Good Morning Everyone!

Today I am going to start re-capping the Healthy Living Summit. I had a wonderful time on both Friday evening and all day on Saturday. During the summit I learned a lot on a variety of subjects – from how to design a great and readable blog, to learning more about why organic farmers are so wonderful and many, many more subjects which were all equally as fascinating! There is a lot of information, so I am going to write a little bit about it for the next few days.

But before I get started on the actual conference, which was all day on Saturday – I wanted to say that the cocktail party and dinner at Rustic Kitchen was really wonderful.

Thankfully I met a fellow blogger in the elevator before walking over to the restaurant. I was so happy to meet Mardi – and we stuck together for the rest of the conference! I had a lot of fun getting to know her both during the cocktail party and on Saturday during the summit. Check out her blog: Eat, Live, Travel, Write.

The room we had for the cocktail party was a little hard to navigate since it was long and narrow and there were 110 people trying to squeeze in – but the food that I was able to try was divine! My favorite of the night would definitely be the risotto balls 🙂 but I also loved the portobello mushroom pizza, and what I think were basically roasted root vegetables. Everything I had was fantastic. The cocktail party started at 7 o’clock and Marti and I got there at 7:30 or so. We stayed for two hours chatting and tasting the food, and we also had a wonderful conversation with Jenna from Eat, Live, Run. She is one of my favorite bloggers – and I was so glad to talk with her for a while – she is truely a sweetheart!

I gracefully left the cocktail party at 9:30 and headed back to my sweet hotel room on the top floor of the Raddison. I loved this room, and my sleep number bed 🙂 and the bathroom was spa like. I wish I had stayed more than a night – but it was great to be there on Friday, for sure!

So, the blog conference started bright and early at 8 o’clock with breakfast and registration. Because the actual conference did not start until 9, I did not feel the need to get right down there at 8. Mardi and I decided to meet up around 8:30 for breakfast. I was totally shocked when I walked in at 8:35 and all of the Stoneyfield yogurt and Kashi granola bars were gone! I was really looking forward to the yogurt and granola combo for breakfast, but instead I had a great meal of fresh fruit and a blueberry muffin, half a small container of orange juice and some wonderfully strong and fresh coffee – which was much needed!

At breakfast Mardi and I met another summit attendee, Kate. I was so happy to meet two new friends at the Summit. Kate was a lot of fun, and she sat with us during the conference. I had meant to get a picture of the three of us – but somehow I forgot!!

The summit started right on time, at 9 o’clock with some opening remarks from the six ladies that planned the summit – I am so impressed with all of them, they did a wonderful job getting the sponsors, speakers and products for our awesome “swag” bags. You can go to the summit’s homepage and watch the conference for yourself, thanks to Mark who videotaped the whole day for us.

I really enjoyed the two morning sessions. The first talk was by Janel Ovrut (MS, RD LDN) who is a registered dietitian and talked a lot about living a balanced life, and how to make the right decisions when you are faced with what to eat every day.

Here are a few tips from her talk:

• Eat whole foods. When you are looking at the list of ingredients on a box or package, aim for five ingredients or less and try to make sure they are ingredients that you know (and stay away from chemicals and preservatives!)

• Eat as close to the source as possible

• Make sure to get enough calcium and vitamin D in your diet

• Eat as many of your nurtients as possible – your body processes them better than when you take a daily vitamin

• Take a multi-vitamin that is made for you (I take One A Day Women’s, and because it is for females, it has more calcium and vitamin D in case I don’t get enough in my daily diet) Even though you are eating fresh fruits and vegetables, your vitamin can act as an insurance policy to make sure you are getting the vitamins and minerals your body needs.

• If your daily vitamin makes you feel sick (this used to happen to me) Janel recommends taking it with dinner…. I take my daily vitamin right before bed. Your body has all night to absorb all of the vitamins and minerals that way!

• Try to eat at least one fruit and veggie with every meal.

I really enjoyed listening to Janel. I must say, I did not learn much that was new to me – but I liked having a lot of the things that I try to accomplish in my daily life reinforced by a professional. 🙂 After listening to Janel speak for 45 minutes, I definitely felt like I was on the right track and living a pretty healthy life, which is always a nice feeling!

Our second morning session was lead by Zesty Cook (aka Cory) who gave us a ton of information on how to have a great blog. This was definitely geared towards the attendees that have a blog, and I loved his talk.

Zesty talked about how to make your blog readable, interesting and fun. He also gave us tips on how to format our blog’s home page – have your content on the left, your ads on the right and have your RSS feed as high up on your page as possible.

I have even learned about an easier way to publish blog posts – so you might be seeing more posts coming soon. I think my new application on the MAC is going to really cut down on how long it takes to write and publish each day… has anyone out there tried Ecto yet? This is my first entry using it and so far I really love it!

As I was waiting in line for lunch I had a great chat with Zesty – and I think I am going to be moving the blog to it’s own domain sometime in the near future… so be on the lookout! It will take a while, but it would be a lot of fun and a great project for me. Now that I have had the blog for a year, I think I might finally be ready to self-host – we shall see. I will keep you all posted!

Well, this is a super long post for ya’ll to read, so I’ll close for now. I hope everyone is having a great weekend. I’ll be back soon with a recap of the rest of the weekend and I will be posting about the conference for the next couple of days, to spread out the information.

See you soon!