with living in Pittsburgh. Or at least that’s what they always said! I believe they just loved the farm life and wanted that life to transition back to when they retired.

Grandpa loved the name of the farm. The original sign hangs in my garage waiting to be rehung. I didn’t really get it as a kid, but now I get why it fits. We are all a little crazy, and let me tell you, we certainly ache!

Clearly my father fell in love with the farm because he moved to it full time when he graduated high school. He worked for Northwestern REC starting out on the brush crew and ending up as a supervisor. He met my mom through friends from work, and they purchased land across from the farm where they built a house. We lived there until I was 16 and then we moved into the farm house when my grandparents passed the farm onto them.

Looking to the future

Our main goal at this point is to teach the boys small time farming and hope they fall in love with it as our greatest hope is that either they or one of their cousins will want to take it over when Ray and I are old and gray!

We also want to teach the boys that about money. I try to do business related projects with them when we can. They have planted and sold flowers that they were responsible for keeping watered and taken care of. They have also bought one of the turkeys and helped take care of them and were rewarded with getting to keep the money when we sold them. We hope to continue this trend.

 

Legging Review

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As a prefix to this I want to state that I have only tried the specific lines of leggings listed below.

I started out with Lularoe and still wear them as my comfy causal choice but not for working out unless everything else I own is dirty. While I was a bit turned off by the price of the Zyia leggings after trying several others they are where I will spend my money. They are high quality and the older I get I find that quality is far more important than quantity.

For reference I’m 5′ 6″ tall and wear size 10 tall women’s jeans.

1. Zyia

Light n Tight Hi-Rise 7/8

  • Size L
  • I love these!
  • They have a fantastic fit (nice and long) and feel
  • The compression is great
  • They come in a bunch of different colors and lengths which is also nice.
  • The ones pictured were actually a close out price so while I don’t love the print they were a steal!

Pocket Light n Tight Hi-Rise 7/8

  • Size Large (sorry no picture of these I ruined mine while coaching baseball last year and haven’t replaced them yet)
  • These are actually more awesome than the regular ones because you can fit your phone in the pocket!

2. Beachbody

3/12/2020 – After a quick look this morning it appears that all their legs have currently been pulled

Empower 7/8

  • Purchased size M per sizing chart
  • Awesome compression
  • Definitely longer than the Fusion Wave 7/8 but still not really long enough
  • Because they aren’t long enough then tend to slip down when doing squats and other leg work
  • Would purchase again to use on less leg intense days

Fusion Wave 7/8

  • Purchased size M per sizing chart
  • I couldn’t even get these up to where they were supposed to sit on my waste because the legs were so tight.
  • They just weren’t comfortable because they clearly didn’t fit properly
  • I didn’t end up keeping them as they just didn’t work for me

3. Victoria’s Secret

  • Size 12
  • I love these!
  • You can order them in different lengths
  • They are extremely comfortable
  • They don’t slip down
  • All that being said they don’t have nearly as much compression as the Zyia and Beachbody leggings and as a result aren’t as flattering
  • Oddly enough retail price on these are the same as Zyia but I got the pairs that I have on sale 2/$50 which is why I took the chance.

4. Lularoe

  • Purchase sizes One size fits all and Tall and Curvy
  • I like the tall and curvy for length but the one size actually fit better in the waist
  • No compression
  • Good for yoga days or just part of a fun outfit

Creating a Healthy Living Community

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As I think back on how this whole crazy journey began for me and when I really started to focus on my health, it all comes down to my twin boys. Carrying twins is hard. Life after they are delivered is hard and crazy, and I just didn’t have time or the desire to focus on myself. Then, one morning I woke up, and they were 2 years old. I was exhausted and unable to keep up!

I started walking and jogging and even did several 5Ks with my work, but I plateaued. That winter, I completely back slid because I couldn’t exactly take twin 2 year-old boys out in the stroller for a 3-mile run when it’s 10 degrees out. I got completely frustrated. By that point, my kids were in daycare with a family member 3 days a week, and she was having some of her own health issues. Together, we started working to motivate each other. We would meet up to walk, and she introduced me to THM. I started losing weight again slowly.

During one of our meet ups, we were talking about different workout/nutrition plans. While there were a ton of great plans on the market, most were ridiculously priced or took a ton of time. As a society, why do we constantly price people out of things? We price kids out of sports and activities. We price most people out of getting/staying healthy in a lot of ways. In my experience, I always have had much better success with a strong support system. Most of the weight-loss programs out there require that you spend a ton of money monthly in order to to get any sort of real support.

I went home with that conversation rattling around in my brain. With all the technology available and social media making connecting to others so easy, why did it have to cost anything at all to support one another?

I use Facebook for everything, so it wasn’t really that big of leap to propose creating a group that we could invite our friends to so we could support each other as we worked to get healthier. I think we started out with about 20 ladies just talking about what was and wasn’t working for each of us and encouraging each other.

That was in 2016. Now in 2020, we have 200+ members, about 100 of which are active at some point during the month. We run daily challenges and steps challenges all completely free to our members and weight-loss challenges that are just $5 to participate in with a chance to win the pot!

I’ll leave you with some things to think about….

  • Never be afraid to challenge the norm. You might just come up with something great!
  • What do you want out of a healthy living community?
  • How can you help ladies in the community?

My Trim Healthy Mama Overview

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For those of you that don’t know me in real life, I’ve got a massive sweet tooth, which happens to be why I suck at diets! Any diet where I feel deprived leads me to failure! So, when a friend of mine introduced me to Trim Healthy Mama about 5 years ago, I sorta thought it was too good to be true. How can you eat cake for breakfast and lose weight?

Let me just tell you that it’s completely possible! I’ve lost and kept off over 20 lbs living this life style about 50% of the time. I wish I had before and after pictures, but honestly pictures of me at my heaviest just don’t exist.

After just that one conversation, I needed to know more, so I did what anyone in my profession does–I started researching Trim Healthy Mama online. A few days into my research during one of our weekly visits to the library on a whim, I decided to see if my local library had the plan book. They did; however, there was a wait list, which I added my name to and and continued to research. When it was finally my turn to check out the book, I think I only had it maybe 2 days before I ordered my own copy from Amazon!

What is Trim Healthy Mama?

Trim Healthy Mama (most often referred to as THM) is an amazing lifestyle brought to life by sisters Pearl Barrett and Serene C. Allison. Read that again; It’s a lifestyle, not a diet. It is also great for diabetics and those who need gluten-free options. Many of the recipes are also Keto friendly.

These are most important take away items from THM:

  • It’s all about thinking about your food in a different way.
  • Foods aren’t really good or bad. Some just go better together than others.
  • It’s so much more about pairing foods correctly!
  • Carbs aren’t the enemy either. They just need to be paired with lean proteins in smaller portions.
  • Don’t deprive yourself of foods you love. Just find healthier ways to make them.

You can find a ton of information online, and a bunch of different support groups are available on Facebook. However, the best reference I have found are the books themselves. Below you will find my review of their 3 books.

THM Resource Review

The Plan Book

Their first book Trim Healthy Mama Plan was published in 2012 and is an amazing resource.

My copy has been loaned out over and over again, and honestly, I’m not sure who currently has it! It’s a fantastic resource if you really want the science of why the lifestyle works!

If you really want to get into the weeds as far as the science of how this works and why you shouldn’t mix your fats and carbs, this is the book for you!

That being said, if you would rather just have the rules and how to figure out your meals or are on a tight budget, I would skip this book and start with Trim Healthy Table.

The Cookbooks

I ordered both of their cook books via pre-order: Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook and Trim Healthy Table. Both of these books are completely beat up and have notes on so many pages and post-its stuck all over them!

Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook

This book was published in 2015 and released right around the time I started with the plan.

I love a ton of these recipes and make them often. The drinks are amazing! All that being said, I found that the preface for it doesn’t give you quite enough general knowledge, so you have to really pair it with the plan book to get it at times.

Trim Healthy Table

When this book came out in 2017, I ordered it as soon as it became available and even got some bonus material with it as a result!

Where the first cookbook was lacking in general info about the plan, this book completely makes up for it. It explains the meal options in a nice way that lets you understand without getting too far into the weeds as far as the whys are concerned. The recipes are also fantastic, and many have several variations, making them versatile.

If you can only afford one of the resources, this is the one I would go for!