It’s the holidays.

These are actually Sheila's homemade chocolate covered marshmallows. But you don't have to earn these either. Just ask very nicely and I'll give you some.

Time for being dragged through some Christmas tree farm in upstate Maine for two and a half hours until you can no longer feel your toes and you’ve found the “perfect” tree. Even if you passed the perfect tree 17 times in the first half hour.  

Oh…that’s not how you started your season?

It’s also time for listening to Dean Martin’s “Marshmallow World In the Winter,” wrapping presents with duct tape, and cookies. And....watching Christmas Vacation for the 3,457th time. And cookies. 

I’m not a huge fan of all cookies - my mother is a good baker, but she only ever used half a bag of chocolate chips when making three batches of chocolate chip cookies. Finding a chocolate chip was like finding the baby Jesus in a king cake.

But if you wag a peanut butter cookie with a Hershey's kiss in front of my face, you best set it down and walk away. Walk slowly, slowly, away.

People are making cookies. They are bringing them to work, giving them as gifts and hiding them from children so there will be some left for guests.

You should eat the cookies. 

No, don’t shove them all in your mouth at once like a holiday cookie chubby bunny contest. Moderation people. But you should eat them.

And you don’t have to earn them.

Let me repeat that.  

You don’t have to earn your cookies. You don’t have to do 10 burpees and 75 jumping jacks before you can have one. You don’t need to do walking lunges up and down the hallway after you eat one. You don’t have to punish yourself to enjoy a taste of the holidays. 

Exercise is not punishment. 

I know it can feel like punishment. But I hope you exercise because you feel good doing it. Because it feels good to work up a sweat and move your body. I hope you’ve already established an exercise plan that you follow on a weekly basis. Stay consistent with what you're doing, but don't give in to the pressure to feel like you have to do more because of food. 

If you want to go for a walk because your brother decided to bring up politics and that’s how you’ll relieve your stress - that’s a good reason to literally run for the hills. 

But don’t go for a walk because you had two of your co-worker’s famous bourbon balls and you feel you have to work off those calories. (Or a slight buzz. Easy on the bourbon next time Martha.)

You don't have to earn your food. And exercise is not punishment. Even pushing the sled. Really.

Nia Shanks writes a great article about good and bad reasons to exercise right here. And it’s worth the read. 

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I love vegetables.

I like them, but I will be forever traumatized by the canned gray peas that I eventually smeared with mustard so I could be excused from the dinner table. 

Don't judge. You do what you gotta do to go back outside and play more baseball.

Anyone else have these growing up? Somewhere I've still got the peach. 

I like vegetables just fine. I eat broccoli, spinach, green beans, peas and other veggies on a daily basis, but I still don't get enough. Especially on days when I practice intermittent fasting it can be difficult to get enough veggies. 

According to the USDA though, I need to try harder. Really, that’s exactly what they told me.

Dear Kim Lloyd,

Try harder.

Sincerely, the USDA. 

Recommendations vary based on your age, gender, and level of physical activity, but for me, and most of the other people on the planet, we should be consuming at least two and a half cups of veggies every day.

According to www.choosemyplate.gov, a serving of is one cup of raw or cooked vegetables. 

Consuming fruits and vegetables can help reduce, among other things, cardiovascular disease, various cancers and obesity. 

So if you’re coming up short on the veggie train on a regular basis, what can you do to help ensure that you are coming closer to your totals?

1. Sign up for your local farm share

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a great way to get more vegetables and support a local farm in your area. Every year, we split a share with a friend and each week we get a hefty supply of whatever vegetables and fruits are in season.  

A share always includes a plethora of fresh greens, including kale, spinach, and swiss chard, and then a few servings of whatever is in season. 

It was through a CSA that I discovered kahlrabi for the first time. (Pronounced cool robbie. I mean it wins on name alone).  

Because we've already paid for the vegetables and need to use them before they go to waste, we come a lot closer to meeting our daily veggie goals in the summer. 

2. Add them to a smoothie

A lot of our summer CSA greens end up in my smoothies, and I don't even taste them. 

Sure it makes the whole thing turn green and sometimes I end up with spinach in my teeth, but at least I know I’m getting the nutrients.

A sample recipe might be:

2 c. unsweetened almond milk
1 scoop low carb protein powder
2 tbsp. chia seeds
1 tbsp. peanut butter
1 banana
1 c. of spinach 

Sometimes I throw a serving of PB Fit in place of the peanut butter to reduce the calorie and fat content, but either way, I never really taste the spinach. 

3. Make crunchy chips out of leafy things

When I eat Kale, I don’t eat it raw and I don’t really like it sautéed either. Sure collared greens are good for you, but the end result is akin to the seaweed you pulled out from between your toes at the beach last summer. 

So slimy. Just, so, so, slimy.

Instead, I prefer to bake my greens. And by that I mean Sheila bakes them. 

With kale, I like to:

Take a bunch of kale, drizzle it in olive oil, and feed it to the dog. 

Kidding. 

Kind of.

Seriously though, cut the stems out of the kale or swiss chard, and tear into bite size pieces. Wash and dry the kale in a salad spinner, drizzle with a tablespoon of olive oil*, sprinkle on some salt and bake on a cookie sheet at 350 degrees until the edges are brown or the smoke alarm goes off. 

Approximately 10-15 minutes for the first, and probably an hour for the second. 

Somewhere in those instructions I ask Sheila how to preheat the oven. 

* Don't overdo it on the olive oil. This is one of the more common ways to get more calories and fat than you intend. Measure out one tablespoon and stick with that. 

4. Use a lettuce wrap in place of tortillas or sandwich wraps. 

Sure it’s messy as a two-year-old eating spaghetti with no fork, but you’re saving yourself on some calories and adding a little nutritional value as well. The tortilla is really just a vehicle to get burrito filler in my face anyway. 

Boom. 

Plus it's crunchy. 

5. Add a raw green supplement

First and foremost a supplement is just that; something to supplement your diet. Whole foods are always your best option, but I know very few people who won't benefit from the addition of a green supplement. I'm currently using Greens Plus Superfood Raw which doesn't taste as bad as it looks. And by the way, if you're looking for a taste test, the folks at Precision Nutrition have done just that for you right here.

Greens supplements can help boost your energy and immunity and I notice a big difference in digestion when I use my greens. If you're hitting 10 servings of fruits and veggies a day, you probably don't need a supplement, but for anything less than that, adding some raw greens powder is a great way to meet those needs. 

If you want to read a little more on the benefits of using a greens supplement, check out this post, again from the folks at Precision Nutrition. 

I know what you're thinking.

No one puts Baby in the corner.

If you're not thinking that, then chances are you're under 35 years old and never saw the wonder that was Patrick Swayze on the big screen.

I’ve been fortunate in my athletic career to avoid major injuries (knocking wood as we speak here), and one of my only surgeries to date was an arthroscopic procedure on my knee known as IT band lateral release surgery.

As the doctor put it a few days after the surgery, “I always like to take a healthy person and make her limp.”

I was a 25 years old avid runner. At the time, I’d been training for the Cleveland Marathon when I started to feel like Joe Pesci had taken a baseball bat to the outside of my knee. Eventually, I was diagnosed with IT Band Syndrome or runner's knee.

When I started exploring options for treatment, the overwhelming recommendation was to take time off from running and cross train.

And, stubborn 25 year old that I was, I refused to do either. When the doctor proposed the IT band lateral release surgery, (which I don’t think they do anymore), I jumped at it.  

Running wasn't just my form of exercise, it was my identity.

I see a lot of this thinking in the fitness world. Someone is a yogi, a cyclist, a power lifter, or a runner, and, much like I was, resistant to try other things. We know we "should." We know it would be good for us. 

I did myself no favors that summer, and while I returned to running a few months after the surgery, chances are I’d have been able to do so anyway with just rest and…drum roll please…some cross training.

It's great to find an identity through fitness (we'll avoid the deeper questions of who am I for now), but sometimes limiting yourself from other activities can cause more harm than good.

Also...

Yesterday I experimented with Facebook Live. If you can ignore the weird thing I'm doing with my hands (air piano maybe?), you might be actually find something useful to do with that fitness equipment that's been sitting in your spare room since last year :)

Click here to watch yesterday's video on stability balls.

But wait - there's more :)

Because last week was Thanksgiving and we're in the thick of the holiday season, sign up for my newsletter below to get a free guide on keeping a toe in the fitness water during the holiday season.