Sometimes, especially in the winter, all you want to do is spend the day in sweat pants and bake with Groundhog Day on TV in the background.  Although, this can easily put you in a dieter's remorse come Monday when you realize you didn't get to the gym and have eaten a whole cake to yourself.  Remorse no more... Using a good recipe base with some tweaks and other tactics, you can still fully indulge in one of these lazy baking days with majorly reduced guilt.

Use an Angel Food Cake Base

I found this remarkable recipe through Pininterest for Blue Velvet Cake With Cream Cheese Frosting.  The photo was enough for me to think there was no way I could make this and not gain 3 pounds overnight.  But after reading through the recipe, I noticed the lovely and talented blogger Eva Marie Kosmas made this recipe with an angel food cake base.  Sure I've had angel food cake, but I never thought about making it from scratch.  It's a remarkably good reduced guilt cake recipe! 

Don't be afraid to tweak aspects of a recipe

The cake itself is mostly made from whipped egg whites and the icing can be tweaked with less sugar and non or low fat cream cheese.  So last Sunday my good friend Jessica and I made this exact recipe except for the icing, where we used only 2 cups of powdered sugar, 8 TBPS of butter, low fat Neufchatel cream cheese, and I only used about 2/3 of it all when icing the cake.  It was remarkable.  And amazingly, each "wedding sized" slice was under 200 calories.

Don't keep the entire cake in your kitchen

Sure I had a nice well deserved, hearty slice of cake right after we iced it, but by the next day I only had about a quater of the whole cake left to ration throughout my week.  So think about it... Jessica and I had our first "we did an awesome job" slices, then I made her take a third of the cake home with her, and then I brought another third of what was left into my office.  Does that leave me with a quarter?  Well regardless of the math, I only had a very small fraction of the cake left to my disposal.  So, not only did my coworkers love the 3:37pm treat, but it automatically reduced my ability to over indulge in the cake throughout the week to come.

I also used this technique with the dozens of Christmas cookies my mom sent me back with after visiting home for the holidays.  While I absolutely adore them, I live by myself now and certainly didn't want to eat them all myself.  So I brought about half of them to my new downstairs neighbors that now every morning bring in my newspaper and put it upstairs at my front door.  It's a win-win!

So you see you really don't have to deprive yourself of all things awesome when you're trying to stay on track to weight loss goals or an overall healthier lifestyle.  With many challenges for healthy eating remember that you can make tweaks, keep it in proportion, and still have fun in your kitchen.

Do you have a recipe for a seemingly "bad food" that makes it reduced guilt?  Share them below so other readers and I can give them a shot too!

Known by many and noted from the great Dr. Oz, motivation is the biggest hurdle people face when on their weight loss journey, so having an app that can help you put your money where your mouth is when you first want to start your workout plan while motivation is high is monumental! 

Released just this month, the new tool GymPact allows you to put a monetary value to the workouts you make or miss at your local gym.  Their very simple interface allows you to pick a value (you can pick from $5-$50) for your "pact" on your weekly "pact plan" (you can pick from 1-7 workouts a week).  Then you download their phone app so you can check in to your gym and track these workouts.  You'll lose your weekly pact if you don't make all your workouts or you can gain money from all those people that lost their pact if you make yours.  Pretty awesome right?!

So I actually signed up for GymPact this week.  You can only start your pacts on Mondays so mine hasn't started just yet, but I already have a great idea on how it actually works.

How it works...

• Super simple and intuitive interface. It's really easy to get set up, go on an indefinite break (essentially their way to cancel), or edit any of your settings.
• In order for a workout to count, you must be at a location for 30 min straight.  This functions through your check in via the mobile app.
• You can't cheat the system and make your couch "Gym Elena".  They authenticate each gym location you submit overnight to ensure it's really a gym or workout center.

Overall, I think this is AWESOME.  When I was a trainer, I would always try to implement the same concept with my clients by utilizing their spouse, roommate, coworker, whomever, to hold them accountable monetarily or with other rewards for making their workouts.  This option is just that, but an app won't cave under severe sweet talking and won't forget about the pact either.

The caveats...

• This doesn't work for running outdoors.  Major bummer for me considering at least 3 out 5 workouts a week for me are outdoors on the run.  Although on their forum they say they're working on a work around for this as speak, so hopefully a solution for this will come shortly.
• Authenticating the gym locations makes it so you can't cheat, but that means it won't work for any at home workouts.  I doubt there's any work around possible with this one, so sorry P90x users.

Overall takeaway...

If you have a gym, Pilates or yoga studio, etc. membership and want to work on staying consistent and increase your motivation to stick to your workout plan (who isn't?!) then sign up for this immediately!  You've got nothing to lose and everything to gain.  If you do your workouts on your own and outside (like me) then you'll need to stick to the classic tactics of having a workout buddy, journaling, making milestones with rewards and taping your goals/vision to the frig.

Has anyone else signed up and used this service?  Even though I workout outside mostly, I'll continue and try it with a low pact plan to hold me accountable for my yoga studio workouts and will keep everyone updated on how it goes.