Hi there, blog readers! How have you been? I have been so busy working on a lot of different projects – hence not as much blogging. But rest assured, even though I have not been blogging every day, I have been focusing on healthy eating and living these days!

Right now we are in a deep freeze in New England (like a lot of the country is). We have been in the single digits for the last couple of nights and when I walked to the car this morning it was a grand ol’ SEVEN entire degrees! When I got to work 45 minutes later, it was 9 degrees. A winter wake up call!

Most of the day at work I was dragging a little bit. I felt tired, and a bit run down. So I opted to skip the gym tonight and go straight home. While I was driving home I came up with my dinner plan. Dinner tonight was basically one of my fall back “go to” meals. It was chocked full of fresh vegetables, a bit of pasta and some awesome mozzarella cheese and fresh basil. I figured that eating a lot of fresh veggies might help me out because I really do not want to come down with the cold that everyone around me has these days!

I chopped a lot of vegetables for dinner. I started with some fresh onion. Then I minced two garlic cloves, 1/3 cup of red pepper, spinach, 3 mushrooms and my garnish, the basil leaves. I also used Dave’s Gourmet Butternut Squash pasta sauce to bring all of the other fresh vegetables together. I had a cup of Whole Foods pasta to cook up, too. Here is what dinner looked like:

I can tell that my healthy eating is paying off because I could not come close to actually finishing this plate of pasta and fresh vegetables even though it was so good! I loved every bite of it. I love having a dinner that you can turn to easily when you don’t feel like cooking a complicated thing, or when you are having dinner by yourself, like I was tonight.

Because it has been so cold these days, I have been focusing on soup for lunch a lot. Today I had a beef, barley and vegetable soup. It was great. I have been also packing a lot of healthy food to bring to work. The flu was crazy around work for a couple of weeks and now everyone has colds. I have been drinking and eating a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables, and so far the fresh stuff has really been helping me stay healthy.

Yesterday for an afternoon snack I had a half of a sandwich thin, Teddie peanut butter and carrot sticks:

I have also been eating a lot of spinach salads. Yesterday for lunch:

Spinach salad with red peppers and croutons and a side of fresh pineapple. What a great combo! The other thing I have been trying to work on (in an effort to stay healthy) is getting a good amount of sleep every night. With that news, I am off to try and wrap things up and get ready for bed. I hope you are all doing well and that you are staying healthy and happy so far in 2013! See you soon.