Todays Workout and a Greek Salad Recipe

Today -more Firms. I remember the first time I did BCMCB I just about died during the squat thrusts! That was my first introduction to the beloved squat thrust. Now I do burpees the entire time. The difference between the 2 is in a burpee you add a jump at the top. In a squat thrust-you just stand up after jumping back. At least that is how I understand it.

Today's Workout:

-Bootcamp Maximum Calorie Burn (BCMCB)

-(16 mins) Jiggle Free Abs

*total w/o time 60 min + stretch

Alison leads BCMCB. Here is a pic of us from the infomercial

Everytime I do a w/o with Allie, Alison, or Emily-at some point during the w/o I always say to myself "I met her." If I can still speak by the time Jay comes in to say goodbye, I usually tell him too, as I'm sure he cares tremendously ...Its the small things in life...

Today's Recipe: Greek Salad: spring mix (see pic below), grape tomatoes, red onion, kalamata olives, fat free feta cheese (Trader Joes has it), and I like this dressing, Olde Cape Cod, All Natural, Fat Free Balsamic Vinagarette. Toss and eat-YUM! Even Jay likes this salad. We have salad every night w/ dinner so I try to change it up every now and then-always looking for new salad ideas.

Pineaple Zucchini Bread Recipe

Today's Recipe: I did my cooking yesterday and had some leftover pineapple and zucchini so I made diet pineapple zucchini bread. .

• 1/2 cup eggbeaters
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup splenda
• 1 cup unsweetened applesauce
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 cup white flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp nutmeg
• 2 cups shredded zucchini
• 8 oz crushed pineapple undrained

Mix all ingredients, adding zucchini and pineapple last. Spray 2 bread pans w/ Pam & bake at 350* for 60 to 70 minutes. Cool in pan 10 min before removing.

Protien Pumpkin Frappucino Recipe

 Protien Pumpkin Frappucino, I know it's early in the season for this but I saw the new Schwans catalogue last night and saw the most delicious looking fall ice cream-Autumn Treat- pumpkin ice cream, cinnamon ribbon, and praline pecans-YUM! 7 grams of fat and 150 calories per 1/2 cup-not terrible IF you can eat only 1/2 cup, which I will assume I can not...

-1 scoop BSN Lean Dessert Fresh Cinnamon Roll

-2ish TBS pumpkin puree (canned)

-iced espresso or iced coffee

-ice cubes

-water (or non fat milk-but water is fine for me)

-2 packets Truvia or splenda

-cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice to taste

Put all ingrediants in the magic bullet and blend it up-YUM! I think this recipe would still be good w/ vanilla protien powder if you don't have the BSN Cinnamon Roll...

My Favorite Workout Splits: Upper Body + Cardio/ Lower Body + Cardio

I do love my splits when they combine cardio!!!! I think this is the best of both worlds really. You get cardio plus strength training EVERY day. SO you can burn calories and build muscle! Perfect right?

Heres a list of my favorite splits that include cardio:

• Barrys Bootcamp Fat Blaster            
• Results 10 Days to a Better Body 
• Workout One on One Training with Jackie
• The Firm: Jiggle Free Arms
• Jiggle Free Buns

And others in the "like" category:

• The Firm Upper Body Split
• The Firm Lower Body Split
• PowerFit Harmony Lower Body Blast
• PowerFit Harmony Upper Body Blast

Jen Galardi

Heres a pic of me with Jen Galardi! I got to meet her at the FIRM Wave infomercial shoot :)

Firm Wave Infomercial Shoot 7.08

I just RE-submitted my story to the Firm for their next infomercial so thought I would recap last years fun! I'm sure I won't get chosen again but where's the harm in resubmitting, right!

This "adventure" all started with a boring January day at work (imagine that!). I decided to go check out the Firm website. On the site there was a generic blurb "have you had success with the Firm? If so, we want to hear from you!" I thought hmm why not, I've had success with the Firm. So I sent in a really simple paragraph. Fast forward to June 08, I receive a phone call from "Script To Screen regarding the upcoming Firm Infomercial" I was so excited! Unfortunately I was in a full car and was kind of embarrassed doing my "phone interview" and was a little dissapointed in my interview skills when I got off the phone, but I guess I did ok cuz I got a call back a week later informing me I had been chosen and they would be flying me to LA in TWO weeks!!!!

I guess the Firm received 150 Success Story submissions, narrowed it down to a short list of 25 and did phone interviews on the 25. From there they narrowed it down to 16 of us for the shoot. I feel really lucky to have been chosen! The 16 of us had been emailing in the weeks before the shoot so we kind of knew each other before we officially met in Cali.

The Firm sent us a wooden prototype of the Wave and a promo dvd to try ahead of time. I felt very special to have this ahead of the rest of the world. We also received the plastic Wave and Wave dvds after the shoot so thats an added bonus.

Onto the shoot... We got to have our hair and makeup professionally done, which was really cool!

Heres the "interview room" where they filmed our interviews. I was last to be interviewed and we were way behind schedule. It was late, 9:00 pm before mine even started. I felt a little rushed and "stepchild" at this point. Yes I know, I can find negativity in ANYTHING. So after all was said and done I wasn't even sure that my speaking part would even end up in the infomercial. But it DID! Check out my 10 seconds of fame.

I did a horrible job of buying/ bringing good clothes for the shoot/ picture session. Even though I packed basically my entire wardrobe, most of my outfits were voted down. Here are some After shots from my photo shoot: They also sent us our After shots via mail & email so that's cool.

Ok and since you've seen the "Afters" here are my "Befores"

The day after the interview session. We had a free day, so a group of us went on a tour of LA/ Hollywood. I got the chance to get to know the group. And WOW what an awesome bunch they are! I still email/ facebook many of the ladies and one gent regularly and am lucky enough to live 20 min from Tammy and we hang out all the time! I love having real life friends that I can totally relate to and talk about the Firm of course.

The 3rd and final day of fun was working out on the Wave with the Firm Master Instructors Emily, Alison, and Allie. They were all super nice and of course beautiful and fit, Emily was my fav :) Here is a pic of us on set and one of me and Alison & Allie.

Wishful thinking, but I can't help to think of how awesome it would be to do it all again next year!

8.05.09: Our Wedding 8.18.07

We are coming up on our 2 year anniversary so I thought I would just do a recap of our wonderful wedding! (Also I have nothing exciting giong on right now to write about so recapping my past excitements is as good as it gets).

Jay and I have been together (on and off) for over 10 years. We met in April 1998 and finally made it official two years ago.

I chose a lemon and lime theme for the wedding: pale yellows & greens; sunflowers, daisies & lillies; and of course lemons and limes. I searched and searched for the perfect cake to no avail. So I found individual tiers on seperate cakes that I liked, changed the colors and pieced together the perfect cake (then the cake lady did her magic with my idea). Not only was it beautiful, it was SO yummmmy! I did the tables with my same lemon lime theme. After the wedding I got quite a few comments about how surprised people were that the colors worked (and looked great) apparently no-one thought they would work, but I pulled it off!

Before the wedding I got a part time job at Michaels and used their employee appreciation day to purchase alot of the decor: the gift bags, scrapbook paper for the candy tin favors, the favor tins, candles, flowers for the bubble favors, the bubble favors, the paper for the water bottle favor lables, etc. I got the cool green martini/ water glasses at Party City after Christmas for 50% off too! Annessa made the tags for the gift bags (thank you Annessa!). I found the lime placemats at K-mart, and some cute lemon lime cups at Ross-we filled them w/ jellybellies.

Overall the wedding was wonderful and beautiful! There were a few fopaux' ... but the pictures all turned out great! Kudos to our photographer DJ Bob. BEST wedding pictures I've seen (no I'm not biased...)

As you can see Jay looked very handsome in his white tux. And I was very happy with my dress! I tried this one on only because a) the other dresses that I came in to try on looked horrible on me and b) they didn't have one of the dresses I wanted to try on in my size so the girl had me try this one. Well I fell in love at first site and HAD to have it. Only problem: It's a $1,000 dress...I used my bargain hunting skills and found it new with tags on ebay for $400! Only problem was it was one size too small. Nothing a little bit of Firming couldnt fix! Worth every penny and every minute of exercise. I wonder if I would have paid full price for it...

And for everyones viewing pleasure, here are pictures of my family. My sister, brother, dad, and mom :)

Workout 101

My only area of "expertise" is fitness, so I guess I will start there...I am a Firm girl at heart. This is the program that got me started on the right track to fitness. It features AWT (aerobic weight training). The workouts incorporate weights into the cardio so you are def maximizing your efforts here. Before I found the Firm I was killing myself with cardio and getting nowhere. Not anymore! Dumbbells are my friends-from 1# to 20#ers, I've got a complete collection.

Right now I am doing another Barrys Bootcamp Fat Blaster rotation. I did one last fall and lost 7.5 lbs in 8 weeks! I was very happy with my results, particularly because I didn't change my diet! Of course, I couldn't keep those lbs off but it was nice at the time. So anyways, I started this again last week and am down 3#'s from my normal weight (6#'s total if you count the 3 I was up)! I am actually content at my "normal" weight so the 3#'s down is just a bonus. I swear this program is seriously my magic bullet, if one exists! Here is a link to some reviews of the series that I posted on my fav website videofitness.com.

So you can decode my workout postings, here are some acronyms for this set: BBC= Barrys Bootcamp, FB = the Fat Blaster set (he has another earlier set that of course I have), LB= lower body, UB = upper body, w/o= workout (or work out for those who know the difference, I am not one that does so to forgo the gramatical error I always stick with w/o :), MS=the Mission Specialist w/o's in the BBC set...I think thats it for now...


Here is my very own custom BBC rotation I have been following:
M: BBC FB UB/ MS UB beginner/ MS abs advanced/ 10 min light cardio
T: BBC FB LB/ MS LB beginner/ MS abs beginner / 10 min light cardio
W: BBC FB UB/ MS UB advanced/ MS abs advanced/ 10 min light cardio
Th: BBC FB LB/ MS LB advanced/ MS abs beginner / 10 min light cardio
Fri: BBC FB UB/ MS UB beginner/ Belly Bootcamp/ 10 min light cardio
Sat: BBC FB LB/ Booty Camp w/o/ MS abs beginner / 10 min light cardio
Sun: Rest