Fitness Swellness: A great big thank you!

“Done!”

“Voted!”

“Go, Karen, go!”

“I’m voting for you!”

“You can do it!”

These are the emails, texts, DMs and in-person greetings I received throughout the month of July and August when I was in the Genuine Health Activate Your Inner Champion contest. From friends with kids of all ages (from newborns and to toddlers) running about, one friend who had a long power outage and was using her limited cell phone battery for voting, pals on vacation, friends hard at work at the office or plugging away on their MBA, and, yes, even complete strangers.

And I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

(A great big merci also for putting up with my regular reminders to vote! I know I was a broken record for eight weeks straight, but it was what helped my vote numbers climb.)

I collected just over 3,100 votes and while I stopped monitoring the votes after the first couple of weeks  (it was just too darn stressful!), I was in the the top eight or so in the end, I think. The votes are being looked at right now by GH so a winner hasn’t been announced yet…but the best part and the thing that kept me going in the competition were all of the kind messages and votes you all clicked through. I often think of this now when I’m having a particularly difficult long training run and it keeps me motivated.

Will I ever qualify for Boston in my lifetime? I don’t know, to be honest. Will I win this Inner Champion contest? Probably not.

But that support and encouragement from all of you, whether you voted once or every single day (I know many of you did click though every single day!) is worth more than any prize and I will always remember this. xo

(Thank you card, Pawling Print Studio)

Leave a Comment September 3, 2013

On the pulse

When a bag of chocolate chip cookies arrived at my door, my first thought?

“Score!”

It was as if the sweets gods had heard my grumbling belly.

And then I read on that package that these yummy looking cookies were made using beans…and I’ll admit it, the notion made me a tad queasy. (I don’t follow any type of restricted diet, so the idea of beans in cookies is a new one to me).

But I’ve eaten stranger things (I’d tried brains for the very first time at Buca restaurant–my new favourite restaurant btw–a few nights before). And so down the hatch one cookie went and it was soft and chewy and totally did not taste bean-y whatsoever) and it totally hit just the right sweet spot.

These gluten-free chocolate chip cookies were sent to me from Genuine Health. Their new Transform+ Pulse revolves around “pulse foods”–a term I’ve come to learn means beans, peas, lentils and chickpeas.

The beauty of pulse foods are that they’re way filling, as I was told by Bruce Krahn, Toronto-based personal trainer and author of the Fat Fighter Diet, given that they are high in fibre and protein. Which makes them a fantastic choice if you’re trying to get svelte for the beach as you can just have one cookie and feel full.

Even better, pulse foods have been shown to reduce risk of cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

The downside? If you’re looking to get your pulse foods in cookie format, you’ll have to bake them up yourself. For a quickie hit of it, though, the Transform+ Pulse ($29.99 for 297-gram bottle) hits shelves in July.

7 Comments May 18, 2010