When we first moved to Virginia, I was waking up every morning with Vic at 4:30 to see him off and help him get his stuff together in the morning. He leaves at around 5:15 so that he can hit the gym before work, #BroLife, whatcha gonna do about it. Like I mentioned above, after the honeymoon phase for moving back to VA wore off, which happened around the time we got home from the Arnold Classic in March, I was in a major funk and stopped getting up early with him, thinking that maybe I needed more sleep. Well, I miss that time with him, even if we spend it drinking our coffee in silence while we scroll through our Instagram feeds, simultaneously liking posts because we follow a lot of the same people. We don't get a ton of time to be Christina and Vic as opposed to Mom and Dad anymore, so I'm going to start that up again.
I've been slacking on my meal prep for him lately, so I made him a quick breakfast of smashed potatoes and eggs and threw together some roast beef sandwiches with a Worcestershire Mayo that is super easy to whip up and super flavorful. Literally, get your normal amount of mayo in a bowl, add in about a tablespoon of the W Sauce (it's so long to type, haha), and add in a hefty amount of freshly cracked pepper. Boom. For the smashed potatoes, I had a bag of steamable cute little potatoes from Target that I steamed earlier this week and kept in the fridge. I popped six of them in a skillet, smashed them with a spatula, drizzled them with olive oil and seasoned them and let them cook until crisp. Double boom. I almost won breakfast except for the part where I gave him plain egg whites on the side of his two over easy eggs and my man doesn't do plain egg whites. Forgive the bodybuilder in me that is used to surviving on plain foods.
The kids and I had a great morning, they slept in late and I got to catch up, like I'm WAY behind, on Southern Charm. Have you watched it? I may start a whole separate series of posts about that show, I'm hooked. After we all got in a good breakfast, walked the dogs and Ryker picked up his 10 pieces of trash, we were off to the gym! For the record, I don't make him do the trash thing, he genuinely loves it and I love seeing him get joy out of something selfless! Today was upper body day, so lots of back and chest work.
We try to do something fun that is just for the kids every day that we can, and today we made it to the Virginia Zoo! We have a membership to the Aquarium and during the month of June they are doing a member swap, so we went to the Zoo for free. Joke was on me though, because it was nearly 90 degrees and 69% humidity, and everyone was asleep. Like, so asleep that when we went to the orangutans, the dude had straw pulled over his face and was like "leave me the fuck alone or give me your iced americano, Christina".
Ryker is sleeping like the monkey!
Regardless, Ryker and I had a great time while Cora cuddled her baby and rode in the stroller, mostly unimpressed. Ryker and I tried to find all of the characters from Lion Guard on Disney Junior, I think we only missed out on the Honey Badger Dude and Beshti, the hippo.
Note Cora's poor little nose, she's had a runny allergy nose for the last two weeks and the skin has finally given up with how many times I have to hold her head still to wipe it with a baby wipe. Poor kid, it does not look comfortable. She was so cute, I would look over and she'd be holding baby on her shoulder, patting her back and singing to her. Swoon!
And finally...the point of this post!
We got a package in the mail from my sponsor, Gain in Bulk, this week and I was stoked to be able to switch over to them as the source for another product that we absolutely run through in our house. I want to start this by saying that Glutamine and all other supplements are just that, supplements. Glutamine actually happens to be the "most abundant amino acid in the body" (UMM.edu), and for a lot of people it isn't necessary to add in an outside source for the purpose of supplementation. For athletes or people who struggle with a variety of illnesses, it can be very helpful!
Glutamine helps to get excess ammonia out of your body while also improving your overall immune functions, and in case you didn't know, a lot of your immune system ties to your gut, so people who suffer from gut based issues can benefit from adding glutamine to their routine. High stress, injuries, surgery, illness and even just an insane training schedule (which can cause high cortisol levels, which brings us back to stress) can decrease glutamine in the body, so again, these are times to consider adding it in.
While some studies have shown that adding glutamine to a diet when suffering from IBD showed no measurable positive effect, many people turn to glutamine to assist with digestion and healing "leaky gut syndrome". They have shown that adding glutamine to enteral feeding methods (tube feeding, like in a hospital) has helped patients in the ICU and it has also been helpful for people coming out of surgery who are at risk or have contracted an infection and it can be helpful for burn patients.
For athletes, some researchers have made the connection between the sickness that can be seen following high intensity bouts of training or events and glutamine, with the idea that the decreased glutamine in the body from the high intensity exercise and stress placed on the body may lead to decreased immune function.
As bodybuilders, we like to think that by decreasing ammonia buildup and helping our immune system, glutamine can help avoid becoming catabolic and some believe that it helps promote muscle synthesis. Bodybuilding.com offers an article discussing how intense training sessions can lead to it taking 6 days to get glutamine levels back to normal, and that supplementing can spur an increase in HGH. But, I appreciate that they also focus mostly on how glutamine is important for your intestines and how hardcore gym bros and bunnies can tend to get sick from wearing their bodies down and glutamine can help support your system and keep you from having to take more days off than you'd like. For this reason, Vic and I each aim to get 5g pre and post workout, and if we remember, another scoop in the middle of the day. you can get it from Optimum Nutrition on Amazon, which is what we used to do, but I appreciate that Gains in Bulk includes a certificate proving the purity of your product, showing when it was manufactured, its exact expiration and its levels when tested. Boom. Get it here and don't forget to use my code, ChristinaK10 to get 10% off!
So, there you have it, folks. Baby Girl is up from her nap and banging on her door. She acts like she doesn't have a shit ton of fun toys in there that she never plays with and like I trap her in a dungeon. Insert Mom Eye Roll here. I hope you have a great weekend!
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