REVIEW: R.W. Knudsen Mega Green Juice

Who eats enough vegetables? We certainly don't. Having Shakeology daily certainly helps A TON, but even more couldn't hurt! With that said - we have been experimenting with juicing over the past couple of months to get more veggies in our diet. 

First we tried a local health foods store in the small town neighboring our even smaller hometown. EPIC FAIL. I believe it had carrots, beets, and radishes in it. Can't even describe how disgusting it was. Took one sip. Done. Tossed in the trash. Lesson #1: fruit is a MUST to make a veggie juice consumable.

Secondly, we tried BluePrint Juice at Whole Foods. We tried the green one (romaine, celery, cucumber, apple, spinach, kale, parsley, lemon ginger) and while it was certainly better than our first attempt, we still couldn't drink an entire bottle.

Third try: (can you tell we were determined to find something that worked for us?!?!), we visited a friend and she made us some fresh juice from her juicer. If we remember correctly, it was romaine, lemon, ginger, green apples, celery, etc. Definitely the best we had tried up to that point: tasted mostly the celery and ginger. But then, she pulled out a jar of R.W. Knudsen's Mega Green Juice from her fridge and poured some for us to try.

Let's be real - we saw that and had inner dialogue something like "Oh HAIL naw, that looks like sewage!" but smiled and said "Ok, we'll try just a little bit".

Tilted the glass up, bracing taste buds for horrific grossness, and then...

ANGELS SINGING!

APPLE JUICE!! All you taste is apple juice!

We were pleasantly surprised shocked and so relived. Quick check of the ingredient label: not bad! The sugar content freaks most people out, but remember - it's from the fruit (there is no added sugar)!

Here's a quick video the pickier half of Fit with Farrar did:

THUMBS UP!

In Health,

Timothy and Lindsay
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Priorities, Baby!

We don't think it is a huge secret at this point - but for those who may not know....yes, we travel an hour to and an hour back to grocery shop at a certain store, once a week, always. It's really not a big deal to us....we are constantly bee-bopping all over creation anyways....but it never fails to surprise people when they first hear it. Weird, but okay.

On our most recent trek, we ran into some cohorts of Timothy's. Chit-chatting commenced: they perused our shopping cart, asked why we were here annnndddd when we explained we make this trip every week, the jokes about "must be nice to have all that money" started up.

Outside, we looked like this:

Inside, we looked like this:

 

  

We were discussing this afterward and found what we think to be the best way to explain it. We will try our best to utilize this explanation/disclaimer, in whole or parts, in all future encounters:

"WOW, thank you for insinuating that a couple in their mid-twenties with no history of monetary inheritance must be rich because they shop at Whole Foods. It certainly can't be because we work hard and budget accordingly, no, definitely not that. We are just Richy McRicherson"

Okay - maaayybbbee skip that part, unless we are just overwhelmed with sarcasm that day.
 

Maybe it should go more like this:

"Yep - high quality food is really important to us and we can't get that at our local stores. We find that you spend your money, time, and effort on things that you deem priorities. For us, our health is the #1 priority, so we delegate a lot of our time, money, and effort into preserving and improving our health."

Now - in our perfect world, the person(s) would follow up with something like "Jeez, you're right. I want to do this too. How can you help me?"

YES! YES! We can help. Easy challenge: For the next month, track your expenses. Keep note of when you go out to the bar for drinks, grab some fast food, get some snacks from the vending machine, order pizza, etc. We bet that you would be shocked if you add all that up! If you really want to make the change without seeing a huge change in your budget, put all or most of those funds toward grocery shopping. Crap out, goodness in, no change in your funds. 

We really mean no harm, and we are sorry if you find this post preachy. We are not perfect, but we do try to keep our priorities at the forefront of our minds 98.978346% of the time and just want people to know that they too can do the same, if they really want to. 

Social Media Roundup: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube

In Health,

Lindsay and Timothy

Review: Vega One Nutritional Shake

We love Whole Foods....there is so much amazing yummy goodness in that place....cannot get enough! Going every week typically elicits a response similar to this:

 
One thing we always do is get a little sample of something we've never tried before. Our bellies *usually* love it, our wallets don't....le sigh :-)

This week's grocery trip was no exception. We picked up Vega One's All-in-One Nutritional Shake samples, one Berry and one Chocolate. Important to note: we've tried Vega's Sport Pre-Workout drink, and oh mylanta was it disgusting!! Gritty, gross, all around nasty. (In our humble opinions, of course!) But, we didn't completely write off the Vega brand based on that experience.....so we decided to see how the shake samples would go.

You can tell by the information here that the shakes are full of a lot of the good stuff: protein, fiber, digestive enzymes, etc. Neither of us are vegan (must.have.bacon.) but we like that it means this product is dairy, soy, and gluten free (particularly the last two!)

Thoughts:

Timothy tried the Chocolate flavor and Lindsay used the Berry flavor sample.

• For the Berry sample, Lindsay put frozen blueberries and strawberries and Trop 50 Orange Juice and blended to perfection. The taste was good - very berry (like the name suggest) and the OJ gives it an extra punch of sweet/tart. It still had that mildly gritty, aftertaste/residue like their Pre-Workout drink did, which kinda sucked. Overall rating = B+
• Timothy made the Chocolate sample with frozen blueberries and mango, almond milk, and a sprinkle of PB2. His incredibly poetic description of it was "It was fine; okay, B+" 

According to the website, it is $69.99 (not including S&H) for a tub (assuming it is made to last you 30 days). The flavors are: Berry, Chocolate, Vanilla Chai, and Natural. That being said - we think Shakeology wins this battle, not only nutritionally, but if we're going to spend that much money, we want to LOVE the taste and we want top-of-the-line everything....Shakeology gives us both. Sorry Vega One - but thanks for playing!

In Health,

Lindsay and Timothy

Grocery Store Trip - Farrar Style!

It really started while Lindsay was in graduate school, pursuing her Master's. She was working full-time, taking a full-time course load, and doing her counseling internship at night. Timothy was working full-time as a firefighter and pretty much every day he wasn't at the station, he was working a variety of part-time jobs (plumbing, farm hand, etc.). 

We were pretty much passing ships in the night....we were newlyweds, but didn't have much time to spend together!! Early on Saturday or Sunday mornings....we'd go grocery shopping. It was virtually our only chance to get an hour or two together, so those trips were like our dates (complete with PDA in the aisles, lol). 

While our schedules have calmed down since then....we still consider grocery store trips to be like dates! We both enjoy it and doing it together is the best :-)

After doing a little Facebook poll earlier this week....it was determined that our friends were most interested in a blog post about our grocery shopping! Well here you are....pics of our most recent trek to Whole Foods (yep, we travel nearly an hour out of the boonies to the nearest Whole Foods - food quality is important to us!!).

Frozen fruit and berries!! Blueberries, Berry Medley (blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, and raspberries), and Pineapple Chunks. We make a lot of shakes, and these add a big antioxidant punch to them! 

"Breads" = waffles, english muffins, and sandwich bread....all gluten-free!! Also have some plain, sodium-free rice cakes (love to spread PB on these!) and Timothy saw some cinnamon dried apples and picked some of them up. 

MEAT! This is probably our biggest reason for going so out of our way to shop at Whole Foods...clean, quality meat! Kroger, Food Lion.....the meats just don't compare. Of course, we get a ton of chicken breasts. Lindsay gets some ground chicken to cook up with some salt and pepper to quickly eat in the morning. Timothy gets chicken burger patties and some chicken sausages. Bacon is also a big hit in the Farrar household (shout-out to Paleo peeps! Lol). Lindsay got some pepperoni for a couple recipes she found on Pinterest this week. 

Plain Greek yogurt, almond butter, some eggs, dark chocolate, and chia powder. Also got some Egg White Protein samples to try out and picked up a mason jar of honey from a local farmer. 

Pretty self-explanatory here! Fruit! Apples, bananas, grape fruits, oranges, lemons, and some pomegranate kernels. 

Had a lot of frozen veggies stocked up, so just needed some sweet-potatoes, carrots, and baby spinach this trip. Going to try to make some raw shakes instead of more than 1 Shakeology a day (we're running out before the next shipments arrive!) and a lot of recipes call for baby spinach! Will likely have a post in the future about our trying out raw shakes! 

Speaking of Shakeology - beginning of the month brought our next shipment!! Thank goodness!! We get the mixed box: half-Chocolate and half-Greenberry. Can't do without this stuff!!

Ohhh....the mail also bought Lindsay's new cross trainers! She was in desperate need of a new pair, and after doing some research, the Ryka Assist XT2 came highly rated amongst fitness instructors/people who did high impact workouts.

Alrighty folks - that's a fairly typical grocery store trip for us! If you have any questions - please comment below or shoot us a message!

In Health,

Timothy & Lindsay