Happy February! One month closer to Warmth… :mrgreen:
I started my morning off with a delicious new breakfast cake. This one was ‘baked’ in just 3 minutes!
3 Minute Breakfast Carrot Cake
Carrots are high in beta-carotene, Vitamin K, Potassium, and Vitamin C. Carrots also are a great source of antioxidants. Eat carrots with nuts to supply fats for cartenoid and Vitamin K absorption.
Ingredients:
- 1/2 cup almonds or walnuts
- 1 cup old-fashioned rolled oats (not instant)
- 3 medium carrots, peeled and coarsely chopped
- 2 t pure vanilla extract
- 1/3 banana
- 2 t pumpkin pie spice (or a mix of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger)
- 1/8 t fine sea salt
- 1-2 T scoop Manitoba Harvest Hemp Vanilla Protein Powder (optional)
- 1 and 1/4 cups almond, soy, rice, or hemp milk
- 3 T raisins (optional)
Directions: Throw all ingredients into blender except raisins. Blend until desired consistency. Pour into three small microwave safe or oven safe dishes. Add raisins (or you can add them after cooking, up to you!) and pop into microwave for 3 minutes on high. Let sit until it cools down. Add desired toppings such as nut butter, yogurt, coconut oil, maple syrup, vegan margarine, walnuts, cacao nibs, etc. and enjoy!
I swirled on top of mine some soy yogurt, cashew butter, walnut crumbs, and maple syrup. To die for!!
Makes 3 servings. Per serving (without optional ingredients):
Note: The sodium should actually be in half. I put 1/4 t instead of 1/8th t by mistake.
Some of you mention that these breakfast cakes are high in fat. In this case, the fat is derived from the Omega 6 fats in almonds which are extremely healthy. We need good fats and it is ok to eat them. :mrgreen:
After fueling up with breakfast, I did yoga as the sun rose! As part of my Spring Training Plan that I will be revealing tomorrow, I have scheduled in some weekly yoga to balance out the strength training I will be doing.
I also did the last session of Whittle My Middle 2!! Can you believe today is the last day?! January flew by. I will be talking about my thoughts on WMM2 tomorrow, as well as talking about my Spring Training Plan.
Where You Live And The Pressure To Be Thin
Missed these?
When I was struggling the most with my body-image, my external environment had a huge impact on how much pressure I felt to be thin. I also noticed this theme to be very prominent in the comments of the previous two topics.
For example, while in university, I felt so much pressure to be thin. It seemed like being thin, or even underweight, was the norm around campus and this created a lot of pressure for me to ‘fit in’. The campus I went to was 70% female and it seemed like it was one huge competition of who could be the thinnest.
During my Master’s career, Eric and I moved to Toronto and the pressure I felt came not from the campus, but from the city itself. Like many huge metropolitan cities, Toronto is a very thin city. Research even shows that people tend to weigh less in big cities, in part because of how much more people walk, take public transportation, and have more access to health food and gyms. The women in our condo building (and area) were about half the size of me!
Last year, Eric and I moved out of Toronto into a rural area. I felt that pressure instantly disappear. There is no pressure to be stick-thin or to look like you just stepped off the cover of Vogue out here. While people are still thin and enjoy an active lifestyle, it’s not as ‘in your face’.
Now mind you, I don’t think that one’s environment is 100% responsible for pressure that one feels…no way, no how. I truly believe that we are responsible for our own thoughts, no matter what environment we may be in. I had to accept this when I sought treatment for my eating disorder. I realized that I was the only person who was ever going to take control and change my thought processes and I couldn’t blame my environment for my problems. With this being said, I still fully believe that some environments (campuses, big health conscious cities) create pressure to be thin more so than others.
Do you feel like your environment has an impact on how much pressure you feel to be thin? Have you noticed the pressure is greater or less in different areas/cities?
I hope you have a wonderful Monday! Make it great. :mrgreen:
I agree 100% that the pressure to be think can come from certain environments. I think especially at universities that pressure very high – I remember it being a real and constant issue when I was in college. BTW your breakfast carrot cake looks wonderful! Thanks again for another great recipe!
out in Orange County, CA, it’s definitely high! being able to be in a swimsuit year round also creates some pressure too. you just have to be able to recognize it and change your pattern of thinking: im not determined by my size, my weight, my looks, etc.
I agree with your post! I’ve been on college campuses for the last 5 years & there’s definitely more pressure to be thin at college than in my day to day life. I live in South Carolina, one of the “fattest” states in the US, and the people I see out in the real world are often overweight. Sometimes that makes me feel like the extra bit of weight I have isn’t a big deal, but then when I’m at college, surrounded by tiny 18 year old girls, I am pulled in the opposite direction.
Thanks for letting us know about the Valentines variety pack. I placed my first order and am excited to try them out!
Angela, I think your surroundings make a big difference. The only time in my life that I felt absolutely no pressure to look any way other than I was, was when I lived in the Netherlands Antilles. The standard of beauty there is different, and even girls on posters and billboards are curvy and voluptuous as opposed to stick thin. Skinny girls were considered to be ill! I clearly remember coming home after a year of living there and suddenly looking in the mirror and going: omg I have to lose 10 lbs! Our culture glorifies slender women in all ways — on television, magazines, marketing campaigns; it’s hard not to look and compare.
I agree with both you and Sarah. The pressure to be thin or to live up to the ideal images portrayed in your surroundings can permeate almost every element of our existence. It’s really difficult to be to strong enough to resist this. Tips gratefully recieved :)
I’d love some tips too…. :) For the first time in my life I’m REALLY trying to simply focus on being healthy as opposed to being skinny. It’s hard, because I really want to just lose weight and be slender, period, but after 12 years of yo-yo dieting, my poor body is just sad and needs some TLC. I’ve been kind to it for 1 month now and it’s been grateful. Trying to focus on increasing my endurance and stamina, not “burning 1000 calories”, and getting the proper nutrition as opposed to eating the bare minimum of calories with no thought to nutrition at all.
I live in Montreal, which is a big city. I don’t think that the city by itself is a source of pressure, I think your environement is. I used to work downtown in a fully corporate environment, and I was feeling some pressure (well… pressure I was putting on me) especially during summer time (I mean, winter time nobody sees anything with big winter jacket on and not so revealing clothes) During summer time, I use to go out every week after work for the famous 5 à 7 on a terasse, where everyone were looking at each other… asking “What you do in life” as an introduction to a conversation. But I am not working downtown anymore and I do not go to the 5 à 7 downtown anymore, so no more pressure there! I’ve never lived anywhere else so I cant say about other cities.
The breakfast cake looks delicious. Do you think that I can you make the breakfast cake with Steel Cut Oats?
can’t wait to see what your trainig plan looks like and hear your thoughts on wmm2. as I focus on my core strength this month I am interested to see how you fit core work into your new training.
p.s. cake looks to die for!
Diana
I agree that where you live can have a big impact on the pressure you feel to be perceived a certain way. When I moved to Colorado from the midwest a few years ago, I was suddenly surrounded by lots & lots of very active, very fit people. While I think I turned that into some extra motivation to commit to a healthy exercise regime, I definitely can see how I could have negatively internalized that pressure.
WOW – your breakfast cake looks amazing!!!
While I have never given in to environmental pressure, I have witnessed it first hand but in the opposite way. My mom lives in a very rural area with no concept of living a healthy life. When you drive down main street you see unhealthy people smoking outside of bars, overweight and making no attempt to live a better life. While my mom is not one of these people standing outside of bars, she does smoke and is at an unhealthy weight. There is no gym, no support and she has every excuse in the book… but so does everyone else. I worry about her health and give her advice when I can but I know it is her lifestyle and mindset.
I’ve found that some environments provide pressure not only in terms of weight, but also in terms of my OVERALL EXTERNAL APPEARANCE. By this I mean that certain environments (for example, my undergraduate college campus) had an impact on the pressure I felt not only to be thin, but also to dress a certain way, wear my hair a certain way, do my make-up just so, etc. Weight was just one piece of the broader equation that placed way too much emphasis on how I looked on the outside.
I definitely noticed a distinct lack of pressure to be thin when I was living in Nairobi. Girls on billboards were normal-sized, healthy looking people! What a concept! I’m a curvier girl with a pretty decent-sized butt, and I got a LOT of positive attention from Kenyans for it (both male and female!) Seriously, during those 4 months in Nairobi I probably had the best body image I’ve ever had.
I think it’s definitely true that the environment can affect the pressure you put on yourself to be thin/not thin.
Though it’s sort of funny. Even though Vancouver is full of lots of tiny Asian people I feel less pressure here to be thin then I do in Kamloops. I think this is because the friends I have here are generally not shallow and don’t care what weight I am, whereas I have some very shallow friends back in Kamloops who are so conscious of THEIR bodies, they make me conscious of MINE (well and they’re conscious of mine and theirs…).
That said probably one of the best body accepting experiences I had was tree planting. That was when I got over “i’m too fat to do that” and realized how strong and amazing my body is. Plus there’s people of all shapes and sizes tree planting, so you just get over it. It’s all about what your body can do, not what it looks like.
The carrot cake looks amazing!
I live in Los Angeles, so you can imagine the pressure to be thin. What I’ve struggled with is, now that I’ve lost 25 pounds, will that be enough? Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it is, when everyone around you is already fitting into a size 2 jeans. It can sadly feel like a game of catch-up.
I find it interesting that you felt pressure to be thin while in undergrad. At least where I went to school, it seemed like everyone gained minimum 15 good lbs over four years of drinking and eating without parental supervision. When I graduated, I didn’t feel like I was “more out of shape” than my peers, but I also had trouble looking at myself in a mirror because I was unhappy with how I’d treated my body. I guess I’m saying that, in college, there was an atmosphere of unhealthiness (not a word?), so pressure to look a certain way came more from myself than from my environment.
To say that environment affects self-perception is to state the obvious. I really think that it comes down to who your reference group is – who you consider your peers. To the greatest extent possible, I consider my peers to be people that exercise, have fun, work insane hours, are constantly striving to improve and follow their dreams. This periodically gets out-of-focus for me. I think the one thing I’ve learned in the last several years is that I have to periodically remind myself that my goal in life is not to be able to wear a miniskirt with absolute confidence. My goal is to run strong, work hard, and love life. When I refocus of who I am and the people I truely wish to emulate, I find it much easier to deal with day-to-day pressures on appearance.
How funny – the first thing you mention in your post this morning is the fact that it’s Feb . .. and that’s exactly the same thing I said to my husband as we left for the bus stop this morning. Focus on the positive!!
Yesterday I made your lunchtime oats – haven’t tried them yet, but their debut might be as “dinnertime oats” tonight! They look and smell good anyway. I’m a bit of a texture person when it comes to food and I just love how thick and hearty they look.
So I definately posted this really long comment this morning but it didn’t go through… haha that’s ok though.
I think your environment for sure affects the pressure to be thin. In high school, it was AWFUL!! All the girls at my school were thin and beautful, or atleast it seemed like it. But in college, I really don’t feel the pressure because i’m in college. I still feel it but not JUST because of that. I also live in the South in a small town.. it’s not tiny but it’s not huge and the pressure isn’t that bad. I’d say compared to a big city, where I could see it being worse, it’s not bad at all.
Carrot Cake is one of my favorite desserts so I’m all over that.. yum!
If my enviroment includes other thin women I feel a lot of pressure to be thin.