This is a little bit different than my normal Keto blog post but I figured you guys would want to know a little bit more about me aside of being keto.

Growing up it had always been my dream to attend the University of Florida and pursue a degree in Journalism. When I was about 5-years-old I had a barbie dream camera and would hook it up to the T.V. and make my own “news cast”. My mom always thought I was just messing around not knowing one day it would be my dream to be a reporter.

Throughout my middle school and high school years, I was the head anchor for the school news shows. Everyone knew Nicole Robinson from WOWTV (my high school TV show name) because at 7:15 every morning they would get to see my bright and shining face.

My junior year of high school I found a summer camp in the paper where I could attend UF for 2 weeks during the summer in the Journalism college. I was able to see what it was like for an actual journalism student and how UF was before I even went there. After those 2 weeks, I knew I wanted to be a gator and study journalism.

The UF College of Journalism and Communications is one of the best journalism school in the country. (We are in the top 6 in case you didn’t know…) The J school provides so many opportunities for their students that other journalism colleges don’t.

The Center for Media Innovation and Research mission is to create new ways of telling the stories that journalists tell, to develop new ways of disseminating strategic communications and to research the effectiveness of both. They allow for students to become actual Journalist and not just student journalist.

Telecommunication students, like myself, are able to work in an actual news room which we are able to create a real news show. The news cast we do is broadcast-ed out into the Gainesville community and the surrounding areas. The stories that the reporters create are stories that the Gainesville community would care about.

Check out one my news stories that I created this semester.

I am forever grateful I was able to attend this University and purse my dreams of becoming a news reporter. Once I graduate, I’ll miss all the facilities we had access to.

Once a gator, Always a gator!

Many places have been closing due to COVID-19. They are also many places staying open such as resturants but only doing take out orders.

My classmate Erika Stallings wrote an article about how Alachua County Fire Rescue prepared for COVID-19.

Once this whole thing is over, there is many places I want to try.

One place I want to go to is in Gainesville before I graduate from college. My classmate Karla Robaina wrote about a secret spot that I want to go watch the sunset at!

Another place I want to go to is New York. I have been begging my mom since I was 16-years-old to take me there. So now that plane tickets are cheap right now I am going to try to book a trip far in advanced so I can finally go.

When I go, right when I get off the plane I was to go where my classmate Chris O’Brien wrote about and get a rainbow bagel. Yes, I will have one cheat meal and break from being keto just to try a rainbow bagel.

I can’t wait for this whole pandemic to be over so our lives can get back to normal.

As many of you know, we are being told to isolate at home and to not go outside unless it is essential. My classmate Sarina Nunes wrote an article about how to prevent getting COVID-19.

Staying home during the coronavirus can be tough for some. For others it can be the best time of their lives. I am a very big homebody person. Being at home is very comforting and cozy to me. But it can get very boring.

Right now, I am still in Gainesville living in my 2 bedroom apartment with my boyfriend and our 5-month-old puppy. With us being home all together all the time can be a very tight squeeze and we can all get annoyed with each other more often than usual.

One thing we are trying to not do is to eat all of our snacks since we don’t know what is going to happen in the next few weeks. I have been trying to do at home workouts so I don’t loose sight of my goal.

My classmate Lauren Reynolds has this great article of a workout you can do while sitting right on your couch. How great is that!

Another thing we are doing is binge watching tons of shows. Right now on hulu we are watching ‘The Last Ship’, which I really recommend watching since the first season portrays of what is happening now.

Another thing we are doing is watching tons of movies. My classmate Cameron Lunn has a blog where he reviews different movies. I hadn’t seen Frozen 2 yet but after his review on it I went and watched it.

We are really just trying to focus on doing other things around the apartment so we don’t get any weaknesses to break from being keto.

This post is going to be something a little different than what I usually post.

As many of you know I am a Senior at the University of Florida majoring in Telecommunications with a specialization in News, graduating in May. I am super excited to be done with college and to move on with the rest of my life.

I had the best time at college and would do it all over again if I could but I am super ready to be getting into the work force and to start my career.

But as many of you know the corona-virus is going on right now. Basically my college ended halfway through my spring semester and I am heartbroken.

There was so many thing that was going on in the next 6 weeks but instead they moved all of our classes to online, closed down my sorority house and canceled all of our events, closed the bars and most importantly canceled graduation.

Everything I have worked so hard for the past 3.67 years was to just walk across the stage, shake the University Presidents hand and get my degree but now the only thing I get is my degree.

Now with this virus going around jobs have frozen any hiring process. Here is a link to my resume‘ as I am trying to let people know that I am looking for work and really want a job.

If you guys have anything let me know I am up for anything!

Stalling… every ones biggest fear. Nobody wants to be at a stall including myself. And trust me I hit that point.

Pretty much everyone I have talked to has been at a stalling point once in their keto journey. Just know it’s NORMAL. It can be scary because you loose all this weight in the beginning and then start to stall out.

But I promise is you keep doing what you are doing you will break the stall and start to loose weight again. The only way you won’t loose weight is if you start to do lazy/dirty keto.

All the keto meals/desserts that you see online or in ads that you can buy is lazy keto. Eating a bunch of keto snacks or treats is dirty keto.

In keto treats there is a lot of different types of sugars that you don’t realize is in them. In this article I found online really helped show me where sugars were hiding in my food.

As many of you know I love my sweets. So switching to keto was very hard for me. One thing I tried to do was to only eat sweets for special occasions such as my best friends birthday when I made keto chocolate chip cookies. Another thing I tried to do was to make my own sweets instead of buying them so I knew exactly what was going into them.

Many people including myself start to do lazy keto once they get comfortable. And then I hit a stall. I knew I had to stop and get on track to keto when I first started in order to loose more weight.

The second I stopped doing lazy keto I lost weight. But if you’re one of those who is just struggling to loose weight and you’re doing everything right just keep pushing! The stall will break and it will pass I promise!

One thing people tend to forget is keto isn’t as hard as people make it seem. YES, you can still go out to dinner with your family and friends you just have to be aware of what food you are ordering and what is in the food.

But, eating out all the time while being keto leads back to my previous post that I made about loosing weight. Eating out is easy for everyone and sometimes can be cheaper but it’s not always healthier.

When you first start keto I recommend eating at home and trying to stay away from eating out since like I said earlier you never know what the restaurants puts in your food.

More restaurants are becoming keto friendly or specifically putting keto stuff on the menus. But my all time favorite place to eat at while being keto is Chipotle.

The main reason I love Chipotle is because 1. I love Mexican food and 2. I can customize the bowl to how I want it.

My order at Chipotle is a salad with no rice or beans, steak, mild salsa, sour cream, cheese, and guac. It is so good.

But chipotle isn’t the only place you can eat keto. In this article it list 14 different places you can eat at while still being keto.

The article helped me a ton once I started being on keto for awhile and wanted to venture away from eating at home so often.

Let me know if you try my Chipotle order or if you have an order that I should try!

When I first started to go keto I was questioning everything that I could eat.

“Wait is that actually keto, Are you sure I can eat it?” I was asking myself and others all types of questions. To the point where I would just google “what Starbucks drinks are keto”.

It was annoying. I was annoyed, my friends were annoyed. Everyone was just annoyed. But I knew I had to do this if I was going to 100% being keto. As I continued to be keto I got more of a hang of it. I find myself not googling as much anymore since it has been a little while.

As I was searching what I can eat while being keto I came across an article that helped me a lot.

I really found this article to be very helpful. I found myself coming to this article quite frequently just to double-check things.

My favorite part of the article is the very beginning when it talks about how many carbs you can eat while on the keto diet. That was always my biggest struggle. But being able to rely on this article was nice.

I found that on almost every article I found the number one thing to eat on keto diets was seafood.

I decided to share these articles with you guys because I’m sure everyone needs a little help!

I did a live tutorial on my snap chat of me making these cookies. But since I figured a lot of you don’t have me on snap chat I figured I’d make a blog post about it and publish my stories to YouTube for everyone to see.

Heres my tutorial!!

https://youtu.be/hOvD9PVKQ_s

Background story: After watching the video I’m sure most of you are wondering why I said Gluten Free in the begining. Well, my bestfriend was having a birthday get together and she has celiac diease, which basically means she’s allergic to gluten. Once I started the Keto diet I reazlied how almost everything I ate was gluten free and that she could eat it as well.

She isn’t the biggest fan of cake and said she wanted cookies and you know how much of a sweets lover I am. So I asked her if she minded if I made them keto, she didn’t mind as long as they were yummy!

So I went to Pinterest to find a gluten free Keto dessert and came across these cookies. This was my first time making them and I fell in love.

Heres the link to the recipe: https://mouthwateringmotivation.com/2018/12/12/chewy-keto-chocolate-chip-cookies/

I made some changes to the recipe.

First change I made was I didn’t use any salt. I didn’t use any salt because I used salted butter instead of unsalted. It was just what I had at home and didn’t want to buy different butter.

Another change I made was I didn’t use blackstrap molasses. I didn’t feel like buying it, I also couldn’t find it anywhere so I figured I could live without the brown sugar flavor.

The last change I made was I added more chocolate chips. I love chocolate chips so I decided to add a little bit more. I added 1/2 cup instead of 1/4 cup.

Be sure to follow me on snapchat to get a live update of what I’m doing! My snapchat is @nrobinson0101.

These cookies turned out so well! Better than I thought they would have. I really recommend making them.

Weight lost…. It’s always a big topic especially for women. The keto diet is known for its causing people to loose weight at a rapid speed. 

The keto diet is very confusing. If I’m not eating any carbs they why wouldn’t I loose weight? But at the same time you’re eating a lot of fat. The first few months of me being keto I was losing weight very fast. The first week I started keto I lost 7lbs. But after a few months I was stalled out. I couldn’t figure out why.

Until I realized I was still going to Red Robin once a week to eat bottomless zucchini fries, and snacking on different keto treats that had all these hidden sugars in them to make you stall out. I was still eating junk food just keto junk food. 

I like to think there are two different types of people who are keto. There are the ones who eat all the healthy keto food. Such as chicken, steak and ground beef and all the veggies you can think of. The other keto people are the junk food keto people. They eat all the cookies, donuts, cake, chips anything that you can think of that’s keto but not healthy they would eat. And I would say that I was the junk food keto person. I would see something that would only be 3 net carbs and would think to myself that’s not bad at all. But I would never look at the ingredients to see all the hidden stuff they put in there. 

I decided I needed to change. I knew I needed to loose weight and no matter how much I worked out if I still ate bad my weight wasn’t going to change.

I started meal prepping and made my boyfriend do it with me. For me personally I need at least one person to do something with me wether it be working out, shopping, or meal prepping I need someone to hold me accountable.

For breakfast we would have eggs with bacon. 

For lunch we would have buffalo wings with a little bit of ranch on the side 

For dinner we would have burgers without a bun and any type of veggie we were in the mood for.

Overall, I’m really enjoying this lifestyle change. It’s benefitted me a lot and I’m excited to keep going.

It’s my favorite time of the year…WEDDING SEASON!! I love everything about weddings to the dresses the bride and bridesmaids wear to even what the guys wear. I love the decorations and how each wedding has different decorations to show off the couples style.

My most favorite thing about weddings it food!! I’ve been on the keto diet for about a 6 months now and I’ll be honest it’s been tough to work with. Theres a lot of food that I can’t eat but love to eat. In order to loose weight you must stick with either being keto or not keto. But going back and forth is going to make you sick and is not good for your body. 

This is the first wedding I went to while being on the keto diet. To be honest I was really worried. I didn’t know what I was going to be able to eat. I figured most weddings had some sort of meat but you never know.

There was a ton of food there. They had a cocktail hour which of course had appetizers. The appetizers consisted of spinach artichoke dip and crackers. They also had Swedish meatballs. I obviously couldn’t have the crackers so I went and talked with the wait staff and asked if they had any vegetables in the kitchen that they could bring out for me. They were so nice and ended up bringing out some celery sticks. I was shocked they had something! But like I always say it doesn’t hurt to ask. 

For dinner I was worried. I didn’t know what meat or vegetables they were going to have. But they ended up having a buffet style set up. And let me tell y’all, it was DELICIOUS! I ended up having salad, a ton of roasted veggies, chicken and a slice of prime rib. It was all so yummy.

Now on to dessert. Before keto I would always have dessert. You couldn’t catch me not having dessert. But I knew before evening going to the wedding I wouldn’t be able to have the cake. Which is my absolute favorite part of any wedding is the cake. So I planned ahead. 

I went online and ordered a box of Chocolate flavored Smartcakes. I follow a lot of keto people on instagram and they all said how good these were. So I had to try them. Not only are they keto friendly but also gluten free. And guys they are ZERO net carbs. It couldn’t get any better. Before I left for the wedding I popped one in my purse and was on my way. By bringing a smartcake I was able to fulfill my sweet tooth as well as not feel left out while everyone else is enjoying cake. 

This wedding was such a special day for these two friends of mine. I was so happy they allowed me to be apart of their day and celebrate them.