Jedi Fuel Pumpkin Smoothies

http://www.deviantart.com/artisan/culinary/pumpkin/?view_mode=2&order=15&q=game+of+thrones

Winter is coming, and 'tis the season of all things Pumpkin Spice. Sadly, almost everything that calls my name is terrible for me. If I'm choosing to spend so much time building themed teams in Pokemon X, then I can't be simultaneously stuffing my face with everything that suits my fancy.

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I'm convinced that there are Sith Lords out there with knowledge of all of my worst seasonal weaknesses. Between Pumpkin Spice Lattes at Starbucks, Pumpkin Smash smoothies at Jamba Juice, and an array of pumpkin flavored pastries at Dunkin' Donuts it's temptation city.  So I put out the call on twitter and facebook for Paleo Pumpkin recipes. Boy did I get a ton of great stuff back! My friend Michelle linked me a recipe for Raw Pumpkin Balls, which I haven't gotten a chance to try yet but I can only believe it's like Halloween exploding in your mouth based on the ingredient list. However it was my "Jedi Sister" Emily who blew it out of the park with a Paleo replacement for that Pumpkin Smash smoothie I've been  hankering for. 

Emily and I spent our youths looking at the sky and imagining our adventures among the stars as Jedi Knights. When we met at soccer practice and admitted our love of Han Solo, it was BFF central. We even saved all our money so we could go to Space Camp and buried a Jedi time capsule in my back yard with all of our childhood secrets. 

Emily is a powerful role model. Not only is she a thoughtful, empathetic, intelligent person, but she is determined to meet every challenge she faces head on. I remember when she got into the Naval Academy, she started doing athletic training at home in Chicago so that she would be ready. No one else I knew at that age was attempting something like that. Add to her list of accomplishments living abroad in Japan to serve in the navy, starting grad school, and spending her free time training for half marathons. Seriously, is there anything she can't do? Apparently not because I tried this recipe and its amazing. I made a few tiny adjustments, but we wouldn't be Jedi Sisters if we didn't collaborate on our missions! Try it out and let me know what you think!

Jedi Fuel Pumpkin Smoothie

• Ingredients
• 2/3 cup of almond milk
• 1/3 cup of organic pure pumpkin (canned is fine, but read the label to make sure no sugar or chemicals are added)
• 1 cup frozen organic pure pumpkin (same as above)
• 1 tbs extra virgin olive oil
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp nutmeg

1. The day before you intend to make your smoothie, put one cup of canned pumpkin in the freezer. Make sure it's chopped up a bit so that you can use it in place of ice. Make sure you put it in a freezer safe plastic bag.
2. Add all the ingredients to your blender. Make sure your "ice chip" pumpkin pieces are broken up. 
3. Blend till smooth. 
4. Drink in your Jedi Fuel, confident in your delicious yet healthy Light Side diet choice. 

If you have other pumpkin recipes you'd like to share, please feel free to add them in the comments! On a slightly separate note, while I was at New York Comic Con, I chatted with some industry folks about what it would take to self publish a Project Reroll Paleo cookbook. Would that be something you Slayers would be interested in? 

Motivational Thinking: I Have Many Skills

There are things I've started to tell myself to stay on track when things get hard or food gets tempting. In the past, being a stickler about having to do the same thing every day has caused me to lose large amounts of weight in the beginning, but resulted in a failure later on when I'm not able to continue measuring up to my own incredibly high standards. After all, no two days are the same, so if you limit yourself to certain behaviors performed in an exact order every day, there's only so long you can carry on before you start to feel trapped by the process. The key difference here is that I've been educating myself on how to be more active and how to supplement the Nutrisystem program so that if I do have to adjust, I have more options for strategies and solutions at my finger tips. This time around, I'm allowing myself to be more flexible and adopting a "slow and steady wins the race" mentality so that I can focus on lasting life-style changes rather than yo-yoing down so fast that I fail to maintain the weightloss and shoot up higher than I was in the first place. It's the difference between Jedi and Sith training.

So without further ado, here are some of my go-to motivational mantras:

• You can sleep in, but then you have to go to the gym after work and work twice as hard.
• You never regret going to the gym, but you do regret not going.
• If you want to eat off of your specific diet plan, then PLAN how you're going to do it so that you're not undoing the hard work you've done. On these "indulgence" days, you MUST go to the gym. 
• If you're dreading your typical boring workout, you don't have to do it. BUT! You do have to go to the gym and take a class.
• If you have a setback, let it go and move forward. You're not going to undo a mistake by harping on the past. The only thing that will undo a setback is what you DO in the present and plan to do in the future. 
• What do we say to the god of giving up?

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Those are just a few of the sentiments I've been using to push myself through rough spots. If you have more that you use to keep your motivation up, please feel free to post them in the comments!