Taking the plunge!

Ok! I’ve done it!  I’ve made the commitment!

No…. I’m not getting married!  I’ve committed to the Nerd Fitness 6 Week Challenge!

What this means is for the next six weeks – starting September 24th – I’ll be working towards four specific fitness and life related goals.  Three will be fitness or health related, and the fourth is a “life goal”.

For example, here’s what I wrote down for my goals (copied from my thread on Nerd Fitness):

Goal 1 – NF’s Beginner Workout x3 a week - Right now I’m sedentary, and really need to get my ass in gear. The beginner workout is probably as good a place to start as any. Hopefully I’ll be able to work myself past it? [ +3 STR, +2 STA ]

Goal 2 – Yoga x2 a week. I was doing Yoga steadily for a while, but fell out of the habit months ago. I felt really good while I was doing it, so I think it’s a practice I need to get back into. [ +2 STA, +1 CON ]

Goal 3 – Learn to eat Paleo up to 80% - That’s really what brought me here. I’m excited to change my eating habits to something that, to me, just the thought of it feels healthier. With a small vacation coming up at the end of September, this will be a difficult starting point, but I’m up for the challenge. [ +3 CON ]

Goal 4 – Life Goal - Start steps towards getting into grad school. First steps would be getting tour of the University, meet with the Advisors about my undergraduate grades (which weren’t so great :/ ) and getting my Transcripts sent. [ +2 WIS, +2 CHA ]

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention – NF treats fitness goals like a role playing game, with stats for your Strength, Charisma, Constitution, Wisdom, Stamina and Dexterity.  You can increase your stats by achieving your goals.  It sounds kinda fun, so why not try it out, right?  Anything that can make fitness that little bit more fun is all good to me.

The first steps on this Challenge are going to be hard, as I’ll be out of state next weekend, so it will be harder to control when I get to work out, or where I get to eat.  I’ll do my best to keep up with things though!  I’m an Advenurer!  GRRR!!

New Toys And A New Grocery Trip!

This week I got a surprise.  In an effort to help me meet my diet goals, Baron picked up a new toy.  He bought a Jack LaLanne Power Juicer Express!  Now we can buy fruits and vegetables and make fresh juice – yummy!  Also, we replaced our blender, which was leaky and dying, so yay for more smoothies!

While driving home tonight, we decided to stop by a store we’d never gone into before – The Fresh Market.  It reminds me of a Whole Foods, but a little smaller.  They had an excellent supply of produce, lots of natural fruits, nuts and candies, coffee beans, hard to find oils and vinegars, tons of cheese – it was a really nice little place!  It said on the sign out front that they sell Sushi too, but we didn’t see the sign until we were on our way out.

We picked up some great looking produce – Honeycrisp apples that are freaking HUGE, a bag of seedless red grapes and a bundle of kale.  I’ve really been wanting to try kale.  We also finally – FINALLY – found a jar of tahini!  It only took forever.  Also, we found some really tasty sodas, with sugar instead of HFCS in them.  One of them was Zevia, a soda that contains stevia instead of sugar, which I’ve been dying to try.  I picked the Ginger Root Beer flavour.  Baron picked out some of the coffee beans for himself.

I like the fact that The Fresh Market is a lot closer to my apartment than Whole Foods – a twenty minute ride instead of a forty five minute drive.  It’s smaller, with less of a selection, but I’m hoping to at least make a monthly trip out there for some staple items.  Like most specialty stores of it’s kind, the prices are higher than your average supermarket, but you can find a lot of stuff there that you can’t find anywhere else.  Looking forward to my next trip out there!

Fun At The Asian Market!

First, let me apologize for the lack of updates.  I’ve been sick since the day after Thanksgiving with some kind of mutant plague I caught off one of the other guests (Thanks ever so much, you know who you are!) and I think I’m just about recovered from it.  My throat still hurts when I swallow and I’m still a bit hoarse, but I’m not sure if that’s from the plague or my thyroid.  Who knows?

Today we took a trip to our local Asian market – MD Oriental Market – on Fowler Ave. here in Tampa.  It’s not far from where we live and they tend to have a pretty good assortment of Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Indian items at fairly reasonable prices.  From soy sauces and oils to curries and fresh fish, they’ve got a bit of everything.  Today when Baron and I browsed the store, we discovered they had recently expanded to include another room in addition to the main store.  From the looks of things, they had expanded their produce and frozen section to this new room, moved all the noodles as well, and added in a ready-made hot foods and pastry counter as well!

Today’s trip kind of had a goal.  Baron wanted me to pick up some things specifically for me to cook and eat on my own while trying to keep with a vegetarian-friendly menu.  We were also cautious to label check as much as we could for high sodium levels and high fructose corn syrup.

Even though upon walking through the door, you’re met with boxes upon boxes of cookies, candies and snackies, we beelined straight for Aisle 1 – produce!  There were a lot of really tasty looking fruit, but we passed on it for the time being.  In hindsight, I should have picked up a few pears.  They were huge!  We skipped on over to the vegetables, and found plenty to choose from.  I first picked up a package of brussels sprouts.  The price was better than the supermarket, and they looked a lot more uniform in size as well.  I really liked my recent attempts at making roasted brussels sprouts with balsamic vinegar, and look forward to trying that again.  We also picked up some orange bell peppers (the price was excellent!), snow peas and a bundle of nine bok choy heads.  I’m not sure how I’ll use a whole nine bok choy, but hopefully I can come up with something.  There were tons of mushrooms to choose from – and I love mushrooms – but we still have half a container of white mushrooms at home, so we passed for the time being.

Next we browsed the frozen items, and decided to come back at the end of our shopping trip (to avoid thawing of course!), and instead browsed the noodles.  We picked up a box of udon since I’ve been out of it forever and I love the thickness of the noodles.  These are really good with a quick stirfry or a peanut sauce.  I also picked up a bottle of furikake (rice seasoning) from an endcap.  After that, we figured we’d come back later, and proceeded to refrigerated goods.  Like we often do, we browsed the section, considering different things, with designs to come back later in our trip.

The next aisle was full of oils and sauces.  We needed to pick up a few things from this aisle, like sesame oil (again, much better prices than the grocery store!), low sodium soy sauce and some lime ponzu sauce.  I was looking for some generic “stir fry sauce” but only found one, and it was oyster flavoured, so I skipped on it.  Baron found green curry paste, and picked up a small tub of that for experimentation purposes.

Next we found ourselves in the cookies and candy aisle.  I pretty much tried to ignore the candy side of the aisle, as I’ve been trying to behave myself with my consumption of sugar.  This was hard, considering that they had those awesome fruit jelly candies that I have loved for years upon years (especially the kiwi flavour with the little seeds in it? OMG NOM!).  I found a couple things, some lemon sandwich cookies and some onion crackers I plan on trying with my hummus.  Hopefully they taste good.

We perused the tea, spices and rice aisle, but didn’t really get much except for a bottle of cumin.  We also found the dofu on this aisle as well, so I picked up the almond and strawberry flavours.  I haven’t tried the almond flavour, so I’m looking forward to that.  We also picked up “peanut meal”, which looked essentially like ground up peanuts, and we’re going to try some experiments with that one too.  Also found some cookies with plum filling and added those to the cart as well.

Now that we’ve reached the end of the store’s aisles, we backtrack to Aisle 1 again, and go back to the noodles.  While browsing amongst the prepackaged ramen  ickyness, we found some interesting stuff.  A spinach ramen noodle and a mushroom ramen noodle in packages of four.  They looked interesting, as I’ve never seen flavoured ramen noodles before, so we decided to pick them up.  We also picked up a few other varieties of flavoured noodle so we were fairly noodled out by the time we left the new room off Aisle 1.  We checked the noodle section’s chest freezers for vegetarian gyoza (dumplings), but only found one small package despite the huge variety of flavoures.  We picked up that, and a chicken and vegetable gyoza in a larger bag.

Lastly we hit the refrigerated section again, which leads right to the checkout aisle.  We picked up a container of red miso (again, for experimentation purposes!), and a few drinks for ourselves – thai coffee for Baron and thai tea for me – yum!  No ramune this time – maybe next time.

In all we spent about $80, which was exactly what Baron had guessed we would.  We still have to do more mainstream grocery shopping at our local grocery store.  Hopefully when my cooking skills expand, we can shop a bit better.  Thankfully we have a pretty good idea at this point what vegetables, fruits and groceries this particular store offers, and where we can get the best deals.  Personally I love the variety of having an Asian market local to us.  I look forward to using this resource even more as my dietary needs progress.