26th Annual Avocado Festival

One word: YUM!

My sister and her family joined us, my Dad drove out from Las Vegas, and we all walked at least 3 miles today. It was a gorgeous day in the mid 60's, clear blue skies, and a fresh breeze blowing.  Our very first stop was at Holy Guaca-moly, Inc for a big scoop of guacamole over chips.  It is the absolute best you can get, so if you run across it, buy it up (it freezes well according to my sister).

Navigating the festival with a 2 1/2 year old walking with us was interesting this year, but Squishy did very well... and my darling hubby carried her on his shoulders for quite a bit of the day.  I wore Frank up in our Ergo Baby carrier and she ended up taking a nice nap about the time I stopped for a second helping of Holy Guaca-moly (see, it's that good!).

We had some street tacos, 1 fish and one steak, the steak was by far the better tasting taco.  My husband had a strawberry lemonade that had at least 1/4 cup of sugar at the bottom, it looked delicious, but I stuck to water.

I may have taken a brief break from eating no grains today, but believe me tonight is back to no grains.  I am doing a great job of not craving them, not begging for them, and I have been finding healthy substitutes.  I am proud of myself.

I am hunting around Pinterest (Follow me here) for weight loss motivation.  Don't be surprised if I start printing things out and taping them up on the fridge to keep myself from snacking unnecessarily.  I am a highly visual person and I definitely love my snacks to be easy to grab and go.

I have been making homemade Lara Bars over the past few days... and I tried to tell myself AND my husband that they are for the kids, but I find myself reaching for them more and more.  They are scrumptious. I made a knockoff of the apple pie flavor and it is delicious!

For 12 small bars I used:

1.5 cups pureed dates and dried apples
1.5 cups roughly chopped nuts (almonds, cashews, and peanuts)
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
3 tsp vanilla
and the tutorial link above will tell you how to make many other flavors, and of course how to assemble your Lara Bars.  These are great for quick energy, they are vegan, gluten free, dairy free, and yummy!

Walking for weight loss

I have had great results with walking for weight loss.  Walking at least 3 miles a day, 7 days a week burns around 1,500 (an average of 74 calories/mile) calories all together, which is awesome! While I was going through my divorce I had to walk 3 miles round trip to the closest bus stop, that didn't include the walking I did at work, or the times when the bus wasn't running when I got off work, or the times when I had to take the bus into town so early that I just ended up walking around for hours before work.  I would guess that I walked off about 4,600 calories/week (or 9 miles/day).  I would walk up and down the hill I lived on sometimes 4 or more times a day, sometimes I would walk the 14 miles round trip to and from work when the bus wasn't running on Sundays.

The calculator for figuring out how many calories you are burning while walking is:

.52 multiplied by your body weight in pounds = total calorie burn
.30 multiplied by your body weight in pounds = net calorie burn

I grabbed this information from this article.  It explains that net calorie burn is the total calories burned minus how many calories you would have burned by doing nothing.  Interesting read... and of course it concludes that running burns more calories (who'd have thunk it?).

So is it any wonder that I lost 22 pounds in 6 weeks of this?

I stopped walking as much last year after Frank was born.  She is a very even tempered baby, but Squishy is a little bit on the high drama side and protested walks for weeks.  We are walking again and I am trying my best to get at least 2 miles a day in.  Next week I am going to make it a goal to get 3 miles in every day, starting this Sunday.  We have the Avocado Festival happening and I only live 1/2 mile from the main street.  So walking around then won't be any kind of hardship.

What are your favorite shoes for walking?