This is one of my favorite recipes and is absolutely delicious. "This does NOT taste like healthy food" (direct quote from my boyfriend). It really doesn't. It is decadent and extremely filling. You will feel like you're cheating. You are not. It is fabulous








Ingredients for Sauce (makes 5.5 cups)
1 cup=162 calories 4.5g fat, 11g carbs, and 17g protein!
1 lbs Isernio's Hot Chicken Sausage (I worship this stuff)
2 cans diced tomatoes
2 tbsp tomato paste
1 small yellow onion
1/2 cup chopped mixed bell peppers (I use frozen)
1/2 tbsp butter
Oregano, garlic powder, red chili flakes, black pepper, and salt to taste


Directions for Squash:
1. Cut spaghetti squash in half (please, please, please be careful!) and scrape out seeds.
2. Place on baking sheet covered in tin foil
3. Rub down squash with a little oil and your preferred spices (I tend to go light and use garlic salt, black pepper, and a little chili powder)
4. Bake at 375 degrees for 45-60 minutes or till flesh easily forks away into "spaghetti"
5. Save to be reheated and used in any dish!

Directions for Quick Bolognese:
1. Heat butter, diced onion, and diced peppers in a skillet over medium heat.
2. Once onions become translucent, add chicken sausage till cooked through.
3. Add tomatoes and tomato paste and let simmer on low.
4. Add spices to taste and remove from heat when too hungry to wait any longer for "flavors to develop". It's so good you really won't care after about 5 minutes.


At most, making the sauce from scratch and throwing 1.5 cups of it on top of 2 cups reheated spaghetti squash (85 calories) took at most 20 minutes. My dinner was 326 calories and it was a giant, hot plate of spicy Italian cooking. Be still my little heart. Hope you all enjoy!


Mara

One of the questions I like to ask a new client when they're discussing their new fitness and health goals is, "what have you tried before"? 

I believe that the best program is the one that you will do! The one that makes sense to your mind and your body and makes you excited when you pull up in front of my studio because you'll know it's getting you closer to your goals. Chances are it's not a body shaming, one size fits all, how to lose an ten pounds or an inch off your waist, detox weight loss magic pill. Deep down I assume that we all know that there is no magic trick to changing our lifestyle, but it's easy to get towed under with all the glamour and marketing of the dark side of the fitness industry.

When we decide that this time, yes this time, we are going to do it! Do that thing that suddenly gets us fit and healthy and changes our lifestyle, it tends to lead to trying to everything all at once: I'm going to change my diet, walk more often, add in cardio days, and get into strength training! I should also add that I'm going to clean my house more often, walk my dogs, call my family every day. I'm going to look like I have that lifestyle of those happy lifestyle fitness models who are always smiling and just look like everything comes to them with ease.

I completely understand the allure of that concept. Change everything, over night, become someone else, a person that everything is easy for. Let's be honest...that means that deep down, there are parts of YOURSELF that you are somehow not happy with. Don't worry, everyone has them. But let us start there because we've just established that you're not happy with parts of yourself.

Plan of attack time. What are those specific things about yourself that you are not happy with? Are you chronically stressed? Do you not clean your house as often as you should? Do you watch too much TV? Do you binge eat? Have you stopped keeping up with all those projects you always said you were going to do? 

Okay. Why?

Let's discover the WHY of why you are too busy, stressed, unhappy, uncomfortable, nervous, etc to do the things or be the person you want to be.

No, really, write them all down.

Now I want you to write down a SMALL change that you could do to help any of these things. Bribe yourself if you have to. Be gentle with yourself. If you can't address those small but pivotal feelings that are holding you back in your personal life, you'll never be able to adopt a whole new lifestyle! 

If you have an easy time changing your diet but find that exercise is hard, perfect! Let's start with two-three small dietary changes and set up 2x/week appointments. Let someone ELSE handle the hard parts of the exercise program while you work on the parts you feel you can begin to get control over. Is exercise easy for you? Great! Add in 1-2x/week of light, slow, supervised exercise and ask for dietary help! Ask your spouse or friend to prep food for the week with you; make it into a fun group activity!

To summarize: Find your goals, ALL of your goals. They are all related! Find what's holding you back from realizing them. Write them all down Make a small plan of action for each one. Little changes. Do not be afraid to ask for help. From anyone. You are loved and there will always be someone there to help you if you have the courage to ask. Pick just a few goals at a time and see what you can do. Let them sink in before you take on more. Change takes time. Be patient with yourself. Be kind and loving. You deserve it. 

This is the most age-old debate in the fitness industry. Because let's be honest, any fitness program that is talking to you about meeting your fitness and weight goals that doesn't talk to you about nutrition is absolutely wasting your time. Really. Completely. What you do and do not put into your body will long-term be 80% of your success in terms of determining your body composition. 

I promise that if you fail at something 80% of the time, even if your 20% fitness plan is on point, you will still end up failing. So let's talk about that 80%.

A calorie = a calorie is really a battle of semantics. Unfortunately, the fitness industry doesn't want to explain this to you because then they have less power to manipulate you for a few more bucks for the newest hottest fad diet, superfood, magic pill, or what have you. 

A calorie, by definition, is the amount of energy required to raise 1 gram of water 1 degree celsius. Yup. It is literally just a unit of energy. This means that calories are not inherently evil!!! If you cut all your calories, you will die. I promise. 

So where is all the confusion? Well, calories of energy do come from different places and therefore are bound up in different chemical structures that have different effects on the body! Because chemicals aren't evil either. 

There are three main types of MACROnutrients: proteins, carbs, and fats. You may have heard this before. If that calorie of energy comes from protein, my body has the ability to use that protein now for muscle synthesis! Good, we like muscle. If I eat 200 calories of carbohydrates, my body can now use that energy and the chemical breakdown of carbohydrates are various forms of sugars. I can use that sugar now for energy because that is what sugar does for the body; it is metabolized to create an energy molecule that supports our whole body! 

Here is the problem. If I take in MORE calories than my body needs, my body will store that energy in my body. Certain macronutrients and foods are better utilized by the body and others are stored more easily. If you just ran a marathon, your body needs all the energy it can get and that 200 g of sugar will be used up in an instant. If you've been sitting on the couch all day and eat a Snickers bar, you've just consumed more energy than you need and BAM, your body is going to store that on for later. Think hibernation. Your body is preparing to support itself through the winter!!! Unfortunately, this is not what most of us are looking for.

At the end of the day though, ANY excess energy, in any form, will be stored on the body as there is no way to use it!!! If you are trying to build muscle, you will eat slightly more than you need. If you are careful to support your body's needs properly with those macronutrients and good exercise, that excess storage will be in MUSCLE and not in FAT, but either way you will be storing energy on your body and getting bigger. Make sense? If we eat less calories than we need, our body will have to TAKE from those stores. Just like before though, depending on how we're eating and exercising, the stores that we take from can be fat OR muscle! Which would you prefer?

When it comes to calories; they really are just calories. Gaining weight, losing weight, maintaining weight is all based on CALORIES and nothing else. However, your health and whether or not that gained or lost weight is from fat or muscle is dependent on those macronutrients. 

So ask yourself today: am I gaining weight, losing weight, or maintaining my weight with how I am currently eating? The diet you choose to get you there is really irrelevant. If you want to lose weight, eat a little less (not a lot less) on a consistent basis. If you want to gain muscle, eat a little more. 

I'd love to tell you that exercising like  a maniac will get you six pack abs and the ability to have them while chowing down on a dozen doughnuts washed down with a beer, but heart-breakingly it does not work that way. I love doughnuts. 

So let's get a little sensible here. A slight dietary change, make sure your macronutrient needs are met, exercise regularly, and enjoy your life. Simple in concept. Challenging to perform. All of the fad diets and miracle cures are there because hard work and small changes aren't sexy. They are hard and take a long time. This is a lifestyle. 

Mara

I can tell you now that I never thought I would be a personal trainer. The original dream was equine neurology and rehabilitation and linguistics (okay, I've always been a little all over the place). I was never a phenomenal athlete but I was one of those people who grew up "naturally athletic". I was hyper-mobile (had laxity in my joints) and so with a little determination I could do the same or more as the girl next to me with half the training or conditioning. Which meant that lazy young me did no training and no conditioning. By 16, my poor body mechanics and abuse of my body for sports began to catch up with me. My shin splints had become stress fractures, my low back ached, and I had constant pain in my legs. 

Over the years I picked up more and more adrenaline sports, and with that, more and more physical therapists. Fast forward five years and I am on my 13th physical therapist. At this point I have torn my oblique, fractured my pelvis, and herniated quite a few discs in my low back. I am using a walker to get around; poorly. I've been told by the best spine doctors in Northern Colorado that I will never run again. The therapist I'd been sent to explains that with a lot of hard work I may be able to make my bed again, if I'm lucky.

I'll be honest and say I almost gave up. I couldn't feed myself or go to the bathroom alone. I don't think anyone can understand what humility and demoralization really feel like until they're having someone help with their pants and hold them over a toilet. That is a giving up moment and the doctors were telling me I should just give in. 

With help and on my last shred of hope I wandered into the office of a local physical therapist who took me in. He thought he could offer something new.  I slowly dragged myself in behind the tennis ball wheeled walker, tears from the pain streaming down my face, and doing everything I could to stay conscious. The guy walks out and starts laughing at me. No introduction or anything else this man just laughs at me. What kind of horrible human being laughs at someone in that condition? I didn't trust him. I didn't like him. He told me my pain was in my head. Well, sort of. He said that my pain was real in that I was experiencing excruciating pain. He explained that the pain at this point was not really in my muscles and it wasn't in my joints or bones. Pain is created in the brain and it has a nasty habit of getting a little out of control. There were some minor structural issues, there were some extremely poor body mechanics, but at the end of the day there was no REAL reason for me to be experiencing the level of constant pain I was experiencing. The trick is; how do we fix it?

That  was how I learned about chronic pain and how I began my long journey towards becoming a trainer. Acute injuries are fairly easy to treat. In most cases there are two treatments: the old school P.R.I.C.E method (protect, rest, ice, compression, elevation) with the eventual addition of careful stretching and strengthening over time. The second option is surgery. When we sprain an ankle, we feel instant pain, that pain tends to decrease over time following ice and rest. Over time, we strengthen the ankle, maintain healthy range of motion, and eventually the pain goes away. Chronic pain, my pain, doesn't work like that. Our bodies scream at us to be careful! Don't move that way!!! That's how you hurt yourself before! The more our brains fear that pain, the more frequent the pain becomes. We get stuck in a pain pathway that becomes more guarded, tense, and irritated the more afraid we become it. 

What I learned from the therapist that day took 60% of the pain out of my body in our very first session. I walked out on my own two feet. He took my walker from me and threw it away. I wasn't fixed but I suddenly had hope. I could walk. He told me to breathe. He gave me permission to feel the pain, and then move beyond it. Because that place, that place AFTER the pain and the spasming and the fear, that was a place of health and healing. 

I've spent years working on perfecting body mechanics. It started with my own. I had fought crippling back pain for a year with rest, ice, and therapeutic modalities and was degrading every day. Within 6 months of very hard work with the RIGHT person, I was running 3-10 miles/day at Colorado altitude without an ounce of pain. I got back into rock climbing, boxing, horse back riding, and learned how to handle my body and my pain. It freed me.

I still have to be aware of my pain but I know that if I keep my body strong, I can live a long, healthy, pain free life and I am so grateful for that. What I was given, besides my life back, was education. Now I have the privilege of providing that education to my clientele. 

I love training my athletes and my transformation clients. However, the most inspiring part of the job is when I get to take a client out pain or give them a piece of their life back. The stroke victim who can now raise his arms to hug his wife, the woman with RA who can now sleep through the night, the frozen shoulder client who can undress themselves. These sound like small victories but they absolutely change a life. I am so lucky that I get to spend my days helping those around me achieve them. 

Mara