My Favourite Energy Bars For a Post-Gym Snack or as a Nursing Necessity

I was learning to box at the UFC gym when I became pregnant with this one.

I LOVED it.

There's something so badass about wrapping your hands, putting on the iconic gloves, and hitting something as hard as you can.

My tender cooking hands were bruised, sore, and bleeding within a week but I loved every minute of it.

I had signed up for a bunch of personal training classes to learn how to punch and kick properly before I went to anymore boxing classes. I really needed to know what was expected of me when the big-shouldered boulder of a coach is shouting "6-3-2-9-4" while circling a bag, looking like it broke his little sister's heart and would pay dearly for it.

So I trained a few times with a coach one-on-one until I dry-heaved in front of him when morning sickness made its debut in the middle of a session. Outside of the fertility clinic, my coach was the first one to know I was pregnant. I took it easy, but my morning sickness typically was awful between 9 and 1 every day, making it impossible to continue at the gym like I had been. And when it passed and I regained a sense of normalcy a few weeks later, the UFC gym was gone. They had closed it down.And just like that, my career in boxing came to halt.

The UFC gym transitioned into a boot camp-style class. Sled runs, tire flips, pull-ups, push-ups, lifting-all-the-heavy-objects, and cardio burnouts, all at timed intervals. I loved it from the start.

I used to go to a boot camp class for years and it was my favourite thing to do. My body would crave it. But that came to a smashing halt when I crushed my foot with a kettlebell in August of 2017. After it was healed, it was just too hard to make modifications in the big classes with one instructor to continue going to that gym. I did my own thing at gyms for a while, but to be honest, without people around to motivate me, I'm pretty lazy. Classes are what I need.

And now, miraculously, at 30 weeks pregnant, I'm still going to the gym. I thought I would have tapped out at this point, but I'm still feeling strong and able in my body. I find it pretty amazing. I barely moved off the couch when I was pregnant with our first.

To be fair though, I make a ton of modifications, I don't push myself, I only go 2-3 times a week, and I am slower than a turtle. Cardio straight up kills me thanks to the tiny person pushing on my diaphragm. But I'm still doing it and I'm proud of the strength in my body.

RRREEEEERRRZZZZ

Insert that scratched record sound from a cartoon when things aren't exactly as they are made out to be and a playback needs to happen. I have no bloody clue how to write that sound but I'm fairly certain it just played in your mind.

I stopped going to boot camp at 31 weeks, just one week after I wrote everything up to this point. (You see, I can sit on posts for weeks before I publish them. I have a backlog of half a dozen I really need to get out there.) I had truly been feeling great up until I just wasn't. Tiny babe had been going through a huge growth spurt and suddenly I was winded just from my warm-up and if I thought I was slow before, I had become glacial. I kept telling myself that I would go back to the gym and do my own thing and take it easy, but honestly, just walking the hills in my neighbourhood take my breathe away, so I never made it back.

Today the final blow happened: I put my gym membership on hold for the foreseeable future until I'm able to return post-birth. I can't lie, I walked out of the gym feeling incomplete, like I left a limb there. I love the gym. I love the people. I love just being active. It really is a happy place for me.

I'm pretty sad to have this part of my life temporarily on hiatus. The gym keeps me sane. Basically that's a warning that I'm going to be even more off my rocker now.

Kidding. I still walk and hike. And when I'm not, I'm just sitting here in awe that I only have 6 weeks left.

Hello 34 weeks.

One of my favourite snacks after the gym was a chocolate lentil energy bar. It also happens to be my dad's favourite bar that I make. Within an hour of him entering our house, he's rummaging in the freezer looking for them. For Christmas all he wanted was a batch all to himself. This man dislikes legumes and lentils as a general rule, so that's saying a lot about how good these are.

Lentils are totally underrated as a recovery food for working out, but they contain a fair amount of protein for repair as well as carbohydrates in order to restore glycogen stores within your muscles. And their high-fibre content make them a great slow-burning fuel so you can continue your day after the gym without crashing from a sugar high that can result from some poorly made protein powders. Read the labels, kids. It's shocking how much sugar can be found in some brands.

I loved these bars especially because I could eat it right out of the gym, feel satiated, and have enough energy to get home and immediately take Charles out for a hike or run. What was resting? I do miss those days though.

These bars also make super B.A. nursing bars. They are calorie dense. (Keep that in mind before you eat three in a sitting!) I don't know about the rest of you who have nursed babes, but hunger hath no fury like that of nursing hunger. One of these is a great snack and I'm stocking my freezer with a bunch to get through the first few weeks of constant near-starvation.

I originally found this recipe on this blog here but have changed the main "glue" of it over the years to make them less sweet and have more of a dark chocolate taste. Other than that, I've remained pretty true to that author's recipe. She created a good thing.

Lentil Energy Bars

1 cup natural peanut butter
1/2 cup honey
1/3 cup raw cacao powder

2 cups cooked lentils (I use 3/4 of a cup of green, and 1/4 of a cup of red)
1/4 cup ground flax
1/4 cup hemp hearts
1/4 cup almond or coconut flour
2 tbsps. chia seeds
1/4 cup shredded unsweetened coconut
3 tbsps. pumpkin seeds
3/4 cup rolled oats

Directions

1. In a small pot, mix the peanut butter, honey, and the cacao powder and heat over low heat until warmed through.
2. In the meantime, mix everything else in a large bowl. As an optional step, you can toast the coconut before you add it in. I love toasted coconut so I always do.
3. Once the peanut butter mixture is warm, add it to all the other ingredients and mix mix mix mix. This stuff can be sticky and tough, but keep going and it'll come together.
4. Dump it all into a 9x13 glass baking dish* and freeze for a few hours or overnight.
5. Remove from the pan, cut into pieces**, and store in an airtight in the freezer.

*Do yourself a huge favour and cover your dish in plastic wrap before putting everything into it or else I wish you all the luck getting it out in one piece.

**I usually cut mine into 20 bars of decent size. I wouldn't recommend making them much bigger than that. Again, these suckers are calorie dense.

Feel absolutely free to mix and match ingredients as you have them, just try to keep within the same proportions. Instead of sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds, this time we used toasted hazelnuts and dried cranberries, as per my daughter's request.

I hope you're all able to enjoy this beautiful sunshine! Charles has been waiting ever-so-not-patiently-huffing-beside me as I finish this up, so we're off for a slow trek through the hills. Happy Tuesday!