Diet and Nutrition

Wordless Wednesday: Skewed Body Image

young girl measuring waist

How do our skewed views of healthy body size influence young girls?

Posted on February 11, 2024 by Natalie K

The Sweet Taste of Truvia is All-Natural

Truvia is the newest, zero-calories, natural sweetener to hit the market. Truvia was developed by Cargill and Coca-Cola. “Sweetness born from a leaf, not in a lab,” they say about the product. Truvia is made from the stevia plant, which is a native plant of South America. The stevia plant is not new and has been used as a sweetener in South America and Japan for centuries. However, in the US, thus far stevia has only been sold as a dietary supplement due to FDA concerns. The ingredient list of Truvia includes: Rebiana, Erythritol, and natural flavors.

  • Ribana portion comes from the sweet leaf of the stevia plant. These leaves are picked, dried, then submerged into water, which unlocks the sweetness portion and is then purified.
  • Erythritol is a naturally occurring fermented sugar alcohol (found in grapes and pears). (more…)
Posted on February 10, 2024 by Kinsey

Healthy Dinner for your Honey this Valentine’s day

Instead of fighting the crowds at an over-priced restaurant this Valentine’s day, opt to cook the one you love a healthy, romantic dinner. By cooking at home you will cut back on money, calories and find personal time together.

We’ve got hundreds of heart-healthy recipes you can choose from to make a romantic meal at home. Or, try the Warm Winter Salad, Roasted Pecan Salmon, and Sauteed Pear Sundaes recipes posted here.

Lover’s Warm Winter Salad

  • 8 ounces boneless, skinless chicken breast, trimmed of fat
  • 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
  • 1 pear, sliced
  • 1 small shallot, minced
  • 3 tablespoons sherry vinegar (more…)
Posted on February 9, 2024 by Kinsey

A Love Worth Celebrating

February tends to be a month focused on celebrating love. Often those who are not in a romantic relationship can feel that they are missing out on important emotional support and nurturing. Everyone needs emotional support; however, research has shown that having regular social interaction with one or more people is more important than the definition or type of relationship you share. Your greatest support and most meaningful relationship may be a relative or friend, rather than a significant other.

They type of relationship does not matter as much as the depth. You need people in your life with whom you can discuss your problems and to whom you can confess your secrets. It is important to have quality relationships, surrounding yourself with people who make a positive impact. It has been said that you are the average of the five people with whom you spend the most time. When you consider the five people with whom you have the most interaction, are they people that you wish to emulate? (more…)

Posted on February 7, 2024 by Brooke Randolph

Burning Calories is Child’s Play

Do you ever envy your children’s endless energy to run, jump, skip and play? As the spring weather starts to warm, take advantage of all the calorie-burning ability of their favorite games. You’ll get some quality playtime with the kids, reminisce about your own childhood, and burn some extra calories.

hopscotchJumping Rope = 150 calories/15 minutes of moderate intensity.

Hopscotch = 75 calories/15 minutes

Roller Skating = 209 calories/30 minutes

Dancing = 135 calories/30 minutes

Playing Catch = 75 calories/30 minutes

Jumping Jacks = 120 calories/15 minutes

Riding Bikes = 239 calories/30 minutes of moderate intensity, about 12 mph.

Hula Hooping = 100 calories/10 minutes

Flag Football = 239 calories/30 minutes

Frisbee = 90 calories/30 minutes

Don’t miss an opportunity to join a dodgeball game, hide-and-seek, or chasing the dog around the yard. The calories burned add up to lost weight and gaining some fresh air!

Posted on February 7, 2024 by Natalie K

5 Things to Remove from Your Diet Today

Store-bought cupcakes are guaranteed to have these five unhealthy ingredients.

Everyone from Biggest Loser trainers to Dr. Oz and less famous nutritionists will urge you to remove these five food ingredients from your diet. Today. Making a habit of reading food labels can make a meaningful difference in your weight loss efforts.

Know what is in your food, and make a conscious effort to cut out these ingredients:

1. High Fructose Corn Syrup – A man-made sweetner with zero nutritional value. The list without HFCS is shorter, but a few examples include soda, fruit juice, cereal, condiments, cookies, pickles and even cough syrup.

2. Sugar – A cup of white granulated sugar has 774 Calories. You’d have to walk for 90 minutes or swim for an hour to burn that off. Don’t burn it off? It converts to fat. (more…)

Posted on February 6, 2024 by Natalie K

Betting on Diets the New Trend

diet moneyFinding a partner or a social way of losing weight is often touted as one of the most effective ways to shed pounds. A few years ago Biggest Loser inspired similar weight loss challenges across the country, but now people are upping the ante. Dieters want friends and colleagues to put their money where their waist is.

“Diet betting is definitely becoming more popular among friends, relatives and co-workers,” Joy Bauer, author of Joy’s Life Diet, told the New York Times. “It makes life easier if everyone around you is cutting calories, and the amicable competition keeps people driven.”

For Samwoo Ee, the first bet was just a warm-up. (more…)

Posted on February 5, 2024 by Natalie K

Biggest Loser Diet Under the Microscope

No white flour. No white sugar. No butter. Those are the three really basic rules of eating at the Biggest Loser ranch, where contestants must prepare their own meals. “There’s no chef whipping up spa cuisine,” said Ed Brantley to the New York Times, in a story featuring the Biggest Loser diet.

Biggest Loser's Ed and Vicky try healthy recipes prepared by fellow contestants.

Biggest Loser's Ed and Vicky (center) try healthy recipes prepared by fellow contestants.

If you watch the show regularly, you know that what the contestants eat isn’t as much a part of the storyline as is the drama unfolding on the ranch. This story really shows what it’s like for the contestants to immediately go from eating anything they want at home, primarily greasy and sweet foods, to extreme workouts and a healthy, clean diet. “The food that you’re used to, you can’t have, and the food you can have, you do not want,” Vicky Vilcan of Biggest Loser 6 told the Times.

The story also points out that an underlying cause of obesity in America is our habit of dining out. It’s in that setting that we cannot control the fat or calories in our food, where preparing meals at home gives us complete control. Since 1965, women have gone from spending 13 hours per week cooking meals to the meager 30 minutes per day now, and in that time the number of overweight women has more than doubled, to 65 percent. Biggest Loser cookbooks author Devin Alexander pointed out that “Twenty minutes in the kitchen will save you three hours on the StairMaster.”

Posted on February 4, 2024 by Natalie K

Trainer Jessie’s DietTribe Meal Plan

For those of you who have been watching Lifetime’s new reality show DietTribe, which features five close friends’ weight loss journey, you may have been amazed at how quickly most of the girls have made their 30-pound weight loss goal a few weeks shy of their deadline.

Jessie Pavelka from DietTribe

Jessie Pavelka from DietTribe

So how did they do it?

One of the key features with the DietTribe’s success has been their diet. With the stringent but encouraging support of the their trainer, Jessie Pavelka, the ladies have managed to drop some serious pounds.

Here is  Jessie’s plan for eating less, eating healthy while still staying satisfied. His guidelines are fairly straight-forward making it easy for you to adopt some of his effective strategies into your own eating routine.

1) Clean Eating: Only consume foods that are whole foods and are preferably organic. Fruits, veggies, lean cuts of protein, and whole grains comprise the staples of the DietTribe diet. The women shun all processed and pre-made foods, which tend to be high in fat, sodium, and sugar. (more…)

Posted on February 4, 2024 by heather

15 Sneaky Vegetable Tips

One of life’s epic struggles is eating vegetables. Having once had a limited list of vegetables I would eat, I now can’t imagine not having my refrigerator stocked with colorful produce. Whether it’s yourself or your kids, you simply have to start making yourself try different vegetables. Luckily, there are a variety of cooking and serving methods that can ease you in to eating more.

The thing is, like them or not, you can’t cut them out of your diet if you plan on eating healthily and/or losing weight. They are the most nutritious foods on Earth, and provide generous amounts of antioxidants, fiber, vitamins and minerals. That’s why you want to eat a variety of vegetable colors in about 3-5 servings per day. A portion size of vegetables is about the size of a baseball.

This list from WebMD introduces 15 tips and tricks that will certainly convert veggie haters to veggie lovers.

  1. Hide veggies you kind of like in dishes you love. For example, add peppers or mushrooms to an omelet or layer fresh spinach leaves in lasagna.
  2. Add to soup. When making homemade soup, fill with your favorite veggies. Or, bolster the veggie content of reduced-sodium soups by adding more carrots, green beans or edamame. (more…)
Posted on February 3, 2024 by Natalie K

Cut Calories, Boost Your Memory

Cutting calories may do more than just trim your waistline. A new study suggests that cutting calories may boost your memory as well.measuring waist

“Even though the number of subjects in the study was not really high, they had really high, statistically significant improvements in their performance on the memory test,” says Mark P. Mattson, a senior investigator at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) in Bethesda, Maryland. (more…)

Posted on February 2, 2024 by Jason