Helen and the Fabled Kitchen Abs

Let's see, where to begin? Yesterday I had noble aspirations to work 9 hours, bang out some homework, and then hit the 6:30 pm CrossFit session. 

That didn't happen. 

I instead worked 9 hours and then proceeded to work on a really magnificent presentation for school (my Master's) and it was 9 pm before I left my office! I felt pretty guilty about breaking my promise to go to the gym after work, so I think that is what got me out of bed this morning. 

(I also wore my workout clothes as PJs, so all I had to do was brush my teeth this morning at 5 am.) 

Anyway, today's workout, which was my first real session at CrossFit was "Helen". Here's what we did:

Self-portrait of my workout this morning. Arm muscles are to scale. 

Warm Up:

-50 Mountain Climbers

-20 Burpees

-10 Ring Pull Ups

-1 Minute Battle Rope

-40 Sit Ups

-20 Squats

-10 Push Ups

Skills:

Hanging L-Sit for as long as you can. x5

WOD:

"Helen" x 3

-400 Meter Run (Or 500 Meter Row)

-21 Kettlebell Swings 

-12 Pull Ups

My WOD time was an astonishing 17:36. I am looking forward to seeing some improvement, haha. Overall, I felt really good about the workout, and I can already tell where I'm going to be getting some calluses.

One thing that's kinda picking at me today is that while I feel good about this morning's workout, I am feeling acutely UN-fit today. I know I will get better, and I'm not discouraged, it's just that I seem to be noticing how my belly is hanging over the top of my slacks a little more than I usually do.  This may have something to do with the way I annihilated some toast and a yellow sweet pepper with hummus immediately after my workout. Somehow I think that was probably not the optimum post-workout meal. 

That got me to thinking, they say that abs are made in the kitchen. I want to know which kitchen that is and what exactly they stock it with. I'm extremely poor (Yay graduate school!) and so my healthy meals consist of the cheapest veggies in the store and eggs and bread. It's not great, I know. I rarely buy meat either, but that's because I'm a terrible cook and it seems a waste of good meat when I burn it into shoe leather. 

Last week though, I was good and made myself some cabbage soup... I made a ton of it, so I was eating it all week, but fortunately, the recipe I have is not only nutritious, but also delicious. It is from a cookbook entitled, The Natural Healing Cookbook by Mark Bricklin and Sharon Claessens. All of the recipes are super healthy in that there's not processed sugar and a bunch of salt. Often, they leave flavor out as well, haha, but my spice rack is able to combat this. 

I added a nice ham shank to the recipe and it is always divine.