eat this much

I dabble in using MyFitnessPal to monitor the foods I'm eating and the exercise I'm doing, but sometimes I struggle with allotting myself food over the course of the day. There have been many times when I have a bigger than usual lunch and find that I'm left with only 300 calories for dinner, and as luck may have it, it's pasta night.

EatThisMuch.com eliminates a lot of these issues in a seriously easy way. Tell the generator how many calories you want to eat and in how many meals and it comes up with a simple, straightforward answer. In this case I put 1500 calories in 3 meals (jokes!) and was given the image below.

You can save a meal so that it comes up again next time it generates, or banish a meal that has yucky things in it. There's a special feature that generates by diet (Atkins/Keto, Paleo, Vegan, Vegetarian), and you can also specify how much preparation you want to go into each meal. 

This site is pretty bare bones, but extremely useful and gave me some really great inspiration as to what I should be eating. I figure 1500 calories was a decent amount plus 200 give or take calories to put towards things that the site doesn't have programmed in (aka I work at a bakery so cupcakes and other yummies). You can also add recipes of things you cook and have them shuffled into the mix. 

Overall this was really cool, and definitely worth checking out!

arms & abs

Holy soreness!

As part of my recent attempts to get stronger and leaner, I'm trying to isolate muscle groups into separate workout days. Instead of trying to pile my upper body workouts into one day (and a lot of sore days after), I split up back and shoulders into one day, and arms and chest into another.

It was so bright and sunny today that I was especially motivated to tone my arms (and the fleshy part where my arms meet my torso that every girl seems to hate) for when the time comes to break out the sleeveless dresses! Give this workout a try next time you want to work arms and let me know what you think!

Any of these exercises can be recreated with just dumbbells if you prefer, instead of a Boku ball just do push ups on the floor; instead of a yoga ball use a bench or the floor to lay on. I do tricep pull downs on a Matrix universal structure, but you can do them with just weights and gravity as well. 

I finished up by combining the Lower Abs Trifecta and Upper Abs Trifecta from LeanItUp.com and was DYING at the end. Definitely a good one to work into my arms and chest days in the future

*I'm not a doctor or a personal trainer, so please do not try any of these exercises if you are not comfortable with them, experienced, or in the condition to do so. Be safe! :)