This sums up day 9 for me. I got up at 4:45am and ate my pre-workout snack of 1 hard boiled egg. I know the template says to add a fat too, but I was just not feeling the black olives this morning. I am planning to get some almonds for next week. 2 of the girls who completed on-ramp with me in December were in class today, so that was exciting. It is always nice to know a few people going into the class. We did our regular warm-up and then did a strength exercise of overhead squats. My max weight for overhead squats was 45lbs. It is tough to keep the bar up over your head and squat down below parallel and not feel like you are going to fall over! Today the workout was:
WOD
Amrap 11
10 box jumps
15 shoulder to oh
30 sit ups
You had a partner for the workout and the girl who I was partners with during on-ramp 
was there, so it was just like old times. We both modified the workout to do step-ups instead of box jumps and the weight for shoulder to overhead was 45lbs. The sit-ups were regular sit-ups with the ab mat. I completed 2 rounds +25. I was trying to keep an eye on my heart-rate today during the workout, which led me to take a few more breaks than normal to slow down my breathing. I just wanted to see if it was possible to keep my heart-rate in the 150ish range during the WOD, but it averaged around 160-165. The whole point of the WOD is to push yourself as hard as you can for the workout, so I guess my heart-rate doesn’t really understand that. 6:30am and workout was done for the day!
I was not hungry right when I got home, so I took a quick shower and ate my post-workout
snack of chicken zucchini poppers on the way to work. I wasn’t really hungry, but decided to have breakfast around 10am and had my prosciutto eggs with guacamole. I remember reading in the Whole30 support group people saying that they were forcing themselves to eat because they weren’t hungry and being so jealous because I was STARVING between each meal. Thankfully that has gradually changed and I am not really hungry between meals and found myself eating today because I knew I needed to get my meals in. This is definitely a welcome change!
Lunch today ended up being different than was originally planned. I live in the wonderful snowy land of Buffalo, NY and although we have not had much snow yet this year, we had a warning today between 10am-10pm. The snow started to fall around 10:30 and I decided to head home to beat the snow so I could work from home and not have to deal with traffic later in the day. I left a little too late and got caught in my first white-out driving for the season. It was only bad for a short part of my drive home, but it is scary when the snow is blowing and you can barely see anything in front or behind you and the roads are covered!
Anyways, I made it home and posted in the Whole30 group asking how people cooked their spinach. I really enjoy the support of the Whole30 group and highly recommend joining one if you are taking on the Whole30. It is great to see what other people are making, ask questions, and be able to go through the ups and downs of each day together. After reading about 10 suggestions on how to cook spinach, I decided to throw together lunch. I warmed up a baked potato for 3 minutes in the microwave and then cooked in on the stove in some coconut oil with onions. After a few minutes I added chicken sausage and then some spinach. Once the spinach started to cook a little bit, I added garlic powder, salt, and some coconut milk to make a type of creamed spinach. AMAZING! I do not like coconut, but I LOVE the coconut milk that is compliant for Whole30. If you have a hard time getting in your veggies, I think sauteing spinach is a great way to go. You can put a few big handfuls in and once it cooks down it is nothing. See pics of the spinach before and after it was cooked below.
After lunch I did some work and then decided I probably needed a nap and ended up sleeping for about 1 hour. I always set an alarm when I nap because I am afraid I won’t wake up and will sleep for hours and not be able to sleep at night! I got up and made beef 
enchilada for dinner. I got to use my relatively new food processor that I got from my wedding shower to make the cauliflower “rice” for this dish. Although it was a little time consuming, the food processor made the job so easy! I will definitely be trying on of the cauliflower “rice” recipes I have 
seen in the future. I remembered to take pics while I was cooking, but took about 1hr to bake and by the time it was done I was hungry and I forgot to take a pic before I dug in! I added some hot sauce and guacamole to complete the meal and it was amazing…. as you can see by my plate. 
Tomorrow is Day 10 and everyone says Day 10 and 11 are the worst and when you feel like quitting. I am keeping this in the back of my mind if I have a few hard days and will remind myself that after a few more days, it should be relatively easy for the last 2 weeks!
FitnessLion 