Lunch al fresco

It was another gorgeous day here in southeastern Wisconsin! How great it felt to eat my lunch outside again instead of at my desk!

I made myself a veggie sandwich with hummus, red peppers, spinach, provolone cheese and tomatoes.

My favorite combo of fresh strawberries and greek yogurt.

I liked this vanilla bean greek yogurt from TJ’s.

I read a Family Circle magazine on my break (trying to get my hoarding pile of magazines down) and there was an interesting article about teens and blogging. Of course they warned parents about privacy issues, but the article also said that blogging may help teens “soothe stress and boost self-esteem.” I think the same can be said for adults who blog!

I had two free coupons for these Starbucks refreshers drinks, so today I tried out the Orange Melon variety. It was delicious!

It’s not something I would drink that often, especially because it contains 13 grams of sugar.

I couldn’t find this anywhere on the can, but I found the info on the Starbucks site: “each Refreshers has 40 to 55 milligrams of caffeine — two-thirds the caffeine of a shot of espresso and one-third that of an 8-ounce coffee.”

I had mine around 3:30 p.m. when I took a 15 minute break outside to catch up on some e-mails. I definitely didn’t feel tired tonight because of the afternoon caffeine boost. I just hope I can fall asleep tonight!

I went to the gym for a quick workout which involved mostly strength training and then 10 minutes on the stair stepper. That machine always wears me out! When I got home, I buzzed around the neighborhood on my bike. Nothing makes me happier than being able to ride my bike outside again.

I admired our strawberry plant that survived the winter outside…it’s coming along quite nicely! Can’t wait for fresh little strawberries this summer. That reminds me, we’ll need to put our netting up so the birds don’t get them like they did at the beginning of last summer.

Craig didn’t go to the gym with me because his exercise was cutting the grass.

And now my husband is going to be embarrassed when he sees a picture of him on the internet in his 80′s jeans shorts that he only wears for cutting the lawn.

Time to go read a book or magazine!

EatSmart Precision Pro digital scale review

After Karen from EatSmart reached out to me on twitter, I received a product I have always wanted in my kitchen: a digital scale!

From their website:

The EatSmart Precision Pro Digital Kitchen Scale is an economically priced multifunction home scale, perfect for everyday tasks from weighing food or ingredients to calculating postage. Along with our Precision Pro, you will also receive a FREE Calorie Factors Book making it easy to achieve goals such as portion control and calorie counting.

Features

-Compact Design and Easy Two-Button Operation
-Tare Feature; Subtract the weight of any plate or container
-4 Measurement Modes: Grams / Ounces / Kilograms / Pounds
-Max Weight: 11 pounds / 5 kilograms
-Graduation: .05 oz / 1 gram
-3 minute Auto-Turnoff
-Includes 2 AAA batteries

One of the reasons I always wanted a kitchen scale was for portion control, especially with cereal or snacks.

I weighed a bowl of Love Grown granola. In this case, I forgot to zero out the scale, so I just weighed the bowl (38 g) and subtracted that number from the one shown below.

I ate 35 grams of granola, or just a little over the serving size.

This scale is definitely great for keeping my granola habit in check! I also love that I don’t have to use a measuring cup to see what size portion I am eating.

My scale came with this great book, which has basic instructions and the calorie factor numbers. The $69.95 scale actually has 1,000 nutritional values programmed in if you want something more sophisticated.

I cut up some strawberries for my lunch and decided to experiment with them to see how many calories they would equal out to. So, I looked up the calorie factor for raw strawberries, which is .32 and multiplied it by how much they weighed on the scale.

I zeroed out the scale this time and then weighed my strawberries.

I ate 39.04 calories with that serving size of strawberries for lunch today. This is great for when I count calories and really want to closely keep track of what I am taking in each day.

While I haven’t used other digital kitchen scales to compare this one to, I would definitely recommend this product! It retails for $25 on Amazon. Obviously I am not the only person to have really enjoyed this product because the precision pro scale is rated 4.8 of 5 stars on Amazon! That is pretty spectacular!

Thank you to EatSmart for reaching out to me and letting me try this product!

Want to check it out for yourself–follow the company on social media:

-LIKE EatSmart Products on Facebook
-Twitter @EatSmartScales
-Pinterest
-Google Plus
-Follow the EatSmart Blog

Do you own a kitchen scale?