A Rather Cavalier Attitude

 I am desperate to like yoga. Truly. I want so badly to love it and to happily perform sun salutations at 6 AM in the mornings. I want to be the girl with a yoga mat perpetually slung over my sculpted biceps and who can recite the Sanskrit chakras on a whim. I want to have an excuse to wear Lululemon clothing. But alas, every single time I go, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and even shaving my legs for the occasion, I exit sullen and thinking, "Do I have to wash my hair as a result of this? Can I get away with the dry shampoo gimmick here? This was not worth the hair follicle sweat."
  Firstly, yoga is the absolute most excruciating thing you can do to yourself if you suffer from monkey mind, as I do. Practicing yoga is like pinching the wings of a dragonfly mid-flight. I feel suffocated, panicked, and confined, especially at the end of class when the instructor cooly tells everyone to just close their eyes and be still for 15 minutes. FIFTEEN GODDAMN MINUTES?! AND I'M JUST SUPPOSED TO SIT HERE?! Thinking of NOTHING?! The idle mind is the monkey mind's playground. That just makes my beehive brain even worse.
 To add insult to injury, literally, I'm as brittle as a a biscuit, and the 800 push-ups disguised as 'hatha flow' do not help my rotator cuff impingements, scoliotic pain, hip bursitis, achilles tendinitis, plantar fascists, and triceps epicondylitis. I just want to lie in child's pose the entire class and literally revert to childhood and force my orthopedic surgeon to surgically correct the double 23 degree curvatures of my spine so I wouldn't have to suffer enduring lopsidedness as an adult that lead to a bevy of orthopedic woes. JF kindly refers to me as 'Quasimodo.'
 And thirdly, 20 dollars per class? That's 20 Chobani yogurts when they are on sale at Publix at 10 for $10.00. Two classes is a blow-out. I'm done here.
   Still, I decided to give my antagonizing friend yoga one more chance on Wednesday evening. I walked into the gym, gingerly sat down in the waiting room, and was informed by the exuberant receptionist that the schedule had changed that week, and now the 6:30 class was no longer yoga, but boot camp!
 As I turned on my heels to leave and go back to my apartment to make whole wheat pasta with tomatoes and melted cheese and call it a night, I was intercepted by my friend RK who had also naively assumed yoga was at 6:30 PM. Having heard about the new class, she insisted we stay to try it. Let's just say that here I am, four days later, still recovering/begging JF to massage my trocanter muscle group and actually enjoying Madeleine walking all over my back in the middle of the night.


Madeleine went on a lunch date with a younger man at Berrie's in the Grove. Winston is a 5 month-old cavalier with all of the sass of a young stud. His mommy, TB is a new friend introduced to me by my fitness-loving pals PV and NN, but it seems that TB subscribes more to my camp of "we'll eat cheese and drink wine from the balcony watching PV and NN complete their triathlons down below on Brickell Avenue." I know a kindred spirit when I meet one.

Pint-sized Winston next to Dame Madeleine

Food adventure of the week: chia pudding. Definitely a new texture, but I tend to love pudding/mousse concoctions so I was a fan. It did require some added honey for sweetness and I'm fairly certain you're not supposed to have more than 1/4 cup at time since it's so nutrient dense. Couldn't help but recall the 'ch-ch-ch-chia!' commercials of the '90s while eating it as well. I felt absolved of my eating mishaps this weekend after I ate it, since it definitely tastes healthy.

Vanilla Chia Pudding
3 TBSP Chia seeds
1 cup low fat milk/almond milk/soymilk
1/4 tsp vanilla
1 tablespoon honey
cinnamon to taste

Combine all ingredients and chill overnight. Add fruit/shredded coconut before serving.

Happily Ever After,
Mon and Mads