Protein Cookies

This weeks recipe is Protein Cookies. One might ask, what are protein cookies? I have a very large sweet tooth, I love desserts , so w hen i first starting dieting it was dreadfully painful.  Having to cut out sweets was probably one of the hardest things i had to do. Recently i have found people making desserts with Whey protein powder, before i was curious if this would work. As you can imagine there aren't as many recipes online for these types of things. I found a base recipe on youtube and modified it to my liking. Its not perfect but it is edible and tastes pretty good.

The Items you will need:
1 3/4 cups of oats
6 egg whites
1 1/2 scoops of protein powder (chocolate or vanilla)
1 tbsp vanilla extract
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
3 tbsp of  pumpkin
2 tbsp of stevia1/2 cup to a cup of Raisins (optional)

Mix all dry ingredients together first then add the wet ingredients and mix them all together. This recipe can give you about 11, 2-inch cookies. Feel free to make them smaller but i thought that a 2-inch cookie would be a good size for a snack on the go.

 

In conclusion these made very good snacks, I brought a bunch to my Final presentation and everyone loved them. I plan to keep making these till I find a perfect recipe, next up trying to use oat flour instead of rolled oats.

*stevia- is a sugar substitute that is derived from the sweet leaf plant which is native to subtropical and and tropical areas of North and South America. It is 300 times the sweetness of sugar, it has recently become popular due to its low carbohydrate, low sugar and low glycemic properties.

 

A Starting Point

Every great thing needs a good starting point. You need to start somewhere. The same thing applies for Weight training, you first need to determine your goal for working out. It can be something as simple as trying to lose 5lbs or it can be something more complicated like a complete lifestyle change. For me I wanted to feel healthier, I wanted to have energy , I wanted to be more confident and most importantly i wanted to feel and look good about myself.  One of my online friends Eric, whom I had never met and still have yet to meet is a personal trainer. He suggested I try out the starting strength workout. The Starting Strength workout is a workout that was created by Mark Rippetoe to help people get started lifting weights, whether their goal is to gain muscle or lose fat this is the best starting workout out there.

This workout helped me shed unwanted overall body fat as well as build strength and muscle over the course of months. This was before i started to dip into nutrition so the gains were purely from the consistent workouts, hard work and sweat put in to achieve my goal. The workout looks as follows:

Workout A
3x5 Squat
3x5 Bench Press
1x5 Deadlift
**2x8 Dips (if you cant do these or no assist machine then do Decline Dumbbell Bench Press with your hands Facing each other)

Workout B
3x5 Squat
3x5 Standing military press
3x5 Pendlay or Bent Rows (or power cleans)
**2x8 Chin-ups (recommended mainly if doing the cleans)

Working out 3 days a wk and alternating workouts is the way to go, for example if you were to Start working out on a Monday then you would start with Workout A, Wednesday would be Workout B and Friday would be Workout A. The following week you would start with Workout B. As weeks go on feel free to increase weights as you get stronger. This workout contains alot of good overall body exercises as well as strength exercises.  Go Train!

                                                                      

Motivation

As i mentioned in my first post, the main thing people lack when it comes to being fit is : MOTIVATION. It is important for everyone to find something or many things that motivate them.  I would like to share my motivators with everyone as well as share some images I've found online that i find very motivating. My main motivator is my health and appearance, this is one of the most important motivators to have. You have to want it bad to keep yourself motivated. I am also motivated by my girlfriend, a little while ago she was lacking motivation to workout because she wasn't seeing results. I stepped in and  introduced new things for her to try and i trained her the best i could. A few months later she started to see results and this motivated her to work harder. It motivates me to help others achieve their fitness goals. Which in turn makes me want to learn as much about health and fitness so that I can help train and motivate others.

You will hit bumps in the road but that doesn't mean you are at your limit

I draw alot of inspiration and motivation from this guy: Pham Woodbridge

The king of bodybuilding-still a great king today

If she can do it, why can't you?

Humble Beginnings lead to great things..

          When was the last time you worked out??? Can you do a pull up? How about a pushup? As we age and get busy with life we don't think about working out and exercising as one of our main priorities. It is one of the best things you can do for yourself. One of the main reasons that we don’t exercise is the lack of MOTIVATION. Everyone has an extremely busy life dealing with things like school, work, social life, family and friends but that’s no excuse not to find a way to work out during a busy day.  I am a full time student, I work 30+ hrs a wk, Have a passion for all different types of exquisite food and like everyone else i love to have fun. I still manage to get into the gym 2-4 times a week. It wasn’t always like, about 4 years ago I decided to join a gym for the first time in my life. The experience changed my life, It is a habitual part of my everyday life now. I might not work out every day but when I do workout, I train very hard and challenge my body.My main goal for creating this blog is to share my knowledge and motivate others to get healthy, get fit, get shredded and feel amazing. I want to educate people in dieting, supplementation and finding the right workouts to do. Every little bit counts, it just takes that effort and motivation to push past the starting point and get the dumbbell rolling.

          As i stated earlier , I didn't always have a passion about being healthy and fit. When i was growing up my parents were very restrictive on the amount of junk food that they allowed my brother and I to have. So any chance I got, I would eat all the candy, desserts and fast food I could get my little hands on. As a kid we think fast food is amazing, I mean who doesn't like it. Its delicious, cheap and made to be consumed immediate within a few minutes but we don't know any better. We have no idea what negative effects it has on us, we just know that it is a quick meal. What's horrible these days is a lot of parents are giving their children fast food because they are too busy working or involved in many other things in life. Fast food becomes their first choice to feed their children because its fast and they know their kids will eat it. I want to encourage parents to change these habits. Many people eat fast food for a few reasons, they don't have time to cook, don't know how to cook or they just don't care what they consume. I've learned that cooking your meals ahead of the time for the week is very important in managing what you eat on a daily basis. If food is prepared ahead of time then you don't need to think about what to eat and you know that there is food in your fridge ready to go. 

          Being healthy and eating right doesn't mean that you don't get to indulge in the wondrous joys of food. You just need have a little will power, cheat meals are actually very beneficial. Having a cheap meal once a week can help make your metabolism work. Eating clean is great but after your body gets used to it, its not as efficient. By throwing in those cheat meals it makes your metabolism work to burn off those calories.  After dieting for a while Ive realized that life is too short to not eat what you want, the trick is to not do it all the time. Combining healthy eating/dieting with the right workouts will lead to results. The trick is to find that consistency, I think my biggest pet peeve about the gym is when the new year rolls around and people say they are going to work on becoming healthy and being fit. They try to continue their bad eating habits and just start going to the gym. Then two weeks later if they make it that far, they decide they aren't seeing the results they want so they quit. Being an avid member of my gym, I see this all the time, I am not looking down on them because they did give it a try but that try wasn't good enough to get results. To get results you have to work hard, change your habits and keep things consistent. I push but I don't topple!