Vegan Pancakes

Good morning all! What better way to kickstart your day than with some pancakes? And healthy ones? Un-heard of! Well, here I am, your saving grace! 

Look how precious these things are. Like yum, I know your jealous rn! 
They are really simple, really yummy, and totally adaptable to what you want to make them with! 

I’ll give you the base recipe here: 

Ingredients 

1 cup of flour

1/2 cup of sugar

1 tbsp of baking soda

1 cup of non dairy milk

1 tsp of vanilla

1/8 tsp salt

2 tbsp of oil

This is the general recipe, here is how I made the ones shown above! 

1 cup of whole wheat flour

1/2 cup of coconut sugar

1 tbsp of baking soda

1 cup of unsweet almond milk

1 tsp of vanilla

1/8 tsp salt

2 tbsp of coconut oil

*added vegan mini chocolate chips*

 (I recommend)

They were sweet, delish, perfect, I just loved them. I added a sliced banana on top and drizzles a little organic maple syrup, not toooo much. You don’t want to kick yourself in the morning with too much sugar. 

These were so good. This recipe can easily feed 3 people and keep them extra full. Any more and I would double it. I got 3 huge pancakes out of this and barely finished one. 
Let me know how they go for you! You can substitute any of the ingredients that you want, different flour, sugar, add ins, milk etc. make it custom to your liking! That’s what I love about recipes like this, make it how you like it, so you love it! 

Let me know how they come out. Comment below! I hope you get a great breakfast from this 🙂 

MJ

Simple & Easy Vegan Burgers

Hey guys! I haven’t been keeping up with my ‘Day by Day’ weight/ food journal, but I am here to bring you some recipes! I’ve been exploring healthy, vegan recipes and have found some great ones! I always put my own flair on them. Today I have for you, Vegan Veggie Burgers! 

Who doesn’t love a good ole burger? Well, here is the story behind making my own yesterday. My fiancé and I were watching the food network, as per usual, I mean what else is there to watch. We were watching Gordon Ramsay make a huge, juicy burger. My fiancé is not vegan, he loves meat, but has a very healthy diet to where he likes everything I eat so if he wants, when we go out he will have chicken or a burger, because I don’t make it at home. He was craving a burger, it was 10 pm so I wasn’t going to let him go get one because that’s not a healthy time to eat, but I decided to surprise him the next day and make him the full, healthy, experience of a burger! My style 🙂

He came home from work to find this, yummm! And he loved it! 
This was the first time I’ve made a veggie burger myself, so I will add what I suggest, and what I will do next time! 

Ingredients 

-1 can of black beans

-1/2 cup of corn

-1/2 onion

-1/2 pepper

-3 tbps of flour (I used whole wheat) 

-spices (I used garlic salt, paprika, pepper, Italian seasoning and rosemary) 

It’s a SUPER simple burger. Just mix everything together and mash it! Mine wasn’t as mashed as I will make it next time, but it was still delish! 

Once you mix it all together, put the patties into a skillet pan, or grill pan, and cook for about 4 min on each side, medium heat. Make sure you either coat the pan with a layer of oil, this will add some crispy-ness if you want, or just spray it with Pam. 

And that’s it! I did a bun-less burger, save some calories, and instead put the pattie on a bed of mixed greens with a light oil and vinegar dressing. 

The fries were super simple as well. I took 2 medium sized golden potatoes and cut them into slices, fry shapes, and soaked them in a cold water bowl for 30 mins. (The longer the better, overnight is the best. This adds the crispy texture your looking for in a baked fry.) 

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Once the fries have soaked for at least 30 min, take them out, I didn’t dry mine, I just got most of the water off, and place on a waxed sheet. You can coat the fries with whatever you’re feeling, I used garlic salt, Italian seasoning, and nutritional yeast. I baked those for 25-30 mins and they are done! I broiled them for 3, I like them crispy! 
And that’s it! It’s a super simple meal with few ingredients. You can add more veggies to the burger if you want, I will. More peppers, onions, etc. Just keep the base of beans and flour. You could even add some cooked rice/quinoa if you wanted! And you could do the same recipe for the fries and substitute sweet potatos. The options are endless! 

I hope you guys try it and tell me how it goes! If you like this post, let me know that as well and I will try more recipes and let you know about them! 

Have a great rest of your weekend, 

MJ

Day 18

Man was today a DAY! I found a new love inthe workout world- TRX. 

Breakfast: Avocado Toast, as per usual. Topped with cayenne and garlic salt! 

After this I did the TRX class. 700 calories in 45 minutes!!!!! Say whattttttt???? Yea! It was amazing! Constantly moving and keeping the heart rate up. I LOVED it. 

Lunch: Banana and hummus pack. I had this before my workout, but after I also had a rice cake with pb, coconut, chia seeds and cinnamon. 

Dinner: this beauty. Man, this was the best sandwich I’ve ever made! It had mixed lettuce, tomato, nana peppers, roasted red peppers, spicy mustard, vegan mayo, sub sauce on Eureka Bread! YUMMOOO

I also went to a dance cardio class for an hour and burned another 550 calories. 

Total calories: 1,659 calories

Total workout time: 175 minutes

You today was awesome!! I also went to Publix and got lots of fresh veggies and fruits (ones I either already ate or didn’t get at the Farmers Market.) 

Keep up on your goals 🙂

Camping

Hello folks! I know I haven’t posted in a while, but thats because I’ve been camping! I’m from FL so my closet friends and I decided to go hiking up in North GA! We stayed at Terrora Camp grounds right near Tallulah Falls. 

Sadly, we had some pretty crappy weather, so we weren’t able to go down into Tallulahs Gorge. But, we did find some amazing trails to hike near by! 

The first full day we had we went to hike Panther Creek. Over all it was about a 8.6 mile hike round trip, but the terrain was crazy! And since it was raining, the clay was slippery and caused for even tougher terrain. But it was a blast! Here was the end set of water falls:

Pretty cool right?! My boys climbed alllll the way up the the very top (not pictured because I was having heart palpitations the whole time they were up there)

Here are some pictures of the day: 


Beauttttiiifffuullllll. 

The next day we did Yonah Mountain, one of the highest peaks in GA! It was a really crappy day, constantly raining so I didn’t get any pictures from the hike itself. It was a Steep climb. Going down was the worst part, the rocks and clay combined with rain caused for a dangerous trek. But after that hike, we went to the famous Dillard House for dinner (not so vegan friendly, well for that GA isn’t big on vegan things anyway 😂) 

Here are some pictures from the Dillard house: the food was family style, and bottomless. Yea, didn’t feel to good after lol. I mainly had green beans, candied sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes and cabbage. And of course the strawberry cobbler because who could say no to that? 

This was SUCH a pretty area around the restaurant. They had a petting zoo, vineyard, and beautiful landscaping. Look at that mountain in the background 😍

Overall it was a great trip! Wish the weather was better so we could do what we came here for; the Gorge. But there will always be another chance! 

I’ll be posting my regular blog post this week! The connection was sketchy so I want able to post, plus I was on vacation, soaking in the moment time! 

I hope you all are having a great week! 

Love, MJ

Counting Calories and Macros

Hey guys! I’ve decided to start counting calories and macros again. One of my blogger friends Happy Healing asked if I did, I said I didn’t, but it got me thinking why not! I have in the past, and since I am focusing on losing weight, I think it will help me control unnecessary calories. So let’s do it! 

I started this morning, I had a homemade acai bowl which came to this: 


Not only that, but I couldn’t believe what my macros came to! A lot of these foods have high fat contents! Breakfast has already made my fat content more than halfway to the desired amount. Crazzzzyyyyyy. 

Here is lunch: I have it packed for work so I already logged it:


Luckly these foods were higher in carbs so I was able to balance out my macros! These are the accounts for breakfast and lunch. No dinner yet. 

Fat is to high but that’s okay because usually for dinner I have more protein and carbs than fat.

I really think there are a lot of positives that come from CPU ting calories and macros, especially if your looking to make sure your diet is healthy and balanced! If you ever have any questions let me know! I’m using the app MyFitnessPal. You can downloaded in the App Store. It’s free, but you can go premium with extra perks. Personally I think the free version is plenty, but it all depends on what you’re looking for! 

I hope you all have a great Thursday! 

Alllll about Oats!

Good morning guys! How are you doing? I hope you all are well. If you’re looking for a way to jump start your day, have a bowl of oats! Whether that be oatmeal or a granola mixture, having oats in your diet gives lots of health benefits! 

Oats help you to feel fuller, longer! That’s why they are great if you’re looking to regulate or lose weight! 

Here are some great recipes to help incorporate oats in your diet! 

If you’re looking for something sweet Click here for some sweet cookies!

Here is a recipe for Overnight Oats!

Here is a yummy pancake recipe

Here is a recipe for Chickpea Oat Crackers!


There are tons of delicious recipes to add oats into your diet! They great thing about oat recipes is you can make them and they will stay good for a while! So great for trips and adventures!

I hope you all get your oats, they are helpful in more ways than you can imagine! 

Love, MJ

Spartan Race Training

Hey guys! I don’t know if you know but I LOVE obstacle races. I’ve done a couple Savage Races over the years but today I signed up for my first Spartan Race, the Spartan Sprint. I’ll be making up a training schedule and doing a lot of their WOD (workout of the day) to help prepare for the race in December! I’m really excited about this! Here are some pictures from past Savage races, I’ve done three but can’t find the pictures! They are somewhere on my computer. 


This race will just be me and my fiancé, this hunk 😍

We LOVE doing outdoorsy things together. Next week we are camping! He challenges me and pushes me to see past limits I set on myself. Here is today’s WOD: I’ll be shooting for 8 times through the main set. We will see about that 2-3 mile run, I might just laugh at it. 


I’m really excited to start this training. Along with the WOD and whatever else I do, I’ll be sure to do 30 burpees as well. In Spartan races, if you fail any obstacle, the penalty is 30 burpees, PER OBSTACLE. The Spartan Sprint is 3-5 miles with about 20 obstacles or so. Lord have mercy. 

To give you an idea, the Savage race is usually 7 miles with 25-26 obstacles. They are pretty spread out. But the Spartan Sprint will have a more condensed area so you’ll be doing obstacle after obstacle pretty quickly. Aka you’ll be burning you muscles out faster. The Savage Race have usually a 1/4 mile between major obstacles, sometimes the barb wire crawls would have an obstacle right after but that isn’t as intense as a 17 ft rope climb….yea. 

Regardless, I’m STOKEDDDDDD. I’ll update you guys tomorrow on how today’s workout goes and let you know what their workout of the day is tomorrow! The goal is a lot of upper body training to increase my muscle endurance and gain strength. 💪🏼 

Let’s do this! MJ 

Alllll about Almond Milk!

Hey guys! As a plant based water, my go to milk is almond milk! I usually get unsweet vanilla from Silk. 

I love almond milk. Even before I decided to go plant based, I wasn’t the biggest milk fan. Other than icecream… mmmmm. Luckly there are almond and coconut based icecream so we are good! 

Almond milk is versatile and delectable. I enjoyed it this morning with a bowl of granola. 

Here are some health benefits Almond Milk provides! 

If you want, you can even make your own almond milk! I haven’t ever made my own, but I think it’s a great idea! I’ll be using this recipe too! 

Once you’ve tried making the almond milk, you’ll have lots of Almond pulp left. Here is a great article about how you can reuse the pulp and create a variety of things from it. Don’t throw it away!!!! Uses for Almond Pulp

I add almond milk to my cereals, oatmeal,  baking batters, and smoothies! And much more. 

I LOVE almond milk. It is the perfect animal milk substitue. 

Here are some recipes that incorporate almond milk! 

Strawberry Almond Smoothie!

 Recipe here


Vanilla Chia Seed Pudding

Recipe here

Tomato Soup! 

Recipe Here

Skinny Vanilla Iced Coffee! 

Recipe Here

When I’m having a cheat, I’ll dip plain graham crackers into the almond milk….delicious. 

Love always, MJ

Alllll about Carrots! 

Good morning guys! Happy hump day! We’ve made it halfway through the work week, thank you God. I have this w rj left and then I’m going camping with my fiancé and closest friends in Tallulah, GA! And then a wedding in St. Augustine and then my nieces baptism. Good lord, all in one week…. peace be with me. 

Carrots! Who loves carrots? I’m weird, unless they are in a salad, wrap, etc I don’t like them raw, but I LOVE cooked carrots. Stirfry’s are my favorite. I try to incorporate them raw as much as possible. Unlike my fiancé, he eats them like chips. Do you know about all the wonderful health benefits of carrots? Look here! ⬇️

Carrots are like little orange miracles! They really are essential for a healthy diet. There are tons, tons, of ways to add carrots to your diet. 

Here are a couple recipes I LOVE! 

Yummy glazed carrots. Great side dish! 

Recipe here

Carrot bacon! Say whatttttt???? 

Recipe here

BBQ ‘pulled pork’ Carrot sandwich! 

Recipe here


Lastly, Dessert! Carrot Cake 

Recipe here


I hope you enjoyed and will take some of these yummy recipes and amazing facts & add them to your life! 

Love always, MJ

Alllll about Pineapples! 

Happy summer guys! What makes you think of summer, the beach….. the sun…. piña coladas…. pineapple! 

Yes, Pineapples! What refreshing, juicy, vibrant fruits! They are a staple when it comes to summer fun. But did you know all the wonderful health benefits you can get from consuming Pineapples?? 

Guys talk about feeling fresh on the inside and out! You’ll be glowing with your pineapple-self. 🍍 

I like to put frozen Pineapples in my smoothies! Or you can check out my post about Frozen Banana and pineapple nicecream here! It uses frozen pineapple, bananas, and maple syrup to create a yummy frozen treat! 

I also really like this pineapple smoothie recipe! Really great for your body!

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I enjoy Pineapples!

Love,  MJ