Workin' hard for dinner and dessert

Yesterday, I was sitting at my desk at work hungry, hungry, hungry. I tortured myself by looking at a few food blogs. This was done just to make sure I was really hungry for dinner. And dessert.

Dinner was packed with protein, the non-meat kind.

Black beans, white onions, lots of cilantro, a red chili pepper, lemon juice, cumin, cayenne pepper, paprika, salt, and a dash of olive oil. And then more cilantro.

Onto a sprouted tortilla it went. Topped with an avocado, pineapple, and nutritional yeast.

Simple yet delicious.

And there's always room for dessert...

Dessert
Carrot Cake Balls with Avocado Green Frosting

After seeing Pure2Raw post this recipe, I knew I had to try it. My recipe is very close to the Pure2Raw recipe but with a few minor tweaks.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup shredded carrot
• 1/2 cups coconut flakes
• 1/2 cup coconut flour (or just blended coconut flakes)
• 1/4 cup agave syrup
• 1/4 cup raisins
• 2 tsp maple syrup
• 1 tbsp mesquite (optional)
• 2 tbsp vanilla
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp ginger
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg

Mix the ingredients.

Throw in some shredded carrots

Mix, mix, mix and form into any shape you desire.

Not sure why the picture is so dark...

Then top with some frosting!

Avocado green frosting.

Blended avocado, banana, vanilla extract, lemon juice, and stevia.

Definitely hit the spot. Although the frosting did need some work.

Thanks again for these ladies for being so damn creative in the kitchen! Without you two, we'd all go hungry.

There's was much prettier, huh?!

To burn off all of this food, and although I haven't been blogging much about exercise, I've been hitting my gym's MMA classes Monday through Friday (and occasionally Saturdays). I truly love the kick ass workouts I'm getting from Marine style boot camp and Muay Thai style kickboxing. I've said it before and I'll say it again, best workout ever.

On thing that I have to say about this type of exercise is that it's super high intensity mixed with lots of strength training. These are key.

Kickboxing always provides a great heart pounding, sweat session. Sometimes we work on punches and kicks in partners. Sometimes we do a circuit of air kicks, air punches, and core land galore. Lucia, my favorite instructor, mixes things up and makes sure we leave class tired. Most of the time, though, we start class with 3 minutes of jump roping, right into jump squats, and move onto the punches.
Punching and kicking is much harder than it looks. Partner work involves one person holding kicking arm pads or hand pads, while the other person, obviously, kicks and punches. The instructor calls out drills and we have about 30 minutes of high intensity, quick burst kicks, punches, knees, pushes, etc.

It's pretty much like this. Contact sport = other person's sweat included, unfortunately.

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For boot camp we always do push-ups, mountain climbers, jumping jacks, and jump roping. Added to those, varieties of push-ups such as diamond push-ups, dive bomber (shout-out to P90X), and push-ups with hands on an 8 lbs medicine ball. Ouch. Then there is always kettle bells. I love these. You get a crazy good workout that incorporates multiple (if not all) muscle groups. Some of the best kettle bell exercises we have done are figure 8's between the legs with bell, obliques (ahhh yeah!), and hooking your food into the bell handle and bringing that leg up to a 45 degree with knee. And let's not forget core.

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Tonight I'm going to talk the boyfriend into taking some action pictures of me showing my favorite ab/core exercises from my classes...
They're killer. It's awesome.

Happy Thursday, my friends!