My Journey To Eating Clean, & An Eat Clean Giveaway!

Good afternoon Beautiful,

HAPPY HUMP DAY! Tomorrow is Thursday – this week is FLYING BY. This is my second night alone without C, and it’s sad. I miss him. It’s been like, 36 hours since he left, and I have another 48 to endure. I’m sure they’ll fly by. Tomorrow I’m out of the office most of the day at a health fair and Friday, well, it’s Friday. I usually put a post-it over my computer clock on Fridays or else they go reeeeeeeally slow.

Speaking of Friday, I just learned that I need to go to bed at like 7pm on Friday because the Zoo Run that I thought was in Mississauga is actually more near Pickering, which is the complete OPPOSITE end of the city for me. And the race starts at 8:15am, which means I need to leave my house at like….. 6:30am. BRUTAL! I clearly didn’t think it through when I signed up for this race lol. Just kidding. I’m super excited to run it, but I’m also getting a touch nervous. I’ve heard the course is fairly hilly and that’s the part that’s scaring me the most. I’ve done ZERO hills since I started “training” for this 10km so I’m probably going to die. Oh the joys.

Today I did a “long” run… 6 months ago I wouldn’t have called 9.3km a long run since I was running anywhere from 15-21km for my long runs, but today, for me, now, this was a long run. I ran it in the 10/1 format (run 10 minutes, walk 1 minute) and managed to pull out a 9.3k run in about 53 minutes. Not too shabby if I do say so myself! I still have a little bit of the running bug in me. Although, I noticed something extremely awkward on my run today. A little background behind where I run, I do a 2.5km circle around my work, and then today I did it like 3 times plus a little bit more at the end. At two different points on my route, there were guys doing construction. Could it possibly be any more awkward to have to run past a bunch of men in and of itself… but let along having each and every one of them stop what they’re doing to watch you run past? Seriously! It happened a total of 6 times, and by the last lap I’m pretty sure each group said something to me, but I was in the zone and had headphones on so I couldn’t be bothered to stop and chit chat. Near the very end of my run I did two little loops around my office but not past any construction men, but one drove by in a truck and gave me a thumbs up. Really? It was annoying. No wonder some women prefer to run on a treadmill. Sheesh.

As soon as I got in from my run, my friend Katie sent me a text asking if I wanted to go to CrossFit tonight with her. UHMM YES I DO! But my legs did not. My legs are still jelly and it’s 4 hours after my run lol. I don’t think I could have handled any squats or really anything to do with legs, so I opted out (sadly) and told her we should go on Sunday. She’s getting back to me (hopefully with a yes – right Katie? J). I haven’t done crossfit in so long. It would probably kill me, in an amazingly amazing way. I really hope she says yes.

Ok so I have a super fun giveaway planned for tonight (sorry – tons of giveaways happening all at once! I promise, in November it will slow down! But I hope you enjoy them! I wanted to try and spread out my giveaways, but this one and the next one are near and dear to my heart, and I get excited really easily, so I had to share tonight! J) but I want to write a bit of background to the giveaway and why it’s super important to me.

As most of you know, I try my best to stick to a paleo diet, which basically when you sum it up means no grains of any kind (yes, corn is a grain), no dairy, no processed foods, no sugar. Basically I eat meat, veggies, fruit and root vegetables (squash, potatoes, sweet potatoes). For a long time I’d been struggling with what to eat and how to eat. In my first year of college I was a broke student who didn’t know any better and ate pizza, ramen noodles and kraft dinner like they were their own food groups. I also didn’t notice that I, me, the girl who was so into fitness and “health” had gained the freshman 20. I have pictures of me at that size, but I honestly don’t want people seeing it, that’s how embarrassed I am of it. So in the summer in between college years, I decided I wanted to become a vegetarian after having seen the Skinny Bitch girls on Ellen and how Ellen talked about how she’s a vegan. Both of those girls were skinny so OBVIOUSLY I needed to become a veg. Well I was a vegetarian for 3 years, and I don’t remember a single day during those three years that in the afternoon I wasn’t a bloated mess. Every single day I was bloated and I had no idea why. It was something I just eventually got used to and that’s how it was.

Living with men (I had 3 male roommates for about 6 months before I moved to Toronto!), and the plan of moving in with my boyfriend got me back on meat. I started with chicken breast cooked so well that it was so hard to chew, and it was mixed in with a huuuuuge salad. Then eventually I worked my way into eating meat like a normal non-veg human. When I finally did move in with my boyfriend, I took on a job as a CSR at one of our GoodLife clubs downtown. I had no idea what I was walking into, but all of the trainers and the managers went by this crazy diet of eating “paleo”, at the time I had no idea what this was and I thought it was some nonsense people did to build lean mass and get huge.

It honestly wasn’t until after I left the club that I actually started reading about the paleo diet and the “Eat Clean Diet”. I read about the anti-inflammatory parts of this diet and thought I needed to try it. I bought a book by Robb Wolf and I bought some of the Eat Clean Diet books by Tosca Reno and once I read them I was sold. I related more to Tosca’s book probably because we’re both women and she writes in more of a non-scientific manner. I love the way she writes and I love the way she speaks (I had been to her sessions at canfitpro before) and so I absolutely needed to take her advice and start eating “clean”. I started this way of eating when I first started training for my half-marathon, and within weeks I noticed how I wasn’t bloated, I felt great, my skin was clear… this was obviously working for me!  Sometimes people ask me questions about it, sometimes they think I’m crazy and sometimes they don’t, it doesn’t matter to me because clean eating works for me, it makes me feel 100% better than I have in years and that’s enough to keep me motivated to eat this way for life.

If you read my blog often you probably know that I’m pretty passionate about food and nutrition and eating to fuel your body rather than to “feed” your body (if you ask anyone I work with they will tell you this is 100% true. Every morning I come in, heat up my chicken or steak and brussel sprouts and eat my breakfast. It’s not the most delicious and decadent meal ever, but it fuels my body and I’m not hungry 2 hours later…). I really believe that food is the answer to a lot of problems that people deal with in terms of disease and inflammation, and if anyone were to ask me, I would strongly recommend food over medicine any day. I’m actually taking a couple university courses on nutrition and obesity in January/April 2013, I’ll fill you in on those closer to the date, but I’m really excited for them!! J

So this summer at canfitpro I was lucky enough to actually meet Tosca, tell her how wonderful she is, how great she looks and how I love her books… and of course snap a photo with her:

I also got to attend some of her sessions. I tweet to her a lot and she always tweets back and so I was thinking one day, and the thought came to me… “I know I only want to promote products and people that I genuinely enjoy” and I was looking for a giveaway. And taadaa…. This is what I have for you to win (this is INSANE… I was completely shocked when I got the news):

• A 1-year subscription to Oxygen Magazine

 

• A 1-year subscription to Clean Eating Magazine

 

• A copy of the Eat-Clean Diet Recharged book by Tosca Reno

 

• A copy of the Eat-Clean Diet Vegetarian book by Tosca Reno

 

• A copy of Just The Rules by Tosca Reno

 

ISN’T THIS AN INSANE AMOUNT OF THINGS TO BE GIVING AWAY!?

You have no idea how excited I am for this! I want to give this giveaway to myself! If you’re unfamiliar with Tosca and her publications, you can look at her website here www.toscareno.com or www.eatcleandiet.com. I highly recommend you do this and you will fall in love with her like I have!

So to enter this UNREAL giveaway, here is what you need to do:

Mandatory
- Like The Eat-Clean Diet and My (Mostly) Healthy Life on Facebook.
- Share this giveaway on Facebook and please tag myself and The Eat-Clean Diet in your post so we know you’ve done it.

Additional Entries
- Follow Tosca Reno and The Eat-Clean Diet on Twitter.
- Follow me on Twitter.
- Tweet the following “I just entered the @eatcleandiet @sarahohm Giveaway for a ton of Eat-Clean Diet Stuff! You can enter here http://tiny.cc/xhpwkw”
- Follow My (Mostly) Healthy Life via Google Friend Connect (by clicking “join this site” on the right hand side of my blog).

This gives you a total of 6 possible entries! I ask that you please leave 1 comment per entry on this blog post so I can keep them in one spot, and so it’s easy to find the winner of this giveaway!! I also want to extend a HUGE THANK YOU to the Eat-Clean Diet Team, Robert Kennedy Publishing and Tosca Reno for providing me with some amazing prizes for this giveaway. I really hope this giveaway helps someone transition into the world of clean eating! :)

This giveaway is open until October 1, 2012 at 8:00 EST. GOOD LUCK!

I’m off to finish some laundry and cook myself (boo, I like cooking for C…..) dinner and snuggle up with my iPad and get caught up on all my reading!

I hope you all have a terrific night, chat soon!

Stay Sweet,
xoxo