A Healthy Lifestyle Works

Posts Tagged ‘healthy lifestyle’

Making healthy dishes can be fast, easy and hardly any work to prepare, and that is how I manage to fit healthy meals into my daily lifestyle. It can take just five-ten minutes to prepare a meal using healthy whole foods.

This week I wanted to show the people in the New You healthy lifestyle groups how they could make healthy meals really quickly, even on a busy night, and love the results.

So I invited them all to my home for a cooking demo and a healthy balanced meal. On the menu was four different ways to prepare asparagus, along with two easy ways to have fish and two super simple side dishes (basmati rice and sweet potato). It all started with a wonderful bean spread that took only a few ingredients and 5 minutes to whip up.

Here is what I did for our evening event:

Yummy Bean Spread – Everyone Loved This!
Served with Kashi stone-ground wholegrain crackers as well as Blue Diamond’s nut-thin rice crackers (for those who are gluten intolerant).

1 can Cannellini beans – mashed with a fork (after draining the liquid)
1 Tbsp Olive oil
3 Scallions (or 1 slice red onion) – finely sliced
2 tsp Rosemary – fresh (or sage or thyme)
Salt & pepper

Mix all ingredients together.
Can also add tiny bit of lemon or sherry vinegar.
Can put on top of sliced banquettes – as a cannellini bean crostini.

4 Simple & Easy Ways to Make Asparagus
Rinse asparagus and break off one end to see where the natural break is. Then cut all the other asparagus in the bunch by the same amount. This saves time in having to break each end off.

1. Roasted Asparagus
Line a baking sheet with tin-foil and spray with olive oil from a can. (I used PAM for this)
Lay the bunch of asparagus across the sheet.
Then spray the olive oil again across the asparagus to lightly coat them.
Sprinkle with a mix of salt and thyme. (I used a mortar & pestle to release oil from the thyme)
Broil (or bake at 400 degrees) for about 10 minutes – until starting to shrivel and brown.

2. Steamed Asparagus with Balsamic Vinaigrette
Place the bunch of asparagus into a large frying pan or sauté pan.
Add 1/4 cup of water.
Cover with a lid.
Cook for 3 minutes until the asparagus starts to get a tiny bit soft and the water is gone.
Don’t let it fully cook, or it will quickly get too soft.

Place in a dish and pour balsamic vinaigrette over the asparagus.
(I used Lilly’s balsamic vinaigrette, which you can get at most grocery stores.)

3. Steamed Asparagus with Garlic & Herbs
Same first 5 steps as #2.
Push the asparagus to one side of the pan.
Pour 1 Tbsp of olive oil in the pan where you have created some space.
Add in 1 clove minced garlic (fresh or from a jar)
1 Tbsp minced fresh basil
¼ cup minced fresh parsley
Cook the herbs and garlic in the oil for about a minute or two.
Mix in with the asparagus and remove from heat.

4. Sautéed Asparagus with Onions, Garlic & Herbs
Cut up bunch of asparagus into 1 – 1½ ” pieces.
Heat up frying or sauté pan with 1 Tbsp of olive oil
Sauté the onion and garlic for 1- 2 minutes
Add in the chopped asparagus.
Sprinkle with bit of salt and dried thyme (or any herb you like).
Cook until asparagus gets a bit soft.

Super Simple Sweet Potato Even the Kids will Love

Roasted Sweet Potato “Chips”
Rinse a large sweet potato (or yam) and slice diagonally in ¼” slices.
Line a baking sheet with tin-foil. You can often reuse tin-foil from prior roastings.
Spray with olive oil from a can. (I used PAM for this)
Lay the pieces of sweet potato on the sheet.
Then spray the olive oil again across the slices to lightly coat them.
Sprinkle with a mix of salt and thyme.
Broil (or bake at 400 degrees) for about 10 minutes – until starting to brown on bottom.
You will have to use a spatula to check the bottoms.

A Fish Anyone Can Make
You can broil a lot of different fishes, and for this event I picked up a pre-marinated “cajun” catfish at our local fish store, David’s Fish Market in Salisbury. You can also take a white fish and marinate it yourself.

Line a baking sheet with tin-foil.
Lay the fish pieces on it.
Broil for about 8 minutes – if about ¼-½ ” thick. (5 minutes if thinner)
Turn over and broil for about 4 minutes.
It is done when you can slide your fork all the way through, without any resistance.

This is the same way you can make swordfish. Top with bit of salt, pepper and a seafood rub, and broil for 8 minutes. When you turn it over, you can re-apply the seasonings or not.

How simple was that!

The basmati rice was from a brand called Tilda, which comes in a blue foil bag. You boil 6 cups of water, then add in 1 cup of rice. 10 minutes later, you strain it (pouring the rice and water into a strainer) and then douse with hot water. You get perfect rice that isn’t sticky.

The remaining shrimp dish came from a Williams Sonoma recipe called Shrimp with Wine & Herbs out of their “Food Made Fast: Seafood” cookbook.

Read What the Participants Have to Say
Find out what else the participants have to say about their cooking demo evening with me, when they add their comments to this blog. And please share your own insights about what works for you. It may be just the spark that helps another person reading this blog.

Have a fit and healthy week,
Alice

Food is Getting Easy, Exercising is a Bit Tougher
After two months of doing this program, the harder issue for most people in the groups is doing more exercise, yet they are all making incredible progress and feel they have improved their fitness since starting. What is interesting is that almost everyone feels they have a good handle on portion control, are easily choosing healthier foods and planning balanced meals and snacks. And I would agree looking at their weekly journals. This is one area they are getting down, and yet it was the area most of them felt they had their greatest struggles when applying for the contest. At this point the bingeing, cravings, addictions, over eating, unhealthy choices and imbalanced selections are getting to be a non-issue.

In fact, I’m now encouraging them to stop tracking foods and to go back to tracking hunger levels by type of meal, unless they have occasions when they struggled with balance or over eating of a specific food. Then that is a good time to write out the actual foods involved. Otherwise, I want them to go back to focusing on how they feel and keeping the journaling process very simple. In doing that, they will remain conscious and stick with their new changes easily.

So this week, I had them all share what they were most pleased about in their fitness progress and choices. They shared how much more energy they had, how much better they were feeling and how well they were doing in staying active each week. As important, we heard again and again how motivated they felt to move a bit more during the day, to get out and walk when the weather was so gorgeous and to choose exercising when they normally would have felt too tired to consider it in the past. Across the board, everyone was fairly pleased with their accomplishments and felt they could do even better.

Addressing Exercise Obstacles
Now is the time to put more of the focus on establishing a solid exercise routine and building up aerobic levels. To do that, I addressed the most common types of exercise obstacles and how to deal with them this week. It is easy to judge yourself when you don’t exercise as being bad, lazy or undisciplined. But those are rarely the real cause of lack of movement. Without understand what is really keeping you from exercising you won’t resolve your inactivity.

The 8 reasons for struggling with exercise are the following:

Low Motivation: A common obstacle to exercising is not feeling motivated enough to do it. You won’t be motivated day-in and day-out to exercise if you haven’t identified what it is you want to be able to do or feel as a result of regular aerobic and strengthening activities. Once you have a focus for why you really want to be more fit, then you can focus on finding ways to stay motivated day-to-day. The trick is knowing what fuels your desire to do more, such as looking forward to a fun activity, tracking steps or calories burned and seeing them go up, or seeing progress as you check off your accomplishments on a calendar.

 Low Priority Planning: Not having enough time is really a result of not putting exercise higher in your priorities. Anyone can find time to exercise if it matters enough to them, and if they can find the motivation to stick with it. A way to make this easier to is to find an exercise or a group class you love so much, you will find ways to fit it into your schedule. Another is to look at your calendar for the week and see where you can fit in time for exercise and schedule it.

Too Much, Too Soon: In the excitement of starting a program, when you feel highly motivated to get started, it is easy to overdo it and find yourself giving up because you can’t sustain the pace or because you’ve gotten injured. Try starting off with smaller goals and less intensity, so that you don’t feel so overwhelmed and can experience your ability to succeed in reaching your goals.

Compliance Perfectionism: Feeling you have to measure up to someone else’s expectations or attain perfection in reaching your goals is the fastest way to failing and giving up. No one is perfect, and no one knows better than you as to what you can do each week, what is motivating or how your body is feeling. Instead of trying to comply to unrealistic expectations or someone else’s rules and goals, focus on what you want for yourself, what your body is telling you, and what works to keep you moving and on track.

Inflexible Beliefs: Another way people sabotage exercise is with the belief that doing anything less than x days a week or x number of minutes isn’t worth doing. Any exercise counts, even if it’s for 15 minutes, and the more active you are, no matter what it is, it all adds up. You may have other beliefs about what you need to be wearing, what your significant other will or won’t do to support you, what constitutes as exercise, or countless other requirements that are keeping you from being active and fit. Stop and identify what your “excuses” are and see if you can change your beliefs so you can achieve success.

Emotional Rebellion: Most people think emotions are just tied to food, but they also impact exercising. Think about it; you do have feelings about exercising, and if you’ve had bad experiences or anxiety about exercise than this can impact your behavior. If you are resistant or ambivalent towards exercise, become curious (without any judgment) about how you feel about exercise and why that is. Most likely you will find there are good reasons for your feelings, and once you acknowledge and validate them, you can start to look into ways of exercising that can address these feelings. For example, maybe you were called a klutz in grade school and have an aversion to gym-based exercise. Maybe you were forced to exercise and hated it. Maybe you had a bad experience with a trainer or fitness program. Are there other ways of being active that you feel confident about, or can you find a class that interests you that offers a safe environment for becoming proficient?

Derailment Resistance: There is nothing worse than finding yourself derailed from your fitness routine and struggling to get restarted after an illness, injury, vacation or period of just not wanting to do it. Once you get derailed it can seem too hard to get re-motivated again to exercise, and often this short period of non-exercise can turn into months or years of inactivity. An easy way to get restarted is by taking it slow and setting very low goals the first week or so.

Extreme Associations: If you’ve participated in extreme fitness programs and boot camps that you didn’t enjoy or that left you with an injury or bad taste in your mouth, you may be dealing with conflicting beliefs and emotions around exercise. On the one hand, you may believe that anything less than extreme fitness isn’t worth doing because of the quick results, and on the other hand you may cringe at the thought of signing up for another program. It is better to choose exercise options that you find motivating, enjoyable enough to sustain, and fit your personality. The majority do best starting off with baby steps and doing just one small thing at first, which easily leads to doing more because it feels good, it boosts your confidence and it motivates you to stretch yourself further.

To create a regular exercise routine in your life, pay attention to what feels best to you, what motivates you and what is really getting in the way of being consistent. We are all different, and our reasons for not exercising are all valid. Instead of beating yourself if you find you can’t quite get moving, respect that you have a good reason and try to understand what you really need to do to get active and to develop a consistent exercise lifestyle.

Read What the Participants Have to Say
Find out what the contestants have to say about what gets in the way of their fitness goals and how they are learning to address them, which they usually add the Monday after this post goes live. Please feel free to add your own comments as you follow along.

To participate on your own or in a group, check out the contest website for details and tools at www.aHealthyLifestyleWorks.com/contest.

Have a fit and healthy week,
Alice

To kick off our sessions this week, I asked everyone to share what it was like to get in touch with their fullness the past week and to share in what way they had success in reaching their other goal. In addition to the goal of tracking fullness, each person had set a second goal for themselves in another area of health or fitness improvement.

Focusing on Fullness Leads to Insights and Changes
Everyone had a different experience in becoming aware of when they got full and what fullness felt like to them. For some, they weren’t really sure when it was they got full. It felt abstract and wasn’t as simple as one would think to get in touch with fullness. For others, they realized fullness was too familiar a feeling but knowing the stages of becoming full was less easy to identify.

Some said the awareness of becoming full helped them to cut back on what they were eating, and for the first time it was effortless to eat less. Just being aware changed their behavior around overeating. A number of them also recognized that they could cut back their portions by giving themselves smaller amounts to begin with (like ½ a sandwich, using smaller bowls or plates, serving less food), knowing they could always go and get more when they got hungry again. They then tried that and found they felt so much better. There were a few people who were inspired to change other behaviors related to their eating, such as cutting back the amount of wine they were drinking or stopping before they ate out of emotional reasons. What is amazing is that they did all this effortlessly, simply by observing how they felt, and that was my point. No one forced them to change; they wanted to make changes because it felt better.

Read more about their insights about fullness.

Tools to Stay Conscious around Food
To help everyone remain conscious while they ate, I introduced them to the hunger scale that you see here. This is a visual gauge to help them notice the levels of hunger they feel whenever they eat. I also introduced them to a Discovery Food Journal, which is available on the contest website for anyone to download. This journal is nothing like the food journals they had seen before. Instead of having them track the foods they eat, I asked them to track each meal and snack by identifying where they were on the hunger scale each time they began and stopped eating. They also have a place to observe any thoughts or feelings that might arise when they eat, as well as any new insights or strategies they come up with.

Having a Small Success Leads to Greater Motivation
Next the participants shared what went well in reaching the goals they set for themselves in one other area of improvement they are working on. I specifically asked them to focus on their successes, so they could see what they had achieved rather than focusing on what they hadn’t accomplished. By focusing on success, you build your self-confidence in your ability to succeed and you increase your motivation to do more. And that is just what they experienced.

Read more about what they did and what they learned.

See What the Participants Have to Say
Find out what the group participants have to say about their own personal experience by viewing the comments to this post. Please feel free to add your own comments as you follow along.

To make your own changes and participate on your own or in a group, check out the contest website for details and tool.

Have a healthy and active week,
Alice

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