Advocare Ten Day Cleanse: Our Survival Tips

October 19, 2012 by · Leave a Comment

After completely another cleanse we want to share with you some of our tips to help you get through it. 🙂

– The fiber drink you drink on the mornings of Day 1, 2, 3, 8, 9 and 10 you want to CHUG IT.

– But before you even get to that stage mix the fiber drink packet with COLD water and feel free to add some more water in as you get towards the bottom (it has a weird consistency, not a taste thing, but a consistency thing).
-A newer tip we learned and tried this time around – if you buy Spark in the orange flavor mix your fiber drink packet with one spoonful of Spark and it’ll taste more like you are drinking OJ with pulp.
-Some people might actually find the Peaches n Cream flavored fiber drinks to be way better than the Citrus flavored fiber drink. Look into that!
-Do the cleanse with a buddy to keep yourself accountable!

-Plan all of your meals ahead of time so you are set! Preparation is clutch. We set up on Sunday for the 1st seven days and then Sunday to the end! Plan ahead of time to make sure you will have the least distraction within your 10 day time frame and whatever you do AVOID birthdays, big life events, etc!

There you have it!  Remember you can buy the Advocare cleanse or any of their products here through Teal.

Have you done the Advocare 10 day cleanse before, is there any advice you would give that we have left off?

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Cheaters, Cheaters, Pumpkin Eaters!

October 18, 2012 by · 3 Comments

If you saw our Wordless Wednesday post yesterday and you guessed that we cheated on our cleanse then CONGRATS you are correct!

Now pat yo’self on the back! 🙂

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We aren’t really ashamed to admit this because we are after all HUMAN.  We hopefully have mentioned before that it is really hard to find 10 consecutive days that work to cleanse.  We discussed a couple of different start dates before we determined October 8th would be the day for us, and now we can see where these 10 days got us.

Life happens much like with when you are trying to block out 16 weeks to dedicate to a marathon, and you might miss a training run or two.  Beth had 3 last minute Birthday parties to attend one of which also included Teal (hence where the cheating pictures came from). Every Wednesday the culinary art students at Teal’s school cook and last Wednesday all of the counselors were going to eat their food?  Yep, a Wednesday during our 10 day Advocare cleanse.

Despite the hiccups (a.k.a. cheat moments) the cleanse is still a good reset for your body!  We both still reaped benefits from it – Beth is 5 pounds lighter and Teal is 5 pounds lighter.  Not bad, right?

We are officially off of the cleanse though we both are trying to keep our eating habits similar to it as much as possible for the next 9 days! 🙂  We’ll be back tomorrow with our survival tips for the 10 day Advocare Cleanse.

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Advocare Ten Day Cleanse: What We’re Eating

October 16, 2012 by · 52 Comments

The cleanse is actually very easy to follow in terms of what you can and cannot eat, and once you have that down, making meals is pretty easy.

These are the bulk of what Teal will eat for the 10 days.

For Breakfast I am drinking Shakeology. Yes I am cheating on Advocare with this one and not using their meal replacement shakes. *gasp* I like Shakeology way more. Shhhh don’t tell them!

Here are the three main meals I made to mix in as either lunch or dinner throughout the time.

1. Southwest Quinoa Salad  ( 5 servings)

Approximate Cost per serving: $4.15

Ingredients: 1lb of chicken breast, ½ of a large red onion, one can of organic black beans, 1 cup of organic quinoa (technically this is 2 full servings and will be split over 5 meals), cherry tomatoes, spinach, salt and pepper to taste.

2. Vegetable Tuna Salad  (6 servings)

Approximate Cost per serving: $1.68

Ingredients: 3 cans tuna, ¾ cup celery chopped, ¾ cup carrot chopped, ½ of a red onion, 1 English seedless cucumber chopped, 2 tablespoons mayo. ( this is 2 servings spread over 6 meals so this is ok)

Serve over salad or use a cucumber and mini sweet bell peppers instead of crackers to eat! They crunch so you just have to trick yourself!

3. Soup:  have no clue what to call this because it’s like 2 recipes combined (6 servings)

Approximate Cost per serving: $3.45

Ingredients: 4-6 cups low sodium organic chicken stock, 1lb chicken breast, 1 can organic gazpacho beans, 1 can organic corn, 2 tomatoes diced, one small white onion, 2 green bell peppers chopped, cilantro, 1 jalapeño chopped, juice of 1 lime, cumin, chili powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes.

Snacks if needed: cucumber, carrots, mini sweet bell peppers, raw almonds or cashews, tangerines, apples, almond butter.

And for Beth the bulk of what she will be eating is as follows:

1. Chicken Taco Meat Salad (5 servings)

actually ate it without quinoa most of the week, but that is something you can put in this salad for sure!

The chicken in this form really goes a long way for me and this is usually me getting 2-3 organic chicken breasts.  You might remember seeing this meat from a previous Tasty Tuesday post from us.

Ingredients: Organic chicken, 4 cups low sodium chicken broth, and 1 packet of low sodium taco seasoning for just the meat.  For the salad I did green bell pepper, cherry tomatoes, and spinach leaves.

Approximate Cost per serving: Yah, Brent and I split the groceries so it made our receipts weird. I’m the slacker here. :-/

2. Turkey Meatloaf (4 servings)

Ingredients: 1.5 pounds of 99% lean turkey breast, 1 cup chopped onion, 1 cup frozen spinach, 3/4 cup of salsa, 1 egg (or two egg whites), 1/3 cup of oats, 1 teaspoon of paprika, 1 teaspoon of ground mustard, 2 tablespoons of dijon mustard, pepper to taste and 2 tablespoons of worchestire sauce.

3. Mexican Chicken Lime Soup (6 servings)

Ingredients: 2 Tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil, 1 onion (finely chopped), 6 gloves of garlic, 6 skinless, boneless chicken thighs cut into 1/2 inch pieces, 2 canned chipotle chiles in adobo sauce, 6 cups of chicken broth, 1/2 cup of fresh cilantro, juice of 2 limes, salt and pepper and 1 hass avocado.

4. Egg Frittata (6 servings)

Ingredients: a dozen eggs, 1/2 of one roma tomato, one squash, 1/4 of green bell pepper, 1/4 of red bell pepper, garlic and salt & pepper to taste.

There was also turkey taco meat but I figure a lot of people know that one already and overall made about 29 meals to split between myself and Brent.

With some preparation on your part you can make doing this advocare 10 day cleanse easy to follow! We’ll be back with a post on our tips to surviving the cleanse! 🙂

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Texas Doesn’t Really Have Four Seasons Anyway!

October 8, 2012 by · 6 Comments

Happy Monday, friends!  Thank you to everyone who is bearing with us as we are in the last couple of weeks before THE wedding and trying to get everything accomplished!  Speaking of the wedding…this weekend we kicked off our Saturday with a wedding shower for Beth thrown by her mom’s close friends.

photo courtesy of Kate O. Lynch

We don’t actually have a picture of us there together. Sad day! But there were mimosas there – yum!

In our Taco Run recap Teal mentioned that she’d strained her groin muscle and the reality of that strain was the potential need to take an entire week off from running.  BUT race 3 out of 4 in our four season challenge was scheduled for this Sunday!?  We discussed how this was possibly sign #2 that we weren’t meant to do this challenge right now.  The day before the Hottest Half in August Teal had a calf injury due to some fun tubing on the lake.  We both said that no matter what training for our marathon was more important than running Tyler Rose and to worsen the muscle strain on Teal was not an option for us.  Turns out she was getting back to normal by the end of the week, so we could run Tyler Rose!

BUT that didn’t mean we ready to spend the four hours in the car for the round trip out to Tyler.  We might have been a little ambitious back in March when we thought doing a race 21 days before Beth’s wedding would be a good idea.  Well, not just a race, but a race where we would be getting up at 4:00 a.m., driving two hours to the race, running two-ish hours and then driving back to Dallas for two hours.

Beth’s sister, Kate, made the executive decision for us (because neither one of us wanted to actually make it) that we would stay put in Dallas. Thank you,Kate! So Sunday morning we met up for our first long run of marathon training – 13.1 miles. We’re coming for you Louisiana Marathon!

We had a cold front come through Friday night so the chilly weather was still there Sunday morning.  For the first time in a long time we went outside to 48 degree weather!  Of course you know it’s always hard to remember what exactly you want to wear in that type of weather, but we were both content with our choices and neither one of us got overly hot out on the run.  Details you really wanted to know about, right??

Teal’s fancy new garmin!

Of course at this stage in the game a half is something we have done a lot of, so we both felt good out there.  This weekend does mark a first for us – DNS.  We’ve run a lot of races and had yet to DNS, but we did and we don’t regret it. We needed to for our own sanity.  We will still race the 4th half in our four seasons challenge come February, but we won’t actually receive that four seasons medal. 🙁

 

A couple of the other benefits of us staying tight in Dallas instead of going to Tyler was Beth got to be on time to Birthday brunch for her dad, and we both had the opportunity to grocery shop and prepare for our 10 day cleanse.  That’s right – we are advocare cleansing again! 🙂  When we’ve done this in the past we have had quite a few questions about it which also includes Beth asking Teal eleventy billion questions each time, so we’ve decided to share more details of our cleanse throughout this week and maybe a little of next week with you too. 🙂  Hope at least one or two of you out there are interested in knowing more.

What was your first race DNS? Do you regret?

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C is for Crafts, Cake & Cocktails

September 24, 2012 by · 6 Comments

This weekend both our guys were headed out of town for Brent’s bachelor party. Beth was planning on doing some wedding crafting with all of that free time! Wilson was sad to see Michael packing. He’s so smart and knew that meant Michael was going away. Look at that face!

Teal & Michael’s doggie, Wilson

The two of us and Beth’s sister, Kate, decided to get the crafting started on Friday night.  So we decided to get in some hill work on the gynormous Windhaven  hill in preparation for our Tyler Rose half marathon coming up.

Hill work done!

Also, a big thank you to, Kate for making us pulled pork tacos from the crockpot for dinner Friday night! Mmmmm! Saturday Teal of course at to work so Beth, Kate and our friend Mandy got to work on crafting that morning.  Mandy brought along the flower girl or you know Meranda, her daughter to the crafting adventure.

Sweet little Meranda turned 3 on Sunday so she got some Birthday goodies while at craft time.  She makes a good princess, don’t you think?

And then our running buddy, Bitner, turned 30 this past week so we went and enjoyed some wine at Times Ten Cellars with him to celebrate!!  It was such a nice day to sit on the patio and enjoy some vino!

Kate, Beth, Teal & Bit

Checkout the cake we had! Not only did it look beautiful, but it was dee-licious!

We actually did A LOT of crafting this past weekend and hopefully everything will actually be done by the time the wedding is here! 🙂

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Tasty Tuesday: Bridal Shower Foods

September 18, 2012 by · 7 Comments

You might have seen yesterday, that this weekend was Beth’s bridal shower thrown by the bridesmaids and since I’m a bridesmaid (highly doubt you would have missed that by now) I had a job to do. I volunteered to do the dessert part of our spread.

Kate (Beth’s sister) had us all pick what we wanted to do so I chose Cake balls and Oreo cookie balls. I’m on Pinterest so I totally thought it would be doable. I am going to give you the recipes and the how to make said cake balls, and even a few pointers of what they do when they completely fail at 10pm the night before the shower and a race you have to wake up at 5 o’clock to get to!

Kate is also blogging today about the other shower snacks! You can find that information over on her blog! You should totally check it out for any future snacking you would like to partake in and/or some other awesome recipes!

Oreo Cake Balls

1 package of oreos
1 8 oz package of cream cheese softened
White melting chocolate (for your sanity DO NOT buy this kind )
You really should probably buy this kind instead (trust me!)

How to:

Crush the Oreos in a blender, or if you are angry at the world you could pound them with a hammer. Just make sure they are as small as you can get it.

Mix in the entire package of cream cheese. It will end up being a ball of cookie mush.

Ball the mixture into the size you would like and then place in the refrigerator. I would recommend freezing them over night because when they are not hard enough they fall through the sticks and it is a holy annoying mess. You could also just never put them on sticks and life might be easier.

So you might guess, the next step is to place them on sticks and dip them in the melting chocolate and you are done.

Hint: Keep refrigerated until you are ready to serve if they are on sticks they won’t stay!

Cakeballs

Cake Mix
Icing
Melting chocolate (again use the candy melts not the other one)

How to:

Bake the cake using the regular directions. Once baked, let cool and crumble the cake into the smallest pieces that you can.

Mix in the icing- the original way I saw this was to use the entire jar of icing, I think this was part of the reason that these bad boys didn’t work, sooooo in the future I will probably use about half so that they are not as moist (eww I hate that word)!

Once mixed, ball the cake and freeze. Once frozen dip in the melted chocolate and you are done!

Hint: too much icing in the mix, not freezing and only refrigerating, and using the wrong chocolate will give you a holy mess that looks much like the picture! While my cake balls failed miserably, I did figure out how to fix them by using the hints above.

If all else fails you could always get your husband on the phone with every Starbucks that will wait for you to get there before they close and ask them for all their cake balls. Then you can buy melting chocolate and cover them in whatever color you need. See! No one would ever know!

I figured I would include some extra pics of the shower just because it was so cute! Beth also has a super crafty Sister in law (She blogs too- Shocking, I know) Tiffany made tons of cute decoration pieces and snacks as well!

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So there you have it! The showering aspect of our weekend! 🙂  Please be advised we are not claiming cake balls are healthy….we are sharing the recipe and parts of our lives right now with you. Ha. Tomorrow we’ll finally let you  know ALLLL about Tour des Fleurs! 🙂

Oh, and additionally it should be noted that Teal’s Oreo cakeballs were WAY BETTER than Starbucks! Sorry Starbucks! We know we are already kind of a traitor to you with our Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf obsession! Only 10 more days until a CBTL opens in Dallas! 🙂  Ok, that’s all from us for real now.

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Racing & Showering!

September 17, 2012 by · 5 Comments

Yes, our weekend included a little bit of both of those things! 🙂  Our race this weekend took us to the Dallas Arboretum where there is currently a Chihuly exhibit, so we got to see a few of his installations there.

Us with our friend Bitner waiting around for the 10K part of Tour des Fleurs to start.

After the race we all rushed back to Beth’s house to get showered and cleaned up for a wedding shower hosted by the Bridesmaids.  Just one of the MANY cute decorations at the shower.

We clean up nice don’t we?? 🙂

How was your weekend? Did you race? Get in a training run? Or just take it easy?

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What Do the River & Wedding Crafting Have to Do with Each Other?

September 10, 2012 by · 4 Comments

Well, this past weekend was very different for the two of us and rightfully so!  Teal was still very much celebrating her 30th Birthday (since every year your Birthday should be celebrated for at least a week!)!  Her weekend involved taking 3 of the most important dudes in her life (hubby and two brothers) with her for a weekend of floating the river as well as a bunch of friends who would be meeting them at the river.

Any roadtrip that involves a stop at Buc-ee’s has to be considered a success especially since you can buy a cup there that’s big enough to hold the majority of your water intake for the day!

Sadly, Beth had to stay home from the river weekend due to needing to make use of time to work on wedding projects and to save a little dough. Her thrilling weekend was full of wedding crafting…

Don’t you wish you knew what it was? Ok maybe not…

Beth did get in some miles this weekend, but didn’t get a chance to try out her new Altra Intuition shoes just yet.  A version of these bad boys were ordered back on July 31st and this past Saturday the newer version of the Altra Intuition finally made their way to Beth’s house.  She did something to one of her toes so instead of aggravating it more she’s letting it rest a bit. Then it’ll be time to take them for a spin!…..or run, whatever!

Also, please note that it wasn’t Altra’s fault it took so long for the shoes to get here….just a random story with lots of details! =)

How was your weekend?

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Thirty Things Thursday

September 6, 2012 by · 18 Comments

1. IT’S TEAL’S BIRTHDAY!!!!!!

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2. Not just any Birthday either…..it’s her 30th Birthday!

WOW!

3. We will now spend the next 9 months and 18 days running races in different age groups….

4. Teal’s name starts with T (in case you didn’t know ;)) like Thursday, thirty, and her dad’s name, Tom!

 

 

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5. As you might know, Teal became a marathoner in her 20’s.

6. She has the same Birthday as Rosie PEREZ.

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7. You also might know that, Teal completed 13th half marathons in her 20’s.

number 13

8. She once ate over 30 jalapenos just to get her brother to wear pants.  He laughed afterwards and did not wear pants.

9. If you didn’t catch on from above….she likes Justin Bieber….or at least his tunes….or maybe I made that up??

10. She loves Mark Salling. He also turned 30 this year.

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11. (9 + 6) = 15 (X 2) (like in 82 a.k.a. 1982 a.k.a. Teal’s birth year) = 30

12. On this day in 1839 the Cherokee Nation formed and you know what? Teal is part Cherokee!

13. Pretty much she is a bad ace and all who know her are lucky!

14. Teal’s cool husband, Michael, collaborated on this with me…..thanks, Miguel!

photo by Gina Van Bemmel

(source)

15. There really aren’t 30 things, sorry? Sorry, Teal!  But Thirty Things on a Thursday that happens to be your Thirtieth Birthday sounds cooler! 🙂

Happy Birthday to the best running buddy a girl could ask for! I am thankful for you!! Please send Teal some Birthday love today! 🙂

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When We Aren’t Running We Sometimes Crawl

August 27, 2012 by · 2 Comments

This past weekend we got to spend Saturday celebrating two important people in our lives, Kate & Brent. Or you might remember them as Beth’s sister and Beth’s fiancé. For the 4th year in a row Kate celebrated her Birthday with a pub crawl and since Brent’s Birthday is two days after her’s we celebrated him too! Our weekend in instagram pictures:

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The pub crawl was a blast and we had fun seeing everyone that came out too, but we think we may be too old for pub crawls now!?

Happy Birthday to Kate & Brent!!

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