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Breakfast means “break the fast” after sleeping and without a doubt, most nutritionists believe that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
After all, how can you expect your body to work and think at peak performance when you have not given it any fuel? How do you expect to avoid that mid-morning slump? [Read more…]
Creamy High-Protein Baked Sweet Potatoes
If you love your baked potatoes but you’d like to get more nutrition than what your typical “white” baked potato offers than you need to try baked sweet potatoes.
Not surprisingly, sweet potatoes top nearly everyone’s list for healthiest foods. Offering a whopping 438% of our needed daily vitamin A, 37% of our daily vitamin C, vitamin B6, 4 grams of dietary fiber, along with calcium, iron and potassium this colorful spud tips the scales at just 105 calories for one baked medium sized sweet potato and it has absolutely no fat to speak of. [Read more…]
Numerous studies have shown that exercising too intensely…including cardio exercise causes negative effects on health while moderate-intensity cardio exercise actually boosts health and fitness.
The body perceives endurance exercise as a form of stress on the body and responds to this stress by increasing cortisol. Cortisol is the “flight or fight” hormone that results as a normal adaptive response to the physical demands of exercise. Chronic elevation of this hormone is associated with signs of aging such as loss of lean muscle, belly fat, inflammation and reduced immunity.
Cardio has long been associated with weight loss…however, the effects are deceptive. When you are on a calorie restrictive diet and you are performing extreme endurance exercise, your body turns to muscle as an energy source and the result is a depletion of your valuable muscle tissue. Not only that, but intense cardio will increase your appetite making your diet all the more challenging. [Read more…]
It may be hard to believe, but losing weight is the easy part of your journey to your ideal body weight and form.
Unfortunately most people do not consider how they are going to handle their new life after they actually lose their excess weight. In other words, how in the heck do you keep that hard-earned weight-loss off your body once you have reached your goal?
Without knowing that ahead of time you are entering into an unfinished plan and dangerous waters. [Read more…]
Without a doubt, eating is one of life’s greatest pleasures. However, for some it is also a huge inconvenience. With so much hustle and bustle going on in our lives and our days seemingly like 18 hours rather than 24, we often feel we should be using our time for some other important endeavor rather than planning and preparing delicious healthy meals.
When we choose to miss an important meal or neglect our nutrition in some way the only thing we accomplish is harm to our health. Not only that, but when we skip meals and our hunger finally takes over and exerts itself, we are left with little control for what we eat usually grabbing the first thing we see without a thought about how it affects our healthy, waistline or energy levels. [Read more…]
It doesn’t matter what season it is or whether we’re celebrating a specific holiday or entertaining friends, dessert usually ends up the star of the show.
After all, for most, it will be the last part of the meal and the last thing you or your guests enjoy before the evening is over so it’s not surprising that it sticks in their minds.
Every day we hear more and more about the negative effects of gluten or white flour or sugar…and now we learn that “cooking” at high temperatures destroys many of the nutrients we paid good money for and what we’re really consuming is a sad representation of the healthy nutrients that used to be there.
So, how do we keep dessert as the star of the show when there is so much negativity about ingredients that are normally associated with desserts? How do we shift from eating foods with white sugar, white flour, dead calories and few nutrients…foods that we have been offered our whole lives and conditioned on our whole lives? [Read more…]
Drinking lemon water is good for you. And, far from being a myth, not only is it good for you, but it can actually help you to speed up weight loss with its real weight-loss powers and it helps to clear out some of the toxins in your body.
The perfect time to enjoy lemon water is in the morning because it helps to activate your body’s detoxifying process are end also its natural cleansing process.
Drinking lemon water helps with weight loss for a couple of reasons.
First let’s check out the lemon itself. Lemons have strong antibacterial, antiviral and immune-boosting powers. These yellow gems contain citric acid, calcium, magnesium, pectin, vitamin C, bioflavonoids and limonene…all of which help fight infections and promote immunity. [Read more…]
Sweet potato…it’s what’s good for you.
This oddly shaped tuber is gaining in popularity and is no longer just invited once a year for Thanksgiving.
Grown throughout the tropics, sweet potatoes are often confused with yams…another starchy root vegetable but they are not even in the same family. Yams are larger in size than sweet potatoes and have been known to grow up to 120 pounds in weight. The easiest way to distinguish a yam from a sweet potato is by checking the skin (you can’t always trust what the grocery store sign indicates). Sweet potatoes are smaller with a very thin peel whereas larger yams have thicker, rougher, dark brown to pink skin. [Read more…]
According to research done by USDA, most of our snacking habits are devoid of rich nutrients but loaded with wasted calories. Do we have to eliminate snacking altogether?
The key is not to try and eliminate snacking, but to shift the way you snack from dead calories to nutritional calories, from bad snacks to good snack.
Snacking fuels you between meals, is the energy to fuel work-outs and supplies you with much needed nutrients…when done right.
Snacking done right can help you to lose or maintain your weight while snacking done wrong is a destroyer of all the good you’ve done…all your weight loss efforts. [Read more…]
Looking to lose weight? Tired of the traditional approach of concentrating on eliminating foods from your diet? How about switching it up and rather than focus on what you should not be eating you turn the focus on foods you should be eating more of?
Foods that not only taste great but are energizing to your body need to be on top of your list.
I am talking about the kinds of foods that kick-in your energy levels…give you that energy boost you need when your fuel tank runs low. Your body is not unlike the car you are driving…it requires quality fuel to run efficiently without breaking down. If you do not provide this energy in the foods you eat, your body then turns to the muscle tissue you presently have to generate the energy needed. [Read more…]