Marcella's Workout and What We Ate Today:

Like Derek, I do a 4 day training split: Chest/Back, Shoulders, Arms, and Legs. I don't follow a set routine on a given day, I just pull from the grab bag of exercises we do depending on what equipment's open and how I feel. Every day starts with a 5-10 minute cardio warm-up and some stretching. I think Derek will be adding some demonstration clips of exercises in the near future, too.
Today was Legs day:
Breakfast
Every workout day Derek blends us up a fruit/protein powder/soymilk shake for breakfast.

Lunch
Sunday is virtually the only day of the week we have time to go out to eat. Today we went to Nile Ethiopian Restaurant:

Tomato Lentil Soup, full of ginger and garlic and general deliciousness

Vegetarian combo with various lentil, split-pea, collards, mushroom, and eggplant dishes. The injera flatbread it's served with is super low-glycemic and packed with protein, fiber, and vitamins and minerals.
They even brought us some lemon sorbet, on the house! Look at how happy Derek is...

Dinner

Nice and simple: some whole-wheat penne pasta with zucchini, eggplant, and mushrooms. A broccoli and carrot Waldorf-style salad.

This is how we do it: Tons of veggies, liiitttllle bit of pasta for the main dish. Huge, filling salad, usually two bowls of it with dinner. Usually steamed greens too, but it was the end of the grocery week and we'd eaten them all up :{

That's 1 whole eggplant & 1 zucchini, diced and some oyster, crimini, and shitake mushrooms sliced. The pasta sauce is No Salt Added, Trader Joes brand. Hey, I work and study 11 hours a day, dammit!

Salad made of above components; yum! The broccoli/carrot slaw (from Trader Joe's naturally) and Fuji apples make it very filling with all the fiber, and the addition of sunflower seeds and cashew pieces makes it protein-rich.


The pasta dish, made to feed us both, had only about 5 ounces of dry pasta to about 2 lbs of veggies. This is where our diet differs from the norm. Nutrient-dense food should be the centerpiece of the meal, and shouldn't be relegated to a mere side dish! It's amazing how quickly your tastes change when you eat more fresh food; suddenly those big mounds of processed pasta seem about as appetizing as sawdust...