Monthly Archives: November 2011

6 Holiday Tips For Staying Fit

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So how are we supposed to get through the holidays without gaining weight? Here are six effective ways to get yourself ready to beat the holiday bulge.

Keep exercising. Most fitness trainers will tell you the slowest point of their year is between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Sure, their clients schedule workouts with the best of intentions, but then they cancel them for parties and gift shopping. It’s hard to remain balanced when you have a million things to do and gifts to buy. Yet the greatest gift you can give yourself is to stay focused on your fitness goals and get your workout in. Shopping getting in the way? Do it online and save some time. Parties getting in the way? Just show up later. Who cares if everyone else is a couple of cocktails ahead of you? You’ll be healthier, and you won’t have to worry about the embarrassing YouTube® videos in the morning! Just stay consistent, even if it’s inconvenient. You’ll be much less likely to look like Santa (both belly-wise and red-nose-wise) at the end of the month.

Eat before parties. Most holiday parties don’t focus on low-fat, low-calorie refreshments, so unless you’re organizing the event, the best damage control is to show up with a full (or at least almost full) tummy. Make sure you eat your meals and snacks throughout the day, and try to eat a healthy meal before attending any party. If you’re going straight from work, prepare a healthy and filling snack to eat on the way. You’ll be a lot less likely to swim in mayonnaise dips and pigs in blankets if you’re full.

Get junk out of the house. The majority of people don’t get into their car at midnight, drive to the store, buy the ingredients for cookies, bake them, and then stay up to eat them. But if those homemade cookies that Linda in accounting made for you are already on your kitchen counter, you better believe you’ll find a way to justify it. Frankly, at 12:30 AM, after a rotten day, for most of us there’s nothing like a few cookies to drown our sorrows. The secret is to get the garbage out of the house. Send it to work with your significant other, donate it to a bake sale, re-gift it to your 100-pound friend with the perfect metabolism, or just dump it in the trash. Arlene from the customer service department will never know. If you have holiday dinner leftovers, box them up for your guests individually and send them home with them. If your family still sends you that sausage or cookie assortment, invite a bunch of people over for a pre-party party and serve ‘em up before the drinks. Try not to be wasteful, but get the less-than-healthy temptations out of your reach.

Offer to prepare healthy fare. This suggestion won’t be well received by those of us who’d rather spend Thanksgiving sitting around watching football than toiling in the kitchen, but if you do the cooking, you have the control. Your family could have a tasty and satisfying meal without ingesting thousands of calories and fat grams. The way the turkey is prepared, the type of stuffing, how vegetables are made, whether the cranberries are real, and countless other things can make or break the healthiness of a meal. There are tons of cookbooks out there that can help you out. Yes, it does require a bit of work. But you can handle it!

Choose wisely and proportionally. Something occurs during a holiday meal. It’s like a Las Vegas buffet—we feel like we have to eat some of everything. We feel almost like those foods will never exist again, and this is our last meal on the planet. This year, why not try to eat only your favorites, as in two or three items, and keep the portions to the size of your palm? If you’re still hungry, try to fill up on veggies (preferably ones that aren’t drowned in butter or cream-of-mushroom soup). If you want dessert, lean toward a small slice of pumpkin pie (220 calories) as opposed to pecan (a heftier 543), leaving out the hydrogenated non dairy whipped topping if possible. If you’re going to have an alcoholic beverage, go with a flute of champagne (100 calories) as opposed to that rum-laced eggnog (with more than four times more calories, at 420). Just a few wise choices will save you a ton of calories, and probably a significant amount of heartburn as well!

Don’t beat yourself up. Quite possibly the worst thing you can do is beat yourself up over a bit of holiday indulgence. Yes, it does stink to backslide after working your tail off. But sometimes it doesn’t stink as much as dealing with your mother when you turn down her brisket and potato pancakes. Sometimes, we don’t have time to go to work, buy a Christmas tree, decorate it with our kids, make dinner, oversee homework, tuck kids in bed, and spend an hour working out. We can only do our very best. Mentally beating yourself up will only make you feel worse, which never helped anyone get back to their fitness program. So if you happen to gain that 1 extra pound this holiday season, be part of the rare group who actually follows through with their New Year’s resolution and manages to shed it again. A week of hard work and a slight calorie deficit should do the trick. Resolutions don’t come easier than that!

 

 

 

10 Tips That Will Make Healthy Eating Easy!!

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Here are 10 secrets that make healthy eating easy!!

1. Use cooking spray to coat skillets and baking dishes.

2. Never fry food: grill, sauté, broil, or bake instead.

3. Lightly steam vegetables.

4. Make large quantities of soup and other foods, and freeze for later use.

5. Take advantage of prewashed spinach, lettuce, and other produce.

6. Buy large bags of individually frozen skinless, boneless chicken breasts.

7. Make a weekly meal plan and shopping list.

8. Wash and chop vegetables ahead of time.

9. Build a meal around a whole roasted chicken. Use leftovers for salads, etc.

10. Replace salt with fresh and dried herbs and spices.

11 Important Tips To Remember

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1. Keep a water bottle with you at all times and drink from it often. Water should always be your drink of choice. To kick things up every once in a while, try adding lemon, lime, cucumber, or a few berries to liven up the flavor without adding significant calories.

2. Look at exercise as a pleasure and a privilege, not a burden or chore. Think positively about the changes regular exercise will produce. Rather than obsessing about your next meal, get excited about your next workout!

3. Enjoy an occasional (once a week) “unhealthy” treat, but never an unhealthy week or unhealthy vacation.

4. Avoid monotony by taking up new forms of exercising, or using things that keep you motivated and inspired, like new shoes or great music.

5. Subscribe to fitness magazines or blogs to keep focused on health as an overall way of life, such as SWEATWORX!!!

6. Invest in the right tools—good shoes, a portable MP3 player or iPod®, fitness equipment, a new series of tapes, etc.

7. Make it your goal to do some form of exercise 6 or 7 days a week. If some days you exercise once in the morning and once in the evening, even better! If you’re eating right, exercise will fuel your energy level!

8. Don’t compare your body to others’. Instead, work to be your personal best.

9. Move beyond the boundaries of weight loss and into total fitness. Measure success by the way your clothes fit, not some number on a scale.

10. Create an exercise schedule the day before instead of leaving it to chance or waiting to “find” the time. If our last three Presidents of the United States can make time to work out every day, you can make time too!

11. Work to take your exercise to new levels of intensity.

 

 

 

 

5 Foods That Can Fool You!!!

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Today, there are dozens of foods we fool ourselves into thinking are healthful, when in truth they do nothing but pad our hips and arteries. Here are of the worst offenders on your grocery store shelves.

Yogurt

1.Yogurt. It starts out as good stuff. Fat aside, there’s the calcium and protein you find in all milk products, along with probiotics, which make it easier to digest for those with lactose issues. The only problem is that straight yogurt can be pretty bitter, so manufacturers load the stuff with sugar and masquerade those carbs as fruit in an effort to make the whole thing more palatable. Have a look at most flavored yogurt and you’ll find the second ingredient to be sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. One container of Yoplait® Original Strawberry has 170 calories, with 5 grams of protein and 33 grams of carbohydrates, 27 of which are sugar. Oddly enough, these are the exact same nutrition facts for Yoplait’s other, less healthy-sounding flavors, including Key Lime Pie and White Chocolate Raspberry.

Solution: Buy plain yogurt and flavor it yourself. You’d be amazed at how far a handful of raspberries or a tablespoon of honey will go to cut the bitter taste. And while you’re at it, choose the low-fat or fat-free stuff. You’ll still get all the nutritional benefits.

Salad Dressing

2. Fat-free salad dressing: Dressing by definition is supposed to be fatty, and thus highly caloric. You use a little bit of it, and in doing so, you get a healthy hit of the fats you need for a nutritionally balanced diet. Unfortunately, people prefer to buy fat-free versions so they can drown their greens while avoiding excess fat.

Nothing’s free. All this stuff does is replace the fat with carbs and salt, so you’ve basically gone from pouring a little healthy unsaturated fat on your salad to dumping on a pile of sugar. For example, Wish-Bone® Fat Free Chunky Blue Cheese has 7 grams of pure carbs and 270 milligrams of sodium for 2 tablespoons, which you’ll never stop at anyway. Also, given that there’s no fat or protein in this particular dressing, one can only imagine what makes it chunky.

Solution: Make your own salad dressing. One part vinegar and one part olive oil with a blob of Dijon mustard makes an awesome vinaigrette. And here’s another trick: Make your salad in a sealable container, add a tiny bit of dressing, and shake it up. It’ll coat so much more than tossing will.  And finally, make that salad with romaine lettuce, spinach, or some other nutrient-rich leafy green as nutrient-poor iceberg lettuce is basically a filler.

Juice

3. Juice. The range in the nutritional value of store-bought juices is massive. On one end, you have “fruit drinks” with just a modicum of actual juice in them. On the other end, you have fresh-squeezed, 100 percent preservative-free juices like Odwalla® and Naked Juice®. But no matter which one you choose, it’s important to remember that it’s never going to be as healthy as whole fruit. And if you’re trying to lose weight, it’s a flat-out bad idea. First off, it’s been stripped of fiber, so you absorb it faster, which makes it more likely to induce blood-sugar spikes. Secondly, you consume it faster and it’s less filling, so you’re more likely to drink more.

Solution: If you must buy it, go fresh-squeezed, but you’re usually better off just skipping it entirely.

Canned Fruit

4. Frozen or canned fruit. Any food swimming in juice or “light syrup” isn’t going to work in your favor on the scale. Furthermore, most canned fruit is peeled, meaning you’re being robbed of a valuable source of fiber.  Frozen fruit is a little trickier. While freezing preserves the fruit itself, adding sugar during the freezing process preserves color and taste; so many store-bought frozen fruits throw it in.

Solution: Read that ingredients list! You want it to say fruit, water—and that’s it.

Wheat Bread

5. Wheat Bread. If you’re reading this, you probably know enough about nutrition to understand that whole-grain wheat is better for you than refined wheat. By keeping the bran and germ, you maintain the naturally occurring nutrients and fiber.

But for some reason, manufacturers constantly come up with new chicanery to lead you back to the refined stuff. One of their latest tricks is to refer to refined flour as “wheat flour” because, obviously, it’s made of wheat. But just because it’s wheat-based doesn’t mean it’s not refined. The distracted shopper can mistake this label for “whole wheat flour” and throw it in his cart. Another loaf of cruddy, refined, fiberless bread has a new home.

Solution: Slow down when you read the label. That word “whole” is an important one.