30 Day Beach Body Challenge

I enjoyed doing the 30 Day Squat Challenge so much and even if there wasn't much of a difference to see, I could definitely feel a big difference. I'm going to keep going with a new challenge! The 30 Day Beach Body Challenge!
Although I don't plan on going to the beach anytime soon, it has a ton of different exercises and I'm adding 50 squats per day. I Just finished day 8 and am loving it! I doubt it'll yield any big results, but having a littler calendar I can cross off every day is exactly what I need to stay motivated. They are hour-long workouts, but it's definitely better than nothing!

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If you ever want to participate in a challenge, or even find a different challenge, 30dayfitnesschallenges.com has over 15 different 30 day fitness challenges that target different parts of the body to try!

30 Day Squat Challenge Results

During the month of November, I did a lot of squats. I decided to do the 30 Day Squat Challenge and I just completed it! It's really crazy to think that I started with 50 squats on day 1 and finished with 250 squats on day 30. The craziest part? It takes me less than ten minutes to do 200-250 squats!

In total this month, I have done over 3,295 squats!

Even if I didn't notice much of a difference myself, I could feel the difference. My legs feel stronger and doing 100 squats is easy. Usually, I'm out of breath faster than my legs are tired. I wanted to actually see progress, so I took some before and after pictures, and I'm honestly surprised. There's not much of a difference in the pictures from behind, but quite a bit of a difference when you look at the ones I took from the side.

Conclusion? The 30 Day Squat Challenge works.

30 Day Squat Challenge

I used to do a lot of 30 Day Challenges, and I've decided to pick it back up again! This month, I will be doing the 30 Day Squat Challenge again, and I know I will crush it once again! It will be the third time I do this challenge and I can't wait! I took some "before" pictures, and hopefully we will see a difference in the "after" pictures. Stick around for the results at the end of the month!

30 Day Shred

There's only 27 days left before I leave for Thailand, which means 27 days to get as fit as possible and look great in my bikini! A long time ago I bought Jillian Michael's 30 Day Shred DVD, but I could never do more than a few days before giving up.

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As great as cardio is for losing weight, it doesn't have the same effect as a full body workout and weight training. Now that I'm done school, I'll have more time and energy to workout, so combined with my half-marathon training, it will hopefully make a difference.

I started on April 1st, and I've only missed one up to now, and it was because I was at school from 9:30am until 10pm editing my movie projects, and then went home and wrote an essay until 1:30am. I've been highlighting the days that I did my workout on my calendar to keep track. 

Should I post progress pictures at the end of the challenge?

Me? A Vegetarian? No Way!

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It's been 10 days and I'm still alive! So I guess you could say it's going well!
Since I'm starting my half-marathon training today, I thought I would go vegetarian for this month's 30 Day Challenge (well... 28 days), rather than do a fitness challenge.

I LOVE meat... I miss it! But hey, I tried peach-mango flavoured tofu, and man, is it ever good! It's definitely been making me think twice about what I eat.

Have YOU ever tried to go vegetarian?

Splits Results!

My 30 Day Challenge for January was the Lunge/Split challenge. Every day, I did the splits a little bit longer until I reached 6 minutes at the end of the month. I definitely feel pretty stretched out!

Here are my before and after pictures: it's not amazing, but hey! It's progress!

Challenge Completed, On to the Next!

Today is the last day of my 30 Day Squat and Crunch Challenge!

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As of today, I have completed 3,295 squats and 2,035 crunches this month! I can already see a different in my legs; they are thinner and tighter and I feel good!

When I got around the 200 squats mark, I started getting so sore, but it still felt awesome to check off another day of the challenge, which is why I'm doing another fitness challenge starting January 1st! Well... 2 actually: Lunges and splits!

I will be posting before and after pictures for the splits at the end of the month to see how much progress I made!

If you're looking for a great website with a bunch of ideas for challenges, check out 30 Day Fitness Challenges! Not only does it have challenges, but it also has various exercises and recipes to try!

What are YOUR fitness challenges for January?

30 Day Squat Challenge

December is always a month of laziness, stressing over exams, and overeating, so why not kickstart the New Year's resolution with the 30 Day Squat Challenge!

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I did this in Germany and I actually received compliments at how much leaner my legs were so why not do it again! I haven't been exercising at all lately, so this will be a good way to restart a healthy lifestyle.
Not only will I be doing squats, I also decided to add crunches to the mix. Here's what my month will look like:

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Wish me luck!

30 Days of Writing

On November 1st, I started a very special challenge. NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The challenge is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Originally, I thought I would never be able to do that! With school, work and my home life, November was hectic to say the least. Instead of doing a full marathon, I opted for a half, which I completed with great success!
I did it!!

In 30 days, I wrote 26,201 words, which equals to 42 pages, single-spaced on Word!
I've been working on a book since August and I managed to add 26,201 words to the project, bringing me to a total of 44,449 words!

I managed to write every day, whether it was 3,000 words or 100, and I plan on continuing throughout December to finish it! It was incredibly amazing to write and get sucked into this project. You open the word file and next thing you know, it's 3 hours later and you didn't notice time going by! It was so great to be creative like that! I would definitely recommend NaNoWriMo to everyone next year!

Gluten-Free: Recap

This past month, I decided to go on a gluten-free diet, just for kicks. I'm a bread and pasta addict, and so I thought I would change it up and little and see what all the fuss is about! Yesterday was my last day of this 30 day challenge and today I'm doing a recap of this month.

At first, I honestly thought I wouldn't survive. How can I live in a world without bread or pasta? Let me let you, it's possible! Over the past 30 days, I've eaten gluten-free bread, noodles, pizza, lasagna, brownies, and I don't know how many other things that were gluten-free!

Despite my big failure at the beginning, I managed to stay gluten-free for 30 days. I stayed gluten-free throughout thanksgiving (a bite or two doesn't count, right?), though I did cheat one day and went out for pizza with my sister for her birthday.
I was really interesting the way my body reacted to this change. I feel lighter, I've lost a few pounds, i digest much better and I don't feel so comatose after eating. I just feel satisfied. Even after I ate half of a large pizza, I didn't feel like my stomach was about to burst!
I'm going out for burgers tonight, but other than that, I think I may try to choose the gluten-free option when I can.

Yay for food!

NaNo-nighter!

Last night at midnight was the start of NaNoWriMo. I decided to try and write as much as I could during the night to kickstart this month of insanity! I wrote until 3:45 am. I didn't write as much as I thought I would have because I was just so tired, but I was also keeping myself distracted by talking to various friends on Facebook, and dancing around to my music. By the end of the night, I managed to write 2,513 words! That is just over 3 days' worth of writing!

Me, 2 minutes to midnight!

It may not seem like much, but I'm really excited about this! I just finished a chapter I'd been dreading to write. It took me forever to write this thing and now it's out of my way! I made myself a calendar with a daily word count goal, which I can't wait to cross out, day by day!

Good luck to all the other Wrimos out there! Happy writing!

NaNoWriMo

Nano-whaaaat?  What kind of gibberish is that? Well, it's the National Novel Writing Month. Since when? Well, officially, November is just another month. What makes it different is this organization (NaNoWriMo), who gives you a challenge: write a novel in 30 days. Sounds crazy right?

The idea is that a lot of people have "write a novel" on their bucket list, but never actually do it. What NaNo does it give you that extra push to actually do it! The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. There isn't really a prize, since there are thousands of winners every year, but you get this amazing feeling of accomplishment, and that is the point of NaNo.

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I participated two years ago and won, though I wasn't quite following the rules, and haven't had any time since. This year, I'm going to try and do a half-NaNo: 25,000 words in 30 days. What with university, work, and relationships, I'm really super busy, and a half-NaNo will keep me from having ANY spare time. I can't even imagine doing a full 50,000 words this year!

Normally, the rules (guidelines) for NaNo are to write fiction, and something completely new, that you haven't written or started writing yet (outlines and prep is allowed). The thing is, I'm already in the middle of a project and I don't wanna to discard it, so I will be using NaNo as a booster for this story.

Tonight, I will try to pull an all-nighter (I'll start writing at midnight) and pound out a couple thousand words to get a head start (I need to write 833 words a day to reach my goal in 30 days). You'll get a full report of my crazy night tomorrow!
(Don't worry! I'll still blog every day! I'm sure my posts will be much shorter and maybe a little crazy sometimes, but I'll be here!)

PS: Did you know Water for Elephants was written for NaNoWriMo? :)

Gluten-Free Brownies!

My mother has been making brownies lately that are so moist, crumbly and chocolatey that you don't even realize they are gluten-free! Alex loves them, and within a few days, they are gone! Being on my gluten-free diet, I thought these would be the perfect example that gluten-free doesn't mean yummy-free! Almost anything can be made gluten-free (even bread!!)
This weekend I decided to try and make some myself and they turned out great!

Here's the recipe:
-1 can (19 oz/540 ml) black beans, drained and rinsed
-3 eggs
-1/3 cup canola oil
-2 tbsp vanilla extract
-1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
-1/2 unsweetened cocoa powder
-1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1. Preheat oven to 350 F
2. In food processor, purée beans, eggs, oil and vanilla for 1 to 2 minutes or until smooth.
3. In a large bowl, combine sugar, cocoa and baking powder. Pour in bean mixture and stir until smooth.
4. Pour batter into prepared baking pan (9-inch square metal baking pan, greased). Bake in preheated oven for 30 minutes or until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool completely in pan on a wire rack.
Voila!

What a Fail

Photo credit: med-health.net

Friday, I was eating my gluten-free toast, like every morning since I started this gluten-free diet, when I thought: "Hmm... I wonder what's in this stuff!" So I looked at the ingredients and I realized, this bread was NOT gluten-free!!!

My mother had told me the gluten free bread was in the freezer in the basement, so when I went to find it, I found this bag of bread with a barely readable label. I thought it was bread my mom had made, but when I actually did read the label, it wasn't. It was homemade bread she'd bought at the farmer's market.... The gluten-free bread was at the bottom of the freezer!

OOPS..... Turns out I've been gluten THIS WHOLE TIME! At least it's not an irreparable mistake... I'll just finish on November 5 instead!

Goodbye Gluten!

To spice things up a little, I decide to force myself onto a gluten-free diet for the next 31 days. Everyone's been talking about how horrible it is for us and though I'm not entirely convinced, I thought I would give it a try and see what the hype is about.

*I did try this for 2 weeks before I left for Germany, knowing I would be eating mostly bread and cheese (which I did, by the way). I thought I might as well lose the few pounds I would gain from eating all that bready-goodness. The result were impressive: in two weeks, I lost over 12 pounds! I wasn't working out, or trying to eat healthy. I just ditched the gluten and bam!

**The ONLY exception to this gluten-free diet will be my granola bars. It's honestly the only thing keeping me alive at work. I am trying to only get healthier ones though, which are basically almost gluten-free anyway.

Goodbye pasta, bread, beer and all you other gluteny amazing foods! I will miss you! ...or will I?