Diet and Nutrition

Most Sensible Frozen Foods for Women

The freezer section in your grocery store can be the ultimate diet disaster. Filled with ice cream, deep dish pizzas, tater tots and french toast, heading to the freezer section when you’re hungry is a risky venture. But thanks to our friends at Women’s Health magazine and ABCNews.com, they scoured our supermarket freezers for the best picks in frozen foods for women.

They broke the list down into categories: pizzas, dinners, side dishes, ice cream and more. Here are their picks that I agreed with and a few more that I thought should have made the cut.

1) Skinny Cow Ice Cream Cones: The diet experts at ABC got this one right. Skinny Cow ice cream makers have hit the mark on making creamy delicious frozen treats with a fraction of the calories and fat as their full-fat counterparts. Their vanilla cone with caramel ribbons is divine for your lips and hips. One cone comes in at 150 calories and just 4 grams of fat. (more…)

Posted on January 15, 2024 by heather

Know Your Portion Sizes

Portion control and knowing what a portion or serving size looks like is so essential for not only losing weight, but also maintaining your weight. Did you know that there are some basic ways that you can remember what a portion size looks like, or be able to assess how many portions you are about to eat? Too often we eat without measuring, therefore we might think we are eating sensibly, but in actuality we are taking in double or even triple the serving size. Below is a fun and easy guide to refer to for identifying one serving!

Use these comparisons to keep your portions in check. (Nestle.com)

A baseball or size of your fist- would be one serving of vegetables or fruit
Tennis ball- measures to about ½ cup of food (for example, ½ cup ice cream) (more…)

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Kinsey

Recipes for Wonderful Wonton Wrappers

Roni from RonisWeigh is our guest blogger for January. You’ll recall she recently took runner-up for Best Diet Blog and her site GreenLiteBites won Best Healthy Recipe site category in our first Diet Site Awards. Today, Roni shares some of her original healthy and scrumptious recipes.

Wonton Pizza Bites by Roni

I admit it. I’m a appetizer-holic. I love them. From the first bite of the cheesy, greasy mozzarella stick to the last salty crispy crunch of stuffed potatoes skins, I always thought appetizers were actually better then the meals themselves. I’d routinely get the “sampler” at Denny’s and don’t get me started about the recent tapas craze here in Baltimore.

So what’s a girl to do? Is it possible to live a healthier slimmer life and still get in my finger food fix?

Of course it is! (more…)

Posted on January 13, 2024 by GuestBlogger

Food Find: Kahiki’s Healthy and Lo-Calorie Egg Rolls

Who doesn’t love a crispy egg roll before they dig into their cashew chicken? But did you know that the average egg roll at your favorite Chinese restaurant can have almost 400 calories and up to 16 grams of fat?

Recently, I had the chance to sample Kahiki Food’s egg rolls. Not only are they yummy, but their egg rolls contain just a fraction of the calories that most restaurant egg rolls do. The veggie egg roll comes in at 70 calories, the chicken has 80 calories and their pork and shrimp combo comes in at a mere 100 calories!

And these aren’t mini egg rolls either. They are your average-sized egg roll packed with tons of veggies, like cabbage, carrots and water chestnuts with a spicy peppery flavor and a crispy egg roll crust. And they are the first microwaveable egg rolls that retain their crunchy crust even after they are nuked. (more…)

Posted on January 12, 2024 by heather

Manage Stress with Simple Relaxation Techniques

Stress is the essence of growth (eustress), but constant stress is dangerous to your health (distress). Balancing growth, health and stress is both the definition of stress management and how we achieve our goals.

Stress management can be defined as avoiding unnecessary stressors, dealing with situations as they arise, and recovering from the adrenaline response. In training for a marathon, one would run a little each day, slowly building endurance and speed. Each day one would also recover and rest after the run. It is in recovery from spending energy that our body gains a greater capacity. If you ran until you fell over your first time out, you would not be able to do much of anything for days. If you never run, then your ability to run will remain low. If each day you push yourself just beyond your comfort zone and allow yourself to recover, you will stress yourself to high achievements. It is the same whether you are running, weight lifting, or creating a new habit; a change is a stressor. (more…)

Posted on January 11, 2024 by Brooke Randolph

Lift Winter Blues with Yoga

Now that the holidays are over, the humdrum of winter is slowly setting in. For many, this time of year is affected by a seasonal mood disorder for Seasonal Affective Disorder, which is a kind of depression that waxes when the days become shorter and wanes as they grow longer.

Yoga has numerous health benefits with one of the most important being the ability to center your mood and find balance in your emotions and mental state. If you feel the heaviness of winter coming on, add a few uplifting and heart-opening yoga postures to your daily routine. The following asanas (postures) focus on breathing vital prana into our heart in order to lift our spirits and energize the flow of energy that circulates in and out of our body’s center. (more…)

Posted on January 11, 2024 by heather

Have Your Kale and Eat it, too!

Green leafy vegetables are on the top of most lists for the foods you should eat because they are nutrient dense and low in calories. The beautiful leaves of the kale plant provide an earthy flavor and more nutritional value for fewer calories than almost any other food around. Kale is packed with vitamins A, C, and K, fiber (1 cup of kale provides 10.4 percent of daily value of fiber), folate, potassium, magnesium, iron, and phytochemicals/phytonutrients. Although kale can be found in markets year round, it is in season from the middle of winter through the beginning of spring. This is when it has the sweetest taste.

How do you serve kale?

Before cooking kale, be sure to remove and discard the plant’s tough stalk center. Even without the stalks, kale will be chewy. Cooking it thoroughly is necessary to keep the kale from being too chewy. (more…)

Posted on January 10, 2024 by Kinsey

Martha’s Vineyard Diet Most Expensive, NutriSystem Most Affordable

A recent article by Forbes magazine asked the question “How much is your diet costing you?” and took a close look at seven of the most popular weight loss programs. They figured out how much these plans set you back during your first week of testing them. The presumption is that your first is your most expensive since you have to buy the food, pay any membership costs, or purchase a device like a juicer.

The results may surprise you.

The study looked at the following diets: NutriSystem, 5-Factor Diet, Zone diet, Abs Diet, South Beach Diet, Martha’s Vineyard Diet Detox and Weight Watchers.

At first glance, you may think that the most restrictive of the diets, like Martha’s Vineyard Diet which consumes the least amount of food, would come in as the least expensive. But Forbes reported that this diet ranked up just as high in dollars for your first week as Weight Watchers, namely about $380. (more…)

Posted on January 9, 2024 by heather

10 Foods You Should Never Eat

Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of saying you should completely avoid a food or listing foods in a good or bad list. I think it’s more important to practice moderation, with an understanding that sometimes moderation means once a week, but with other foods it should mean once a month. However, there are a few foods that I personally tend to avoid 100% of the time because they provide little-to-no nutritional value, or the fat/calorie component exceeds any potential positives of the food.

My list of foods to avoid include:

Chicken Pot Pies. The flaky pastry and meat-filled center sounds good and comforting, but you are doing more harm then good when eating these. Most of the time you will see that these pot pies have around 500 calories and 10 grams of fat, but after looking closer you will see that is for only half of the pie. So for those of you who would normally eat the whole thing, you’re consuming ~1000 calories and 20g of fat! (more…)

Posted on January 9, 2024 by Kinsey

Sasha and Malia Obama’s Healthy School Lunch Menu

obamas

The young daughters of President-Elect Barack Obama will be eating lunches that are healthy and organic at their new school Sidwell-Friends. The lunch menu should be the envy of school cafeterias nationwide. Not only is the food nutritious, it’s stuff kids will actually eat and enjoy. The Obamas are known for eating a lean diet, so it’s possible the quality of food their daughters would be served during the day played a part in their decision.

Sasha Obama, the younger daughter, attends the lower school, where menu items this week included:

Snacks like zucchini bread or apples and cheese
French Dip with Au Jus (more…)

Posted on January 8, 2024 by Natalie K

5 Healthiest and Budget-Friendly Breakfast Foods

Recent studies show that eating breakfast does keep you healthy and slim. According to National Weight Control Registry, individuals who lost 30 or more pounds and kept it off for one year or longer had something in common: they all ate breakfast.

The reason is that breakfast prevents our bodies and minds from crossing over into the dangerous zone of starvation mode. When that kicks in, our bodies don’t metabolize food efficiently and we end up devouring everything in sight. However, picking up breakfast at your favorite java joint or running through the drive-thru may hamper your weight loss efforts and put a dent in your wallet.

Since saving money is on everyone’s minds these days, as well as keeping true to our New Year’s resolutions of healthy eating, weight loss and fitness, here is a list of the top five best breakfast picks that will keep you well-fueled and on your way to your best you! (more…)

Posted on January 8, 2024 by heather

Diet and Nutrition

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