Ten in 10: Making Changes…

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When Recipe Girl talked about doing “Ten in 10“, I thought “No time like the present.”  See, every­one com­mits to diets, runs to the gym dur­ing the first cou­ple months of the year but then you see things taper­ing off.  As BR once taught me, it’s about life changes.

While upload­ing some pic­tures from back in the day, I also encoun­tered some pics that I was none too pleased with – namely those pic­tures of when I was 75lbs heav­ier than what I am now.  At the time I was in a seri­ously bad rela­tion­ship, had made some really bad choices and decided enough was enough.  BR helped get me on the right track and 75 lbs came off with LOTS of hard work (and lots of curs­ing at him while he made me do sit ups).  I think the prob­lem with diets is that it’s like a quick band-aid on a prob­lem, not a life­long change.  In today’s soci­ety of processed foods and drive-thrus, I think we’re always look­ing for the quick fix and I decided that I was going to take these 10 weeks to make some changes for the better.

I am not a fan of break­fast and I’m work­ing on mak­ing changes with that.  Nor­mally when I have break­fast first thing, it never fails – I get severely sick.  Don’t know why.  How­ever, after watch­ing an episode of Sim­ply Deli­cioso, I saw Ingrid Hoff­mann mak­ing a Berry Mint Salad along with an Old Fash­ioned Avena Oat­meal Smoothie.   That didn’t look too bad as berries never seem to drive my stom­ach insane.  The Avena smoothie takes some prep work as much has to be done the night before.  It’s sim­ple but the end result is well worth it.  I am happy to report that I didn’t even want a cof­fee that morn­ing and you know for this cof­fee­holic to say that, it has to be good.  The energy I had all day was insane.  Con­sid­er­ing that I’m not much of a fan of oat­meal, I was sur­prised I liked it as much as I did.  I did halve the recipe and I sub­sti­tuted Agave for the sugar.  The berry salad put quite the twist on your typ­i­cal fruit salad and will be a tried and true in this household.

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Old Fash­ioned Avena Oatmeal Smoothie

Recipe adapted from Ingrid Hoff­mann, Sim­ply Delicioso

Ingre­di­ents

• 1 cup old-fashioned oatmeal
• 6 cups milk, plus more if needed
• 2 table­spoons to 1/4 cup sugar or agave
• 1 cin­na­mon stick
• pinch of nutmeg
• 1 tea­spoon vanilla extract, optional

Direc­tions

Place the oats and milk in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat and bring to a rapid sim­mer. Reduce the heat to medium-low and cook, stir­ring con­stantly, until the oat­meal is thick, about 10 min­utes. Add sugar or agave, to taste, nut­meg and cin­na­mon stick and set the oat­meal aside to cool slightly.

Trans­fer the oat­meal to a con­tainer and refrig­er­ate it for at least 2 hours or overnight. Strain the liq­uid, remove the cin­na­mon stick, add the vanilla and add more milk if you want it thin­ner. Serve cold.

Gather the Ingredients….

Don’t for­get to strain the mix­ture in the morning…

The End Result…

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Berry Mint Salad

Recipe cour­tesy of Ingrid Hoffmann

The Final Product….

Related posts:

1. Tried & True: Giada’s Blue­berry Ricotta Pancakes
2. [Win] The Book: Ingrid Hoffmann’s Sim­ply Delicioso…
3. Tried and True: Giada’s Spice Cake