Archive for January, 2012

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January 31, 2012

Cilantro Turkey Burger

I usually think that the things I cook sans-recipe (aka my Culinary BS experiments) are good, but. Well. This dinner was phenomenal.

She doesn’t know it, but inspiration for this one comes from my college friend, Emily, who keeps a cooking blog. Recently, Emily posted an amazing recipe for Cilantro Lime Shrimp, which I tried out for a little dinner gathering a few weeks ago now. The shrimp dish was excellent (make it!), and a fortunate side effect was a large amount of leftover fresh cilantro, which I would prefer to use instead of throw out.

Turkey is relatively plain, and uninteresting turkey burgers (read: not flavored or filled with things) can easily be dry & completely tasteless. The trick to make turkey burgers delicious is to fill them with juicy flavor givers. In this case, those things were cilantro, tomatoes, and red onion.

Turkey burgers are a great medium for creativity. Seriously. You can do anything with them. My friend served me mint & feta turkey burgers once. I made Apple Turkey Burgers a while ago. The only way to make a turkey burger not good is to not put anything in it & expect it to have a good flavor. Go crazy with these guys. But first, you really should try this preparation! 

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Posted in Recipe | 4 Comments »

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January 25, 2012

Ginger Honey Lemon Tea: an Excellent Cold Remedy

This is a great cure-all for the sinus-related ailments that are abound this time of year. It includes juice of half a lemon, some honey, and as much grated ginger as you can stand. This is tried and true — I’d much rather have this mixture things when I’m sick than pseudoephedrine and its cohorts, but sometimes drugs are good, too.

Anyway, if you have a cold, I’m sorry, but here, have some tea:

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Posted in Health | 9 Comments »

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January 22, 2012

Why Minimalist Running Resulted in a Stress Fracture & Why I’m Still Doing It

There actually is a piece of footwear that causes strangers to stare more than vibrams do, and this fall, I wore it for 6 weeks.
I also had a “going out option” for when I wanted to look even cuter: No lie — the podiatrist called it a “going out boot”.

Over the summer, I was training for an October half marathon in Vibrams. This didn’t end up being the smartest thing a new minimalist runner could do – if you’re curious, here’s the post where I decided to accept that I was injured and stop running so much. After 2 wasted months (and many wasted dollars) of the podiatrist not trusting my google-diagnosis of “Stress Fracture in the Outermost Metatarsal” (which ended up being 100% correct) and having him inject me with cortisone numerous times, the MRI revealed a little stress fracture & I was instructed to wear the Boot for 4-6 weeks.

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Posted in Exercise, running | 7 Comments »

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January 20, 2012

Why I Was Vegan and Why Now I’m Not.

As some of you know, I was vegan from May-ish until October-ish. While I ultimately decided that I enjoy turkey sandwiches and easy healthy food options too much to be vegan, I learned a lot from those 5 months.

For those of you who might not know, vegans avoid animal products, which, in addition to meat, include milk, cheese, butter, eggs, and for some folks, honey. Basically, vegans only eat the plant-life that the earth produces (or things that are made only from that plant life). The fact that I live in a Vegan-friendly area made this whole experiment a lot easier, too.

I’ll try to keep the hippie bullshit to a minimum, but I’m a little bit of a hippie sometimes, so it’s challenging. Also, standard “I just Google Things” disclaimer.

Why I Was Vegan Once And What I Learned

The theory behind Veganism & clean eating intrigues me for a number of reasons, mostly because a ton of cultures survived healthfully off the land without using animal products (or by using animal products sparsely). The earth provides what humans need in order to live; if it didn’t, we wouldn’t still be around. I appreciate the “back to our roots” approach to food. Eating vegan made me feel more like I was fueling & nourishing myself than just eating. It was kind of neat.

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Posted in Food, Health | 9 Comments »

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January 10, 2012

Chick Pea, Goat Cheese, Beet, etc Pizza

This pizza was initially inspired by my friend’s overly beety CSA load. Well, that and the fact that we wanted to make dinner together, but we didn’t want to grocery shop. This pizza came together based on the items in my fridge.

We’ve made this twice now, so clearly we are quite pleased with the concoction, and unfortunately I didn’t take phenomenal pictures either time (it’s hard to cook, chat, AND shoot pictures at the same time, especially when you’re not in the blogging mindset (yet!)).

Yes, if it was whole wheat dough it would be more nutritious, but we didn’t go that route (it’s harder, we were lazy).

Ingredients:

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January 4, 2012

Thoughts on An Atlanta Childhood Obesity Awareness Campaign

I believe that obese children (word up to my people) are a very unfortunate by-product of a society that is totally uneducated as to how to take care of the human body, and that, without question, our society needs to be shaken in order to do SOMETHING big to counteract childhood obesity so that each consecutive generation isn’t more removed from their health than the previous one.

Standard disclaimer sentence that I have no relevant degrees or letters after my name–I just google things & think about them.

Check this out: Grim Childhood Obesity Ads Stir Critics (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Or, if you don’t want to (you should), here’s a taste of the Ad Campaign (I have a hard time calling it an “Ad”) that Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta:

This is why I find childhood obesity incredibly frightening & concerning:

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Posted in Health, Weight Loss | 3 Comments »

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January 2, 2012

On Making 2012 About Health, Not Weight

I am conflicted over the fact that getting healthier comes with a huge emphasis on the scale, so as many people look at their new years resolutions with aims to get healthier, I wanted to write something to hopefully get everyone thinking about where they want their goals to lie.

Last year, before LLH existed, I guest posted on my friend (and former babysitter’s!) blog, and now, since I’m in the re-committing to the blogging process and am still pretty busy getting my life in order/organizing post-move, I thought I’d plagarize from Past-Sarah, with some edits & added thoughts. Hopefully it’s not so jambled — honestly, this is me trying to put up a good Welcome 2012 Post without all of the work… baby steps to becoming a regular poster again! 

I’ve done this weight loss thing from two different angles, and am going to tell my story again, in hopes that it will help others get a healthy & maintainable mindset from the start of their New Year.

As I’ve written before, on January 8 of 2006, at 305+ pounds and 19 years old, I went for a 12 mile walk all around my town. I was sick of my fatness defining me, and I wanted to get rid of it as fast as I could. And I’m a determined person, once I decide to take action, so for 5 months, I hardly ate (except after weighing-in, when I would stuff my face in celebration) and I exercised like a madwoman. I hit my goal of losing 10 pounds a month for 5 consecutive months. I was hungry, I was tired, but I was happy to overlook that because the scale was going down as quickly as I thought it should.

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Posted in Health, Weight Loss | 5 Comments »

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