Eats and Exercise

Hi friends! I’ve had a jam packed but really fun past day and a half! I spent yesterday working at home with a nice break over lunch to take a yoga class and grab some food. I love the Mom’s Organic Market “Naked Lunch” café in Arlington – I was able to get lunch and grab some groceries – efficient. :) I had one of their signature bowls with kale, grains, sweet potato, black beans, avocado, feta, mushrooms, peppers, and an herb vinaigrette sauce. It was REALLY good – and massive, so I have leftovers for lunch tomorrow, too!

After finishing out some AnneTheRD calls and the rest of the workday at home, I headed into the city for a fun adventure! My friend Kath was in town for a blogger dinner we were both attending last night; so fun to show her around my city!

The dinner was in U street area of DC; I’ll share more about that tomorrow, so stay tuned! (Here’s a sneak preview on Instagram)

Normally I would have offered to just have Kath stay with us at our place, but considering our guest room has now been demolished, the house is a TOTAL disaster of baby stuff, AND we have a puppy that hates strangers… we decided it made more sense for her to just stay in the city instead. To make it more fun and to give us a little more time to hang out, I decided to stay with her! U Street area is kind of a pain to get to from Arlington and I knew the dinner would go late so this worked out really well. Plus, this meant we could do a fun workout this morning on U street and grab breakfast before she had to leave, and then I could just walk to my co-working space for the rest of the day. Easy!

It ended up being perfect because Sweatbox, a fun boutique studio located inside the Vida Fitness on U street, ended up emailing me last week about trying out a complimentary class – perfect timing since our Airbnb was literally RIGHT around the corner! They reached out to my friend Chelsea, too, so we made plans for the three of us to get our sweat on together this morning.

Sweatbox is kind of like Orange Theory except they use spinning bikes instead of treadmills for the cardio portion of class – so you alternate between biking and doing weights/strength/TRX stuff on the floor. Everyone has their own little area with a bike, weights, and TRX bands, which was nice so you weren’t running into other people/scrambling around for equipment at all!

As for the class, I enjoyed it! Spinning is actually quite pregnancy-friendly in terms of cardio, apparently – no pounding on the bladder like with running. ;) And the instructor was really nice and spent some time before class getting us set up/making sure we knew what we were doing, and then was great about coming over and giving me modification ideas for some of the strength/floor moves as well.

They had us hooked up to heart rate monitors which was interesting, too, because I haven’t worn one since getting pregnant! My resting heart rate is definitely higher than it normally is, but I was pleased to see that by listening to my body during the workout my heart rate naturally didn’t get very high at all. That was good to see that I haven’t been going too hard in all our weekly classes!

Thanks for having us, Sweatbox – and HAPPY BIRTHDAY Chelsea!! So lucky to have you as a workout buddy every week! <3

After saying goodbye to Chelsea, Kath and I walked back to our Airbnb to quickly shower and grab our stuff. I have been wanting to try a place called Slipstream for breakfast forever now, but I’m never in that area of the city first thing in the morning (it’s near Logan Circle on 14th street, for my local readers); I decided this was the perfect opportunity to give it a shot! It was only about 0.5 miles to walk over there.

The first order of business was some caffeine. Their coffee is SO good – really smooth! I had a half decaf whole milk iced latte and Kath had a pretty cappucchino. Mmmmm.

As for breakfast, it was all about the toast! I went for their avocado toast with goat cheese mousse (omg, so good – and pasteurized, yay!) and added a poached egg (I asked for it to be cooked longer) for protein. Delicious! We each got a side of blueberries, too.

I can’t wait to go back – good food and a really fun, hipster vibe. Two thumbs up!

After eating, Kath headed off to the train station and I walked the half mile to my co-working space to get back to normal weekday business. I’ve got a busy day of client calls – better get through my emails before those!

Have a great day, friends! I will leave you with some links of interest from around the web (below), and, for the Zara fans, two cute snoozing cat photos. As my brother said, she and Freyja (the dog) have been united by their love of naps! Never would have thought these two would peaceably snooze next to each other!

Of interest from around the web:

• I am featured on the Sarah R. Bagley podcast this week! We had a blast chatting all things blogging, entrepreneurship, and nutrition – click here to listen.
• I’m also honored to be featured on the Brooks Women instagram account this week! I love the @BrooksWomen account – so positive and inspiring. Follow it if you aren’t already!
• I thought this was an interesting post: 7 Essential Habits for Creating Happiness
• This Mediterranean Chicken with Cauliflower Rice sounds deeeelish (and easy)
• 8 Recipes That Don’t Require Your Oven (excited to see my Avocado Toast Recipes included!)