Weight Watcher Wednesday- Have a healthy summer!!

 Summer is one of those seasons that I feel kind of makes it a little easier for me to keep up my healthy changes and my weight loss. Although the days are longer and there is more time to eat than usual. That's not a good thing necessarily, but there are a couple of other advantages to that I'm choosing to look at as well. Its a great time to drink a lot of water, there is a variety of foods that I prefer to eat during the summer than in the winter, and because it gets darker later, there's also more time to find different activities or exercise to work off what I eat.

 Summer Fruits...

I love this time for fruits…along with added sunshine comes the added colors. They’re soo pretty! 

 Bananas are staple for me, and a must to have a home. A good banana and a glass of milk, for me, are a meal in itself. And that is low point lunch that can fill me up and leave me some room for something yummy later in the day. Grapes are sweet and just easy to eat on the go too!

 

I LOVE RASPBERRIES!! Don't you? 

They're great on their own and they're so tasty with yogurt and granola...OMG!!

Watermelon is another must for me. 

I can go through a whole watermelon in one sitting if I let myself. 

On a really hot day, its super refreshing and just delicious!

 (It digests really nicely, too)  ;)

 
Salads...have always been one of my favorites too!
Cobb salads with mostly egg whites, low-fat shredded cheese, ham and/or chicken has become one of our favorites at home that even my hubby loves. It has a lot of protein and picking the right low-fat dressing to go along with it can make it a great satisfying meal.

Exercise

Summer is a great time to get motivated to do more with your body. The weather just gets you out there to do more. Although, having said that, extreme heat can also slow you down. And I will admit that since I've started jogging, I too am not as motivated to jog even late in the morning because the sun is pretty strong, and makes it that much harder to keep up my endurance. So instead, I try to run on those early mornings, especially during this June gloom, when its still nice and cool in the am. I LOVE the feeling of that crisp cool air as it hits my face! 

If I can't get that run in, then I reverting back to a nice hearty walk and I've been taking those in the late evenings just as the sun is kind of going down. Another favorite time of day for me!! I'm also taking advantage of that time to take my boys with me. They don't walk as fast as I do, but they do keep up and now they can actually walk up to 2 miles with me if I nudge them along enough. I started doing that last year, and now we look for opportunities to walk to different areas in our neighborhood just for sake of walking. Like on Monday, instead of driving, we walked over to Christian's baseball game at his high school  a little over a mile from our house, and we walked back home part of the way too. It was a nice time of the day to do it and I felt like I got my exercise in for both the boys and myself. 

And then there's always the beach and the pool!!!

 

I cannot wait to get to the beach this year! I honestly discovered the beach all over again, a few years back, and I LOVE going with my boys and our friends. I'll be honest, I don't do much exercising there (or at the pool for that matter), but this year my goal is to hopefully be able to take a few walks along the beach while we're there. Walking on sand is soo much harder than walking on cement, that it makes for a much better workout! I'm looking forward to trying that out this summer.  And I need to get in the pool more often as well to take a few laps and work out those legs, which can never hurt!

So I hope you'll find the summer a great time to enjoy the great fruit that's out there and maybe you already have your favorite activity you'll take advantage of doing, but maybe you'll find a way to change that up a bit or try something completely different. Let me know what you end up doing. It would be fun to see what everybody's "thing" ends up being. 

All in all, I just hope you have fun doing things that can help you all stay or get healthy this summer!

Happy Weight Watcher Wednesday, from my corner to yours....