Biking is awesome!

Biking has been my favorite form of exercise since I was a little kid.  Granted, when I was young, I didn't really think about the healthy aspects of it, it was just something to do with all my friends.  We would round everybody up and be the neighborhood "biker gang", riding around and just having lots of fun.  Then my friends and I got older and we stopped biking so much, especially when we got cars!

I was very fortunate in my youth to be handed down a fully paid for car that I was able to take to college, which I enjoyed for 4 years.  Then, once I was reduced to the meager paycheck of a graduate student (seriously, with the work we put in we should be paid 16 times as much as we are), I realized I didn't like filling up my gas tank once a week.  So, to get to my job over the summer I started biking from our apartment to campus.  

It's about an 8 mile ride one way, which takes me about 45 minutes to an hour at a steady pace.  In the warm months, this is the greatest mode of transportation.  On your way there you wake your body up and get it engaged for the day, on the way home you can beat out your frustrations if need be, and you get lots of fresh air and sunshine!  I will admit, it takes a little bit of perseverance in the cold months.  But, in the end it's worth it!  I get plenty of aerobic exercise and am always wide awake when I get to work (no coffee needed!)

So, this spring, I challenge everybody to dust off their old bikes and give it a shot!  You won't regret it, trust me!

Adam

Weekend Bake-a-Thon and my first pie

Happy Monday everyone!

I hope that your weekend was as relaxing and as enjoyable as ours!  This weekend we had the rare occurrence of absolutely nothing going on.  I decided to use that time to bake to my little hearts content, and Adam of course supported this decision!  I am an addict of the website Pinterest (seriously it's a problem... but in a good way...) and had been pinning all of these delicious recipes that I just hadn't had the time to try out yet.  All of them were clean eats, and those that weren't were easily adjusted to be clean.  It was fabulous! I made muffins and cookies and vegetable chips (that didn't quite turn out the way I wanted, but I learned how to fix it), and candy.  I also tackled my very first pie entirely from scratch.  I was a little intimidated at first because pies are one of those desserts that you can make really well or just completely destroy.  But once I got going and my dough expert, Adam, helped me out a bit, I really liked making that pie.  And it turned out delicious!  This weekend was a little bit like therapy, making all those goodies and knowing they are actually healthy and won't make me feel ashamed to eat 1 or 2 cookies, really puts me in a good mood.  Weird? Maybe, but I have never claimed to be normal anyway!  I promise soon to add a page with all the recipes that I try out and my reviews/revisions of those meals.  That way you guys can start building up your own clean cookbook and enjoy all the delicious food just like me!  Talk to you soon!

Katie

So what's our approach?

So what exactly do we do here at He Bikes, She Runs, They Love?  We've hinted at "healthy living", but what does that mean to us?  

Well our approach is really simple:  eat clean and exercise.  It's pretty obvious what our preferred modes of exercise are (I bike, she runs!) but what exactly is "clean eating"?  Well, to put it simply, if something is  processed, we avoid it.  Now that seems really simple, but it gets a little complicated.  Over time, the companies in charge of creating our food have moved further and further away from the original product, substituting in things like artificial sweeteners to make the food taste "better".  The thing is, if we had stuck to the original product, it would have tasted just as good!  The point is, a LOT of our food is now processed, so that tends to make this diet a little tricky.  Things like sugar and things with white flour (white bread, regular pasta, etc.) are processed so they're out, as are anything at the store that has an ingredients list the size of a small country.  Our rule of thumb is if we don't recognize the ingredient or we can't pronounce it, it probably isn't clean.

The main focus is to clean up as much as possible everything we eat.  We buy lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, eggs, and hearty whole grains (quinoa, brown rice, oats) and make everything we eat from scratch.  If you want to get into the nitty gritty details of our diet, I highly recommend checking out The Gracious Pantry.  Tiffany over at her blog has come up with tons of great descriptions of clean eating, as well as a slew of home made recipes that are 100% clean and delicious to boot!

Adam

One small step...

I know that so far this blog is not that exciting. There is one post and an about us section. Wooo hooo.... I am still in the process of getting this whole blog together and I promise that once that happens this will be a much more exciting place.  I just wanted to share a positive experience that happened on Sunday.  With out making this post a huge novel, I will just say that ever since Adam and I have switched to clean eating we have had a few frustrating situations with both of our families.  We haven't always had their full support because there have been big changes in our lives and they were worried that we were making some bad choices.  That being said, all their worries and opinions were out of love and wanting to make sure we were taking care of ourselves.  But it still did cause some hurt and frustration on our part.  Well, Sunday was Easter and we were spending the day with my family.  It being a holiday, of course there was to be quite the feast and that generally means a lot of food that we no longer eat.  But to my shock my mother asked me a few days ahead about how to "clean" up her recipes so that we could all enjoy dinner together.  It was a really great moment for me because I felt that my family was accepting my healthy lifestyle just a little bit more.  And Easter dinner was fabulous! We were able to eat almost everything that was put on the table and I think that my family really enjoyed the food even if it was prepared a little different than normal.  It is moments like this that make me really happy that we have chosen to really take care of ourselves and possibly help others do that as well.  As this blog continues, I will be letting you all into my health journey so that you can fully understand where I am coming from and why what seems like an insignificant moment of eating a holiday dinner with my family really means so much to me!  I hope you all have a great and healthy day!

Katie

Hello to everyone stopping by!  This is Katie and I just wanted to get our first post on our new blog out there.  I am going to be honest, blogging and what not is fairly new to me.  Sure I read them, but I have never made my own and it can be kind of an intimidating task.  But Adam (my wonderfully tech-savvy fiance) has been helping me to get this blog up and running.  And he has been so kind as to join me in this endeavor and lend a male's perspective to our approach to healthy living.  This blog will be a place to document our styles of exercise, cooking, eating, and the occasional life lesson.  I want to be able to share with others how I have gotten to the point where I am today in hopes that perhaps in can help and inspire just one of you out there.  It has been a long and sometimes difficult journey.  But every step has made me stronger and brought me to the happy place I am at now.  I can't say that I have done this completely alone because there have been so many amazing people who have helped me all along. So I hope that you thoroughly enjoy this blog and that it can help you get to that "happy" place, whatever that might mean for you.  Until next time!

Katie