What Did You Do With Jill?Jill Whalen's healthy lifestyle transformation                                               

By Jill Whalen

What I Learned Last Week (12/16/2013 – 12/22/2013)

When I’m not doing something physically active or cooking, I spend a lot of my time reading and listening to educational/inspirational videos. In order to try to remember a bit of what I’m learning (even if it’s just silly stuff) I decided to write down a few things that I learn each day.

In that spirit, here’s what I learned last week: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the finished products!

By Jill Whalen

For awhile now, I had been using a slight variation of this cornbread recipe to make healthy corn muffins for my breakfast on some days. It was the only recipe I found that uses REAL corn in it! I had been making a few substitutions such as using whole milk instead of low fat (because that’s what I always had on hand), plus I used all natural maple syrup for the sweetener (but slightly less then the recipe called for), and I used coconut oil instead of canola. The muffins always came out to my liking and I would often eat one for breakfast, sliced in half and warmed in the toaster oven with some of my homemade sunflower butter on them. They were delicious!

My Quest to Reduce Wheat Consumption

That said, I’ve been reading the book “Wheat Belly” this week, which made me think about how much of what I eat contains wheat, including my corn muffins. While I don’t seem to have any sensitivities to wheat or gluten, the book did make me wonder if I should attempt to give it up, or at least eat less of it. In my quest to be healthy, I’ve definitely been eating less wheat than I used to, but I have been under the impression that whole wheat was a good thing to eat. Perhaps not so much <sigh>. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been eating a LOT of winter squash lately and have been enjoying trying lots of different varieties.  While  spaghetti squash seems to have its own unique characteristics and texture, I found that butternut, buttercup, acorn and the like, seem to taste pretty similar. They’re sweet and  buttery and yummy!

I have been gobbling up half a squash as my lunch on the weekends for the past month or so. But this weekend I realized I was all out 🙁  Then I remembered the sugar pumpkin a friend had given me from his garden ages ago. Surprisingly, it was still in great shape and not at all soft. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jill Whalen

I truly wish someone was video recording me while I was trying to slice a spaghetti squash in half. But I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal! I’ve sliced plenty of other types of squashes with little problem. I found that at least for buttercup and acorn squashes, a bread knife works well.

I started out with my biggest (widest) knife, figuring that might do the trick on the large spaghetti squash. However, I barely dented the flesh with that one. I know I don’t have the best knives in the world, but they’re typically good enough for this sort of thing!
Read the rest of this entry »