How Much Sugar is in That Food or Drink?

Do you know how much sugar you’re eating every day? Most of us don’t but statistics estimate that the average American consumes between 90 and 180 POUNDS of sugar each year. POUNDS!

Let’s look at a visual of that. Here are some 5 pound bags of sugar. In an average year, you’ll enjoy 20 to 36 of them.   Remember, these are the 5 pound bags that you pull out of the pantry to bake with.  Try eating 20 of them.

But that’s not helpful, is it?   You want to know how in the world that can happen.  Where is all of this sugar coming from?  Well here are some visuals.  Please share this with everyone you know.  It’s the best visual I’ve ever seen to show the amount of sugar in what we eat.   Choose wisely!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sugar in Cantelope

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Healthy Shrimp and Avocado Salad

 

 

This is a great healthy salad that is fresh and good for you. It can be used as a light lunch or as a meal. I sometimes add boiled new potatoes to it if I serve it as a dinner.

 

Ingredients:

For Salad

1 Large ripe avocado (you can add 2 if you like them that much).
1lb cooked large shrimp peeled or you can use frozen and thawed.
2 fresh red ripe tomatoes chopped
1/4 red or yellow onion chopped
2-3 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
1 bag mixed salad greens.
ground salt and pepper to taste

For The Vinaigrette

2 tablespoons lime juice
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon Dijon Mustard
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground pepper
6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

To prepare salad, cut and slice avocado. Place salad greens on plate.  Top with shrimp, tomatoes, onions and cilantro dress with dressing. You may need an extra dash of salt and pepper on top.

This serves 4-6 people.  Wasn’t that easy?

Honey, Does This Squat Rack Make Me Look Fat?

Like a good husband assessing his wife’s newest bathing suit purchase, the answer is always “NO!”   Squats and other resistance training exercises will not make you big and bulky.  What they will do is create muscle, which in turn helps you in your efforts to burn fat. As a result, you’ll lose weight and you’ll look thinner and healthier. (see video below)

I spend an hour at the gym 3 or 4 times a week and I see the same people pretty much every time I go. There are those who spend time in the free weight area and those who spend time on the bikes and treadmills. Some do both. But I notice that there is a group of people who kill themselves, some every single day, doing a half hour or more on the treadmill or an hour on the recumbent or stationary bike. And I know they’re telling themselves and maybe even their friends, “I workout every day for an hour and I just can’t make any progress.”

Get Off The Treadmill

Can I please tell you to stop doing it?  Cardio” is a good thing.  It is.  You really should incorporate it into your workout a few days a week.  Tack it on to your workout after you do your resistance training if you like or set aside days in between your resistance training workouts to do your cardio. And do cardio you enjoy!  Get out on a real bike, go for a brisk walk or jog. But if you’re one of the people that is slaving away on the treadmill, bike or other cardio routine every day, because your goal is to get smaller, skinnier, lose fat, BURN IT ALL OFF, please stop, and start lifting some weights.

Resistance Training

The phrase ‘resistance training’ includes weight lifting but does not have to include weights to be resistance training. For example, performing a squat using just your body weight, is an example of resistance training. Pushups, pull-ups, bench press (with a bar or dumbbells or cans of soup), etc. are all examples. What distinguishes resistance training from cardio is the use of sets with rest in between and the fact that each set is performed with an amount of weight that causes you to approach muscle failure after a number of repetitions.

For example, to train your legs, you might do squats with no weight or with dumbbells for 10-15 repetitions, depending on your level of fitness. If you do them properly (see video) and you’re using enough weight (resistance), you should fatigue and not be able to do any more after you squat 10-15 times. At this point you should rest for 2-3 minutes to catch your breath and then do another set of 10-15 reps. If you’re new to this, don’t work to failure. Just work until you don’t feel like you should not do any more reps. What’s happening during a resistance training workout is that you are actually breaking down muscle tissue. That’s why you work almost to failure and rest in between sets. After 2-3 sets of this exercise, you can move on to another exercise and workout in similar fashion (watch the articles list for sample exercises and workouts).

A resistance training workout should last no more than 30-45 minutes unless you are an experienced weight lifter. You can normally perform several exercises for 2-3 sets per exercise and 10-15 repetitions per exercise. At the end of a workout for your legs, your legs will be a little rubbery and you’ll probably experience soreness the next day or so. You should not work these muscles again for at least several days. The reason for this is that muscle growth does not occur while you’re working the muscle. It occurs during the rest period after the workout as your muscles repair themselves and seek to be stronger for your next workout. The cycle of muscle repair is also what causes your metabolism to continue to burn fat long after your workout (which is NOT true of cardio).

Here’s a typical leg workout that might work for someone looking to do just legs in a short amount of time:
Squats - 2- 3 sets of 10-15 repetitions with 2-3 minutes rest in between (gluteus, quadriceps and hamstrings)

Lunges - 2-3 sets of 10-15 repetitions with 2-3 minutes rest in between sets (same but more emphasis on hamstrings)

Standing Calf Raises - 2-3 sets of 10-15 repetitions with 2-3 minutes rest in between sets (calf)

Depending on your level of strength and conditioning, you might add 2-3 sets of either a leg curl or a leg extension but if you’re a beginner, wait and see how the basic workout works for you and you can increase your weight or add an exercise next week.

After a day of rest, you can move on to an upper body workout. Watch for an article with some sample upper body workouts. Also, don’t forget to do some cardio AFTER or in between resistance training days.

Consult your doctor before beginning any exercise program to make sure you don’t cause yourself any injury!

For more exercises, exercise routines and workout programs, please visit the workouts section of MyBodySite.com. 

10 Ways to Start Losing Weight Now

Losing weight is hard for everyone. If you want to lose weight and you’ve ‘tried everything’, try the following tips. Don’t do all of them. Don’t do them in order. Just pick one and give it a try for a few days. Then try another one. If you can do all ten, you’ll be shedding pounds in no time.

1. Don’t Go on a Diet! Stop thinking of ‘diet’ as starving or depriving yourself or as a new and interesting approach to eating. The dictionary’s first two definitions for ‘diet’ are ‘food and drink regularly consumed’ and ‘habitual nourishment.’ So don’t ‘go on a diet’. You’re already on a diet. You just need to modify your diet so that you’re eating more healthy foods than harmful foods. And if you make just one small change each day or each week and make it part of your regular eating pattern, you’ll lose weight.

2. Eat six meals per day. You may have already heard this before but it’s worth repeating and it’s easier than it sounds. If you’re overweight, chances are you’re skipping regular meals and eating a lot of calories through random snacking throughout the day and lots of liquid calories (soda, mocha choca lattes, chips, chocolates). Instead of foraging all day long on whatever comes near you, try to eat three square meals and three scheduled healthy snacks. For example, eat breakfast before you work and then, midway between your breakfast and lunch, have a planned snack. Nothing fancy but keep it real. An apple with some peanut butter is a great choice or keep a stash of protein bars handy and have one for a snack. When lunch rolls around, you won’t be overly hungry so you’ll be more likely to make a sensible choice for lunch. Have another snack midway between lunch and dinner and you’ll find the same results. After dinner and before bedtime, have one more snack for the day. Make it a small one and keep the carbs low.

3. Stop drinking soda. Period. That’s it. Each 12 oz. can of soda has 7 and 1/2 teaspoons of sugar in it. If you grab any 24 oz bottle or get a medium or larger soda from any fast food restaurant, you’re consuming 15 teaspoons of sugar! Think about ordering your coffee with 15 sugars in it. If you want to see a visual measurement of the sugar in soda, check this out. You won’t believe how much sugar you’re getting.

4. Drink more water. If you stop drinking soda, you’ll be looking for a substitute. Water is the best. Since water contains no calories, it can serve as an appetite suppressant, and helps the body metabolize stored fat. It’s fat -free, cholesterol-free, low in sodium, and has no calories. Also, drinking more water helps to reduce water retention by stimulating your kidneys. Dehydration leads to excess body fat, poor muscle tone & size, decreased digestive efficiency & organ function, increased toxicity, joint & muscle soreness, & water retention. Water works to keep muscles and skin toned. Try to drink 8 glasses of water a day. This is an easy and effective step towards losing weight.

5. Hold the Fries. Have a salad or a vegetable (or a baked potato) instead of those french fries or chips. Even though many fast food chains, restaurants and the makers of snacks (chips, etc.) are voluntarily switching from ‘trans fats’ to better oils like canola oil for frying, avoiding fried foods is best.

6. Eat Breakfast. This is actually a tip included in ‘eat 6 meals a day’ suggestion but for those who want to take smaller steps, this is probably the most important meal. Skipping breakfast means you’ve been starving your body since you went to sleep for 8 hours already, plus however long it is until your next meal. What does your body do when it’s starving? It slows down your metabolism and holds on to fat. On the other hand, eating breakfast consistently signals to your body that there is no need to store fat and your body begins to process your food and fires up your metabolism to start your day.

7. Eat More Protein. Protein is the building block for healthy muscle and roughly a third of your meals should consist of protein. If you eat meals without protein (think coffee and donuts, a bagel with OJ, pancakes with fruit), you’re body begins to pump out insulin to keep your blood sugar levels under control. You’ll get a sugar rush while your body converts the sugar to fat and then you’ll crash. Eating protein with every meal in addition to carbs and healthy fats allows your body to regulate this process.

8. Make better choices. Very few people have time to prepare all of their meals and be ready for healthy snacks and meals all day long. Business travelers, busy moms, working moms, all have too much to do and few hours to do it in. So, we grab food that is available. Having meals prepared or at least a plan is ideal. But when you can’t, make the best choice you can, with what’s offered to you. Substitute a chicken sandwich for a burger. Add a salad or baked potato instead of an order of french fries. Hold the mayo and have mustard. Have the dressing on the side. Order the smaller steak. Choose brown rice instead of white. Order fish. Just one better choice at each meal will make a world of difference.

9. Don’t Eat Past Full. Treat your body more like your car and you’ll eat better. You wouldn’t overfill your gas tank and you wouldn’t put 6 quarts of oil in your car. You measure out what your car is supposed to hold and needs to run properly and that’s what you put in your car. Do the same with your stomach. Prepare a dish of food that is reasonable in size, eat it and stop. You don’t need to be full at every meal. And, if you’re eating 6 meals a day, you won’t want to. A good rule of thumb for determining portion size is the size of a deck of playing cards, the size of your closed fist or the palm of your hand for all solid foods.

10. Resistance Train. If you’ve never worked out at all, talk to your doctor before you begin any exercise plan. But if you’re stuck in a rut with the treadmill, stationary bike and other aerobics, and getting no where, get off the treadmill and start to incorporate resistance training into your workout. A good pattern is aerobics one day and resistance training the next. Weight training or other resistance training (includes pushups, pullups, squats with your own body weight, walking lunges) have one excellent benefit that aerobics does not provide. When you resistance train, you break muscle down during your workout. As a result, you burn calories (and fat), during your workout and all day long, as your body repairs itself with all of the healthy choices you make in your diet all day long. Depending on how hard you train, you can burn calories all through the day and night, from one resistance training workout.

If you are having trouble figuring out how many calories to eat, use our food database and calorie counter (you need to be logged in to track calories) and find or build workouts using our find a workout creator.

Eat Fat, Lose Weight with Flat Belly Diet

Prevention Magazine has a Flat Belly Diet that was released with great fanfare and as if it was a new concept. It’s one worth repeating. Kudos to them for revealing a truth about food that should be self-evident but that we overlook. We need fat. There are good fats. God put all sorts of great foods on the earth that we’ve overlooked because there has been this ‘low-fat’ mentality for so long.

The Flat Belly Diet is based primarily on mono-unsaturated fatty acids (abbreviated MUFAs).

As stated on Prevention’s website: ‘There are five major categories of MUFAs: (1) oils, (2) nuts and seeds, (3) avocado, (4) olives, and (5) chocolate. Eating one serving of any of these foods at every meal will help reduce your accumulation of dangerous belly fat; control your calorie intake and you’ll lose inches and pounds, too–especially around your waistline.

There are two different types of fat: subcutaneous and visceral. Subcutaneous is right under your skin. You can see it and pinch it and you have a little everywhere that you have skin. You may have a lot on your waist or your backside.

Some subcutaneous fat is necessary but too much of it can be bad and is usually a visible sign of being overweight or obese. Subcutaneous fat is the first to go when you follow a diet rich in MUFA’s along with an exercise program and overall healthy diet.

The second type of fat (visceral fat) is much more dangerous and harder to lose. Visceral fat (which gets its name from viscera, which refers to the internal organs in the abdomen) resides deep within the torso, wrapping itself around your heart, liver, and other major organs. In fact, it’s possible to be relatively thin and still have too much visceral fat. That’s why it’s sometimes referred to as ‘hidden’ belly fat.’ Excess visceral fat can subtract years from your life.

Visceral fat has been linked to a long list of adverse health conditions, including:

High blood pressure, stroke, and heart disease
High cholesterol
Diabetes
Breast cancer
Dementia

One of the main reasons visceral fat is so deadly is because of its role in inflammation, a natural immune response that has lately been tied to almost every chronic disease there is. Visceral fat secretes precursors to an inflammatory chemical that helps fuel the systemic process that exacerbates early symptoms of disease.

In fact, according to a study published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, visceral fat may have a greater impact on the cardiovascular health of older women than does overall obesity. Danish researchers found that women with excessive belly fat had a greater risk of atherosclerosis than those whose fat was stored mostly in their hips, thighs, and buttocks. Here’s why:

The proximity of visceral fat to your liver boosts production of LDL cholesterol (the ‘bad’ one), which collects in your arteries and forms plaque, a waxy substance.

Over time, this waxy plaque becomes inflamed, causing swelling that narrows the arteries, restricting the passage of blood.

The narrowing passageways increase blood pressure, straining your heart and potentially damaging tiny capillaries.

The inflammation further increases your risk of blood clots, which can break loose and cause stroke.

But it gets worse. Visceral fat also contributes to insulin resistance, an early precursor to diabetes. Insulin resistance is a condition in which cells do not respond to insulin and the pancreas is forced to increase production in order to clear the bloodstream of glucose. Over time, insulin resistance can lead to full-blown diabetes, which can severely comprise the entire circulatory system and cause long-term issues with vision, memory, and wound healing.

As if that weren’t enough, a Kaiser Permanente study comparing people with different levels of belly fat showed that those who had the most belly fat were 145 percent more likely to develop dementia compared with people with the least amount of belly fat. Why? Inflammation again, suggest investigators.

These science-based studies should be reason enough to motivate you to shed your belly fat forever. But even if you reduce calories and exercise regularly, you can still be left with too much hidden visceral fat. What is the answer? According to Prevention, the answer is eating the right kind of …fat. Studies have shown that MUFAs, are the key to shedding both subcutaneous and the deadly visceral fact. It is these five fats that create the corner stone of the Flat Belly Diet.

iPhone App Review: Good Food Near You

You read magazines and blog posts that list what food choices you should be making when eating out. However, if you are like me, you find it hard to remember the best menu option at every restaurant. I do take my food choices pretty seriously, but I’m not going to demand to see the nutrition facts before ordering. So, I do the best I can and then check myself in Eat This, Not That when I get home! That being said, I was pretty excited to test out the Good Food Near You iphone (and blackberry) app.

Pros:
1 - Simple! It was very easy to enter my zip code and have the restaurants pop up with their menus.

2 -Priority Sort You can select if you want information based on Lowest Fat, Carbs or Calories.

3 - FREE! It’s a free app for your iPhone or Blackberry!

Cons:
1 - Chain Restaurants Only The only restaurants that popped up for me were chains, not the great local eateries.

2 - Selection Variation Some of the menus were out of date as far as food selections.

3 - Skipped Restaurants I was looking down the street at a Wendy’s and it did not show up on the list - so not 100% accurate.

Overall: I found this app helpful and because its free I didn’t have to be disappointed when it wasn’t perfect. I’m sure the next versions will continue to be better and more robust. If you travel frequently or find yourself at chain restaurants often, this healthcare & fitness app will help guide you to make a smarter food choice.
You can download it for your iPhone or Blackberry at GoodFoodNearYou.com or at iTunes.
Fit Links: New Web Site and iPhone App Lets You Find Good Food Near You - Health.com Good Food Near You iPhone App - BlissTree.com

<< Find other fitness tips, recipes and other episodes of Fit Life video at WithAmyMac.com >>

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