food

Don’t Let Eating Like Crap Make You Feel Guilty

September 18, 2019 by Mike Mabrouk

Your watching the football game with a bunch of friends and all of a sudden, it’s half time and everyone starts to feel a little hungry. You of course are used to eating your salads for lunch and can not wait to have the one you meal prepped for the week but then realize that…well everyone is in your living room and you will end up being that person who just eats in front of everyone while everyone just stares at you starving out of their minds. I am sure you know what I mean and may have experienced it with being the person eating and the friends staring. That’s a tough situation. First of all, you are eating in front of everyone when you know everyone is dying to have a bite of anything healthy or not. And the worst part is you have the audacity to whip out a salad. Everyone is currently mentally judging especially since we all know football season equates to football food. And I am talking pizza, wings, buffalo chicken dip, all the goodies.

This is a scenario I would say definitely applies to the situation of eating like crap but not having to feel guilty. I am a believer in situational treat yourself days. These are the type of days where you get to create memories and enjoy the little things in life. In the scenario above, this is enjoying the football game with you best friends and the best food on this planet. It is important to understand and have the mentality that it is okay to take a break from healthy eating to live in the moment. Mentally, you need to be able to teach yourself that no one is meant to be eating healthy every single moment of their life. There is a reason why all this delicious horrible food has been invented and is consumed on the regular.

Scenarios like these are unique to everyone as each individual has their own fun days and own unique ways of having fun too. This includes being social which tends to entail having some drinks or a nice meal put together. And when I mean nice meal, I mean order every appetizer imaginable.

The way through my weight loss experiences of justifying and not feeling guilty for having a day like this goes back to my favorite concept of the numbers game. By some freaky universal law, luck and results are created through more opportunity and mindset (aka energy from you but that’s a little too out there for me and this blog). And opportunity to maintain your healthy status or even lose weight is created from having a lot of days where you move towards that goal you set with eating healthy and/or exercising. So, if you have a routine of eating healthy normally, the every now and then occasional day of being social to live life and have fun will not truly haunt you. To give a number to this, if out of the seven days of the week, you decide to have one bad day of eating and let’s throw in a half day for the after-work party of course, then the law of numbers still has you at five and a half good days of eating. This overall, is excellent when trying to achieve your health goals. The majority of your time is focusing on being healthy and it will show good results for you. And it is up to you to realize this and not feel guilty when you (everyone) has those days where we just simply let it go to enjoy life.

PS: When talking football, I am a big Cleveland Browns fans so when its time to eat during gameday, I tend to indulge out of frustration. So, plenty of experience from my end.

Thank you for checking out this blog post and please give it a like and follow the blog. Much more content on here with everyday issues we face. Trying to provide a perspective of how best to overcome these obstacles and use them to our advantage.

Mike M.

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How To Travel and Come Back Well…Less Larger

September 3, 2019 by Mike Mabrouk

Wow is traveling a whole lot of fun. I mean the beaches, new cities, the scenery and the FOOD, just wow. Traveling is a passion to many including myself and we all know that when are traveling, we have to try the local cuisine and well sit on the beach and be lazy. But that moment we step on the scale after we get back to our good old sweet home, we see the scale not looking quite right. Naturally, we try to shake it and smack the darn thing to ensure that it is actually working properly. We soon find out that nope, it’s just yourself that put on a good number of pounds and now we are wondering what the heck do I do now.

Well the plan is for us to not have to experience that through eating healthy when visiting newer cities and countries. Here are some helpful tips that can be used to leave the extra baggage (and I mean our additional weight) behind.

Plan excursions with physical activity. Talk about killing two birds with one stone (not literally of course). Planning a cool mini trip within your vacation for sight seeing and exploring fun activities while burning a lot of calories is a win-win situation. Look for swimming, hiking, biking you name it adventures that allow you to enjoy your stay while staying physically active.
Set camp on the beach……….far……….away. A little hack I like to do is not set camp on the beach right by your place you are staying but make it a decent walk away. This forces you to walk that healthy distance back and forth plus there is a good chance the further you go, the more private the beach is.
Limit yourself with the breakfast buffet. They say it is the most important meal of the day but there are two other meals in the day (at least), so how the heck do they know? But breakfast buffets are the moments in all of our lives where we go internally “momma, I made it”. All the options and choices with local cuisines tied into it, how can you pass it up. You don’t. But, eat a light meal during the buffet and make it on the healthier side. One because who knows what you will be consuming or drinking for the rest of the day and you really don’t want to feel guilty the rest of the day too. Also, you want to feel ready and energized for the day on hand and the physical activities you have in mind of course. A heavy meal in the morning will make you want to take a giant nap in your room instead.
Drink a lot of water. What is basically the second most filling thing you can consumer besides food? The answer is water. Many argue including myself that water is a great way to re-hydrate yourself of course and to always feel full. It is good for you and it can trick your mind to think you are fuller than you really are. Drink plenty of water throughout the day and this will help you avoid the snacks you start secretly losing track of.
Have fun. This sounds cheesy but think about it. If you are having fun, you more than likely don’t have to be feeling like crap from not moving and eating poorly. If you are having fun, you will not be thinking about snacking or eating the deep fried local cuisine. And if you are having fun while eating, even better. Just don’t go that crazy of course.

Hope you enjoyed the quick read of some helpful tips to travel lighter (pun intended). Please when you have a chance to like and follow as well as check out my other blog posts.

Thanks everyone,

Mike M.

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Save Money While Eating Healthy

August 30, 2019 by Mike Mabrouk

This is going to be my blog where I tie some weight loss content along with personal finance. I am very excited to get into some personal finance/investing content since we all know having money is kinda cool. So, a major part of having money in general is well saving the money that you currently have. And what is even better than having money? I would say having money and being healthy too. Therefore, we can live long and enjoy our money.

You may be asking yourself, what is a good way to eat healthy and save money while at it. Well I’m glad you found this post because I want to provide some helpful tips to do so.

Bulk Retail Stores. Yep. I am talking about you Costco and Sam’s Club. The savings are too good at these places when you buy in large quantities which is the key here. My grandparents used to buy their groceries daily and the whole time I was thinking jeez there has to be a more efficient way to both save your time and save some money. And that is bulking season. For groceries at least. These type of groceries stores allow you to pay cheaper per x amount than buying smaller individual boxes/packages since you are buying more at once aka buying bulk. Anything healthy oriented will be a heck a lot cheaper (average price per individual product) when buying a large quantity compared to an individual product. This is where I love to buy my oats, chicken, frozen vegetables, you name it.
Cheap Substitutes. The alternative can be the right move especially for cost savings. Sometimes if you are looking for a source of vitamins or any form of healthy nutrition, you may not need to look further than the cheap alternative. An example of substituting I always do is my proteins with chicken and replacing them with eggs. A lot cheaper, still fills you up, and is healthy and a good source of protein. Little substitutes like these add up and you should definitely start coming up with ways to get the nutrition with an alternative.
Meal Prepping. When you meal prep, you have the opportunity to utilize your shopping spree at once, plan a healthy meal, and save time from cooking every day. Meal prepping also forces you to consume that food since you already have it ready to go, and therefore it wouldn’t make sense to go out to eat or buy something else. Plus, you get to control what you are eating for the extended time which helps assist your diet.
Buy a Blender. So full disclosure, I do not own a blender. However, I know many people that do and swear buy it. The perks of having a blender are you can make any smoothie/drink you want that can contain any amount nutrients you add to it. It allows for you to utilize whatever cheap ingredients you have and make a contraption delicious (or try to at least). Cheap ingredient + Cheap Ingredient + Cheap Ingredient = Somewhat not cheap tasting ingredient

Hope you enjoyed the quick read of some helpful tips I have for eating healthy while saving money. Please get a chance to like and follow as well as check out my other blog posts.

Thanks everyone,

Mike M.

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