The Best Day Ever

Hello, my name is Gina, and I am a registered dietitian with a master's degree in Science, specializing in Human Nutrition! Nice to meet you :)

YEAH!

I passed. Enough said. It was the best day of my life. Would you like to see how it went?

Morning Brain Power

About 4 months ago Cocoa from Balance, Joy, and Delicias recommended steel cut oats as a replacement for oatmeal, in an effort to seek a more satiating breakfast. I purchased steel cut oats from Trader Joe's at about that time, but have yet to try them. Yesterday morning I knew I needed a good, hearty breakfast so I chose the steel cut oats over my favorite breakfast, cold cereal.

At first I measured out 1/2 cup, since that is a serving of regular oatmeal. After the oats were cooking for a while (you have to cook them on a stove, no microwaves aloud) I realized they were expanding much more than I had thought they would. After about 15 minutes I had about 3 cups of oats! I took another look on the container and saw that one serving was 1/4 cup dry oats, oops. I gave Nick half, he enjoyed it very much.

Like the steam in the picture?? I like my oatmeal really hot. Here is what I added:

Cooked the oats in Almond Milk
Frozen blackberries
Purevia (1/2 t)
Brown sugar (2 t)
Honey (2 t)

It was delicious.


Morning Love

Nick bought me roses. I love it when he buys me flowers (but sometimes I wish he wouldn't always buy roses!) I may have told him that.....I'm brutally honest. But they are so gorgeous either way! He's so good to me.

And the Big Moment Is Here

For those of you wondering what my research was all about, here is it!

Basically I wanted to find out the predictors of whether or not a registered dietitian (RD) will teach their clients and patients about fresh vegetable food safety. What did I find out?

1) The more confidence the RD has about their knowledge of fresh vegetable food safety, the more likely they are to teach it.
2) The belief that other people think you (the RD) should be teaching fresh vegetable food safety, has a significant effect on whether or not they teach fresh vegetable food safety (RDs who are more socially influenced are more likely to teach FVFS).
3) RDs who don't think it will take a lot of time to teach fresh vegetable food safety are more liekly to teach it.

There were many more findings in this research, but these were the ones that I felt were most important. Overall, we need to start teaching dietitians that there are some very simple tips that you can teach your clients/patients about fresh vegetable food safety that are easy to learn, and understand, and that will not take much time to teach. What are they?

Don't buy bruised fresh produce
Cut off any brown spots
Always rinse your fresh produce, and do so in lukewarm water
Make sure to dry your produce completely before putting in the refrigerator
Always refrigerate produce that has been pre-cut

Smiling before my big defense.

Explaining my research, intensely (why didn't anyone tell me I had a bump on the right side of my hair?!!)

After defending my thesis, and sitting through an hour of questions proposed by my committee members, I went home and celebrated! Nick and I went to the driving range and hit balls for about an hour (yeah, I can't believe I enjoy this now!!), then we went out do dinner later at night.
On our way into the restaurant, I was happy :)

And my parents were proud of me.

I ordered a pitcher of Sangria for my mom and I, which was EXCELLENT!

I was craving a burger, so I ordered one. I don't eat burgers often, but I deserved this juicy creation. I like my burgers plain, with LTO and sauteed mushrooms, plus mustard and ketchup on the side. Delicious.


I did manage to sneak in a healthy treat, fruit instead of fries.

But the healthy treat was trumped by our dessert :) Dessert was banana cream pudding, topped with fresh whipped cream and chocolate (really they should have called this whipped cream, with some banana pudding).

And then my choice, the peanut butter pie with Oreo crust and chocolate ganache on top!

This day, overall, deserved a rating of 10 out of 10. I couldn't have asked for a better day. Now I have about 3 weeks to finish my thesis (yeah, I'm not TOTALLY done, my committee had some changes for me to make to my thesis). Oh, and today I have an interview that I will tell you about if I get the job (I want this job SO SO SO BAD!!!)

Question: Did you know that fresh vegetables were to prone to contamination by pathogens???

Question: Which do you prefer, banana pudding or peanut butter pie?