Chef Shay Shay

Ok, so Daryl and I recently took DINKing to a whole new level.

Ever since the engagement the new year the holidays (let's be honest here), D and I have been just awful at grocery shopping. Every once in a while I get super motivated and hit HEB... just to let our produce go bad. We eat out for almost ever. single. meal. It's so bad/unhealthy/financially irresponsible but it's true.

With engagement pictures on the horizon, I've been hitting the gym pretty hard (doing the Jamie Eason Live Fit program) and I'm pretty good at eating well for breakfast (Starbucks turkey bacon sandwich or loaded oatmeal - not great but it could be worse) and then I have a pre-workout snack (Larabar) and a post workout snack (EAS Recovery Protein shake) but then I get home and my life turns in to something like this:

Clearly if someone made an ecard for it, it's a common problem, right?! And I get it, if I'd eat more calories earlier in the day, I wouldn't feel like binge eating at night (the scientifically worst time to binge).

But man, when D says something like "Let's order gluten-free Dominos pizzas instead of cooking", that's a really tough offer to turn down after a 12 hour work day. Especially on this new lifting program because building muscles makes me huuuuuuuuuungry so I can kill just as much food as him in the evenings (a la an entire gluten-free pizza from Dominos by myself).

So anyway, I'll be honest, it wasn't the scale that finally made me see the error in our ways (I'm still losing weight even eating pizza on a regular basis... so... clearly I was eating terrible and not working out at all before! haha), it was the bank account! Eating out was just bleeding us! There had to be a better way that still involved little to no effort on our part.

I started researching Paleo-ish food delivery services, something like Nutrisystem. I had a coworker do that before her wedding and it seemed like the ideal solution! I found one fairly local company that would ship me Paleo foods on a weekly basis... no prep, healthier option but definitely NOT a cost savings! So I kept exploring options.

I remembered a Craigslist ad when I was looking for a maid service that offered cleaning AND meal prep. She was a Mexican girl so her menu was almost exclusively Mexican food... but I figured if she existed, there had to be someone in the west Texas area who would cook me healthy foods for some nominal fee, right??

*Light Bulb*

My aunt Sharon is one of the best cooks I know and loves to do it. She had discussed a while back that she was hoping to retire from her job soon. I wonder...

And sure enough.

We're going to do it on a trial basis at first, just to make sure it's a good fit for both parties involved (I mean, God forbid she wants to REST during retirement), but starting next week, Shay Shay is going to be prepping us 5 nights worth of dinners for us to pick up on Sunday! OBVIOUSLY we're paying her for her help but it's money 100% well spent; we're SO PSYCHED to have healthy, home cooked meals that aren't frozen and shipped across the state. Not to mention, we're getting the luxury of picking the recipes. We're not picky eaters but mushrooms? Get outta here.

And look, she even has a sous chef to help her out!

We're not sure if we talked Shay Shay in to being a personal chef in her retirement, or we've reverted back to having someone else in our family cook our dinners... regardless, it's a win for us! And what a killer business idea, right?! I mean, my aunt may not be in the market to start a small business when she's just beginning retirement but for someone who loves to cook, taking on a few clients and prepping them dinners for the week... definitely something I could see being SUPER successful in a boom town or a regular town, for that matter. 

Moral of the story, I'm the least domestic future wifey ever. I have given up on cleaning and now I'm giving up on cooking. But darnit, I'm a problem solver! 

But really girls. We CAN'T do it all. We CAN'T work full time, have a sparkly home, cook delicious, healthy meals, have VS Angel bodies, enjoy our hobbies, devote time to our families, DIY a Pinterest-tastic house and never let our roots grow out! OMG and I don't even have kids yet! You fakerz who are trying to make us regular people look bad need to take a hike! #RealTalk

Happy Hump Day, ya hard working ladies! Cut yourself some slack today!