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

By Jill Whalen

Be it in salads or side dishes or just a healthy lunch, I love adding fruits and nuts to my veggies! They add so much flavor and character and go so well with just about any vegetable. I had been using dried fruits during the colder months, but now that summer is here and fresh ones are more abundant (and affordable) I’m using them when I have them on hand.

Below are a few of the recent lunches I’ve made for myself which you could easily recreate!

[Added: I decided to continuously add new creations to this post as I create them, so be sure to check back now and again!]

I love brussels sprouts for lunch. While I could certainly eat them with just a bit of garlic, they’re much tastier paired with the little sweetness that fruits and nuts can give. This one didn’t have fresh fruit in it, but was extremely flavorful, nonetheless: Read the rest of this entry »

Before I changed my lifestyle, got healthy and lost 25 lbs., I ate out pretty much every night. Not only that, I’d generally eat my leftovers from the night before for my lunch. And because I didn’t know better, those meals weren’t generally very healthy ones.

These days, I always prepare my own healthy breakfasts and lunches at home, and cook dinner a couple of times a week, but I still eat dinner out the rest of the nights. Though I’m no longer trying to lose weight, it’s very important to me to eat healthy foods as much as possible. I eat almost no refined sugars and keep my grain consumption to a minimum. If/when I do have grains I prefer to stick with something like quinoa or brown rice as opposed to pasta and breads. (This is not to say I don’t eat the others at all, I just try to have them maybe once or twice a week rather than every day and/or with every meal.)

This makes eating at restaurants a bit of a challenge, if not a temptation! Read the rest of this entry »

I am definitely enamored with the deliciousness and healthiness of paleo muffins than can be made in just a few minutes in the microwave. Ever since I learned about them, I’ve had them for breakfast almost every day! (I even made a savory one which I provided the recipe for here.) They’ve replaced my previous go-to breakfasts of oatmeal with fruit in it or sesame Ezekiel toast with avocado on it, as I have cut way down on grains.

Paleo Blueberry Mug Muffin

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s so much information about weight loss out there that it can be really confusing to people who’ve never attempted it. Now that it’s been a year since I decided to lose weight and become healthier I have a bit of wisdom on the subject that I’d like to share.

Here are 3 misconceptions that you may have about losing weight: Read the rest of this entry »

One year ago today (May 1, 2013) I took my body back.

I could no longer ignore the fact that I was…okay I’ll say it…fat. It’s amazing how many buttons I could burst through, mirrors I could turn away from, jiggles I could ignore, and photos I could somehow believe the camera was adding 10 (or 25) lbs. (See before and afters at the end of this post.) Read the rest of this entry »

I learned a lot more this week about Mind, Thought and Consciousness and living “from the inside out” as described by Michael Neill and others. Understanding the principles behind how life actually works can and will transform anyone’s life. I’d love to discuss this understanding with anyone else who’s interested. Feel free to contact me!

Here’s what else I learned last week:

Monday, Mar. 10, 2014

• There’s no psychological trauma that can’t be “cured” by changing your relationship to the memories that originally caused the trauma. – George Pransky (paraphrased).

Read the rest of this entry »

By Jill Whalen

Through my nearly 18+ years in the SEO industry, I loved helping people make their websites be the best they can be through my newsletter/blog and my seminars/presentations, as well as through my paid consulting.

While I’m very happily outside of the SEO space now, I do miss the helping people part. That’s a big reason why I’ve been sharing many of the lessons I’ve been learning in my personal life through this blog. But I keep thinking that I’d love to be able to reach and help even more people. Unfortunately, most of my audience right now is still comprised of online marketers.  That’s okay because they are also human beings who have lives outside of marketing, but I’m itching to branch out. I know I’m not yet an expert in living a healthy life, and I don’t have a degree in nutrition science, but  I have spent the past few months immersed in learning everything I can about health and wellness. And even more than that, I’ve been immersed in actually living it. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jill Whalen

Here’s a tip I’ve been doing for awhile to keep me fuller and eating healthier.

When I’m craving carbs such as pasta, I make it healthier while still satisfying my carb craving, by simply adding some veggies to the dish. 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 »

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 »