Posts Tagged ‘healthy eating habits’
Orange Banana Dessert
Banana Dessert
This is super easy, tasty and a great way to satisfy a sweet tooth. When done right, it can burn fat.
It can be made raw vegan, paleo or lightly warmed under on low flame. It can be served by itself or be added to your own homemade sorbet or ice cream (raw dairy or raw vegan). Believe it or not, its great with an omelette or grass fed sausage for breakfast.
Ingredients:
1 large banana
1 tbs coconut oil
½ orange, juiced
1 tsp honey
Prep:
Cut banana length wise and then in half
Place in heated fry pan with coconut oil and fry each side 3-4 minutes or golden brown
Place orange juice & honey in separate pan, simmer for 2-3 minutes, leave to cool slightly
To serve, place bananas in a bowl and drizzle the orange syrup over the top.
Serve as is, or on top of ice cream or coconut milk.
Optional – Garnish with cinnamon, vanilla powder, goji berries, shredded coconut or cacao nibs!
Cumin Fish With Salsa!
Cumin Fish with Salsa
Ingredients
Fish
2 fish fillets, large
1 garlic clove, finely grated
1tbs ground cumin
1/3 cup olive oil
1/3 cup lemon juice
Salsa
1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved
1 red capsicum, diced
1 bunch parsley, roughly chopped
1 avocado, diced
1tbs olive oil
2tbs apple cider vinegar
Instructions
Combine garlic, cumin, olive oil and lemon juice. Place fish in a bowl and rub on cumin
mixture. Cover and place in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
Pre‐heat a grill to medium heat.
Place fish on grill and cook for 3‐4 minutes each side, or until cooked through.
To make the salsa, place all salsa ingredients into a mixing bowl and combine well.
Want To Know Why Your Back Hurts?
It’s SNOWING!!! Since I have the morning off, I was going through all the blogs that I follow on Fitness, Self Defense and such and found a great article on back pain and spinal alignment. Something I harp on during every workout.
So, here is the first paragraph, but you’ll have to read the full article here. Posture – Why Your Back Hurts.
From Craig Weller at Elevating Fitness.com
We’re all born with near-perfect postural alignment. Watch a toddler walk, stand, reach overhead and squat and you’ll see tremendous mobility and safe strong joints.
It’s pretty much downhill from there.
North American culture has us spending an inordinate amount of time in the sitting position. A great deal of time and effort goes into preventing us from expending, well, time and effort when it comes to moving around in our daily lives. Items on shelves are always within arms reach, if we have to move very far we hop on an escalator, an elevator or get in our cars; and a job that involves spending much time on one’s feet or lifting something heavier than twenty pounds is considered “strenuous.”
This Week’s Featured Paleo Recipe
Sweet Potato, Bacon and Egg Salad
Ingredients
2/3 cup diced sweet potato
2 eggs
2 rashes of bacon, diced using meat only
1tbs oil
4tbs dill, finely chopped
2tbs mayonnaise
2tbs lemon juice
Instructions
Boil eggs in water for 4-6minutes. Peel and dice eggs.
Boil sweet potato for 4-5minutes or until cooked through.
Place a frying pan on medium-high heat, add olive oil and bacon and fry until browned and slightly crunchy.
In a small bowl, combine dill, mayonnaise and lemon juice.
Place eggs, sweet potato, bacon and mayonnaise sauce into a medium size serving bowl. Combine well.
Serve.
Welcome New Boot Camp Athlete!
Hey! I want to welcome another Boot Camp athlete to our family. Please welcome Molly White to our athletic family. When you see her next week, say Hello and introduce yourself.
Do You Journal Your Fitness Efforts?
Everybody should invest in a notebook and write in it everyday. There are many, many reasons to keep a journal. It is a great tool in the organization of thoughts and ideas. It is an invaluable tool in charting your progress in life. For the athlete, a journal is a necessity and should be in your gym bag along with your shoes, towel and other workout gear. I have long neglected the religious journaling of my training, my workouts and other important details of my life and now kick my self for it.
I have forgotten so much of what I have learned over the years in my Martial Arts and Fitness travels. Furthermore, I have many achievements and accomplishments that have gone unjournaled and have thus faded into distant memories. It is unfortunate, but it is not too late.
I encourage you to keep track of your workouts or fit test results, but that simply isn’t enough. You need to keep a copy with you. You should record what you did during your whole workout: warmup, workout, cool down, scores, times and weights. You should record your impressions of your workout. If you felt good or bad or injured or energized. You should record strategies that worked and did not work.
Thoughts and ideas on how to improve your performance between workouts or to improve on your performance on a specific workout. If you learned some great detail that improved your form or time, you should write that down so you do not forget.
There is no limit to what you can write about in your journal. The important thing is that you write in it consistently and refer back to it to see your progress. If you are working on a goal (and you all should have a goal) like weight loss for example, then you should state your goal in your journal. Outline your plan and then record the steps you are taking to fulfill your goal.
Perhaps you read a good article on improving your eating habits and are trying to follow the program. You can cut it out and tape it into your journal or write down the details in your journal and then see if day by day, week by week, you are following the program. Not all programs are one-size-fits-all and so if you are not finding success you can analyze where it might be going wrong and thus make some adjustments.
Remember it is your journal and you should feel free to write in it, personalize it, make it as interesting and enjoyable and user friendly as possible. Many people tape inspiring pictures in their journals of six-pack abs that they want to have or inspiring athletes that they idolize. Here is one tip that I find works really well. Use two pages that face each other and track your workouts in columns going across so that you can fit several weeks of workouts on those two pages.
Having several weeks worth of work staring you in the face makes it easy to look at your recent progress. This is especially true if you are working a progressive goal like those pullups. You can see from left to right how many pullups and other assistance exercises you did for those weeks and quickly see if you are progressing.
If you are doing a fitness and body composition test every Friday, then you might have 4 weeks of tests on those pages staring at you and thus you can see if the program was working that month.
There are no limits. I haven’t even touched on food journaling. If you are following the Paleo plan and zoning, it is a must that your write down everything you eat. Charting your fuel and performance will allow you to really see how everything works together. Getting really personal is also good because you can see how your emotions effect your diet and exercise. If you are a good journaler, you might notice patterns that help or hinder your performance.
You might notice that every time your boss gives you a new assignment, you eat a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and you don’t workout for 3 or 4 days. You might notice that every time burpees are posted on the WOD board, you come down with a cold, a sore back or some other reason not to give it your all.
Hmmm…interesting.
Nutrition Class Follow up, You Gotta Read About This!
In the nutrition class last Friday, we talked a great deal about how our diet can contribute directly to Type II Diabetes, Hyperinsulinemia as well as a host of other problems.
Well, I got this in an email today. Read it, view the research and stop eating and drinking poison…
Nutrition, Nutrition, Nutrition…
That’s what they always say, isn’t it? Maybe not, but if the key to a successful business is location, then nutrition is the key to complete functional fitness. Unlike finding the best spot for your business, nutrition is not as complicated as it sounds.
One little thing that can make a huge difference is to skip the added fat. Even though buttering up may work on your boss, it won’t leave a good impression on those problem areas or your heart! Try new spices and seasoning on those veggies, but try to avoid blends that contain salt. They can add a sneaky amount of unnecessary sodium to your food.
If you are accustomed to tossing a tablespoon of butter in the pan before cooking try olive oil instead. Yes, it’s fat, but GOOD fat. Don’t go crazy because too much of a good thing can still be too much. When it comes to meat, think lean. Lean protein is the best protein. Chicken and turkey breast, lean pork, lean beef, fish, and low fat dairy are a few excellent sources of lean protein.
Another tip to keeping your nutrition well balanced is in the fine print (or the lack thereof).
It may sound crazy, but whole, nutritious foods have less ingredients then processed foods. When you are shopping, read labels; not the front of the package. The more processed, meaning the more they mess with it, the more ingredients they need to make it “whole” again. The more the food is processed the more nutrition is lost. In turn, the more you have to eat to get all the vitamins, minerals, and healthy stuff your body needs. Which means, drum roll please, more calories! BOO!
So, just look for whole foods from the beginning.
My favorite nutrition tip is to eat every 2-3 hours. That doesn’t mean that if you are taking your kids to soccer and you are approaching the 3 hour mark you can swing through the drive-through and grab a burger. It does mean that you can have 6-8 small meals every day. This helps ward off hunger pangs that can lead to binge eating, and low blood sugar that can lead to “see-food” eating.
Don’t forget to plan ahead! If you know you are going to be busy have a few on-the-go snacks ready and waiting. Raw fruits and vegetables are excellent on-the-go snacks that require little to no prep work.
Last, but not least, don’t ruin your awesome nutritional meal with a soda, fruit juice, or any other high calorie drink. An excellent substitute for the ladder is green tea with honey. Even better than that is green tea without honey. The best of the best, however, is water. Yup, water is what we should all be drinking. No matter what the latest “in” healthy beverage is; there is no substitute for water.
So…eat lean, whole, minimally processed foods, and drink water! That’s nutrition in a nutshell. Keep checking back for more healthful information (in fact, you can bookmark this page) For a more comprehensive, personal nutrition plan call 254-247-4999 and talk to Jim!
