Eating out needn’t derail your efforts to eat well and healthily

•    Order water for the table. Drink between courses to help fill you up
•    Order plain bread and butter or olive oil separately. Pizza and herb breads have the fat added
•    Creamy sauces add large quantities of fat
•    Order extra vegetables for bulk and more nutrients
•    Fresh fruit, sorbet or a hot drink with biscotti make good choices for dessert
•    Trim hot chocolate  will fix the chocolate craving with fewer calories that black forest gataux

Bon Appetite,

Nancy

If you are training for weight loss, do your weight training prior to your cardio vascular workout. The weight training will utilise most of your glycogen stores and so that by the time you start on your aerobic training most of the calories you burn in your workout will come form your fat stores.

Happy training,

Yours in Health,

Nancy

Pasta Salad
Pasta salads are delicious. Great for light easy, summer cooking. To maximize their flavour make sure you dress the pasta as soon as it is cooked while it is still hot. Try substituting fresh basil if it isn’t available, with dill, mint, oregano, or parsley.
For 8-10 servings:
Pasta:
2 pkts of brown rice pasta and vegetable pasta
Dressing:
2 large cloves garlic
1 tsp coarse mustard
2 Tbsp parmesan cheese
8-10 leaves fresh basil (or other fresh herbs)
1 tsp salt and pepper to taste
½ cup light Best Food mayonnaise
2 Tbsp pineapple juice with touch of cinnamon
Salad:
2 stalks celery, finely diced
1 red pepper finely diced
2 spring onions finely diced
½ cup toasted sesame seeds
Tinned pineapple pieces 125 g (unsweetened)
Boil the pasta as per the packet directions, until tender. ***
While the pasta is cooking make the dressing by pureeing the ingredients until smooth.
Drain the cooked pasta and put in a salad bowl and immediately toss the dressing through the pasta while it is still hot.
Allow to cool then toss the rest of the salad ingredients with the pasta.
*** Tip: Cook the pasta until just al dente; brown rice pasta will disintegrate if over-cooked.

To eat more healthily start by substituting healthier ingredients in your cooking, but keeping to tried and true recipes your family love. If they are particularly fussy eaters they may complain at first. Persevere though and before you know it they will eating it up, just as they did before.

In the recipe above I’ve exchanged plain old white wheat pasta with brown rice pasta, for two reasons. First, whole grains provide better nutritional value than processed grains. Second wheat based foods so predominate in the western diet that we miss out on the nutrients present in other grains, and many people have allergies to wheat and other gluten containing foods, so it’s a good idea to find creative ways of getting other grains into our diet. As we age too our bodies lose their ability to metabolise processed gluten containing grains well and this can cause a host of health challenges from easy weight gain to a tendency towards diabetes. Take home message, use whole grains, and vary them.

To reduce the number of calories in a recipe you can substitute ‘lite’ varieties of dressings as I’ve done here and help your cause of weight loss if that’s an issue for you or your family. If using canned fruit in a recipe go for an unsweetened variety for the same reason.

Using fresh herbs in your cooking as I’ve done here will increase flavour and nutritional value, because of the enzymes present in fresh produce verses cooked, canned or dried, all helping us toward our goal of optimum nutrition for better living.

The recipe above is contained in our nutrition book for more information on our products, go to www.flexibilityplus.com

Bon Appetite,
Yours in Health,
Nancy

•    Our age in years and our age according to the way our body behaves can be one and the same or two different things
•    This matters because if our body behaves much older than our age in years this doesn’t bode well for our future health

Certain biological markers such as blood pressure, heart rate and pulse, blood sugar levels, hormonal levels, cholesterol levels, bone density, kidney and liver function can help identify our true biological age. For example if you 48 years old with a blood pressure of 117/ 76 you could be said to have the blood pressure of someone in their early 20s. Similarly if you are in your 30’s and have a blood pressure level of 140 / 90 you would be considered much older than your age in regards to blood pressure. In fact a 35 year old friend of a fellow personal trainer came in to her gym to train. He was some what over weight and was keen to shed some the extra pounds. So began an assessment with him, but by the end of the warm up he was perspiring quite profusely and feeling unwell, her gut told her something was a miss, she took his blood pressure and it was off the charts even though he had been cleared to exercise previously.

She called an ambulance immediately, he was rushed to hospital and was put on blood pressure medication to stabilise his condition. According to his doctor would need them for the rest of his life. The blood pressure rise he experiences came on with out warning, most likely as a result of unusual stress he was experiencing at the time. The situation came as great shock to my colleague who would not have suspected blood pressure as high as this man had in someone his age. He was lucky to have been in the gym that day undergoing an assessment where it was picked up otherwise he could have easily collapsed somewhere and had a heart attack, possibly fatal.

Keeping a healthy weight by following a regular exercise routine and a healthy diet has been proven by the research to add years to your life and life to your years. In our system at flexibilityplus.com we teach you the key principles of optimal nutrition and provide a broad range of exercises to keep every part of your body flexible and strong. Go to www.flexibilityplus.com to learn more so your age in years can match the age  your body is behaving or better!

Cheers,

Nancy

In his book I Can Make You Thin Psychologist Paul McKenna outlines 4 easy weight loss tips I wanted to share here and elaborate on a little.

1.    Eat only when physically hungry.  Learn to listen to your body’s cues about hunger and differentiate between peckish, slightly hungry, hungry, very hungry, ravenous, and faint with hunger. Aim to eat when you are some where in the middle of that range. Also learn to differentiate between physical hunger and emotional hunger. Here are a couple of easy clues that can help. First emotional hunger comes on as a sudden craving and is usually unsatisfied by food. Physical hunger comes on gradually. Second the brain’s signal to the body for thirst and hunger are identical. To tell what your body is saying to you, have a glass of water or two before eating. If you still feel hungry eat, if not then the message being communicated was just “Man I was parched! “
2.    When you are physically hungry, eat what you want: Whether it’s  a crsip cool salad, a crunchy fresh sweet juicy apple, hot soup and a chunk of crusty fresh bread with lashings of butter , creamy mashed potatoes , a bowl of delicious Rojan Gosh, Chilli Con Carne, or Chicken Chow Mein, a meat pie or Black Forest Gateau, if that’s what you’d like and you have it on hand go for it.
3.    Enjoy EVERY  morsel : Pay close attention to every bite, slow down, chew well ( digestion begins in the mouth) and eat with healthy relish
4.    Stop when you have had enough: Give up being one of the clean your plate brigade. If you are full save the left overs for later, if eating out ask for a doggy bag. Differentiate between: a) still hungry, b)satisfied, c)full, d) stuffed . Aim for some where between b and c.

Don’t worry that you will endlessly indulge your cravings at the expense of a healthy balanced diet, if you follow these principles your diet will even out. Your body will tell after the third day in a row of Death by Chocolate Cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner that it has had enough of that and would like something else thank you.

For help overcoming dependence on certain foods and other advanced behaviour modification techniques check out Paul’s CD I Can Make you Thin, and for great info on healthy food choices and delicious recipes, see our products on our web site www.flexibilityplus.com.

Yours In Health,

Nancy

We’ve talked about the benefits of physical fitness for women but what about men? Well, men have just as much to gain as women do from taking up an exercise programme. Natural inertia, bad habits and the belief that they’ll never get back to the fighting form they enjoyed in their youth often keep them back. Any man reading this who falls into this category should take heart. One study showed that the effects of a sedentary lifestyle of thirty years duration was actually reversed in six months, after a group of middle aged men took up an exercise programme. The weight of the trial subjects had increase by 25 percent their body fat had doubled and their aerobic capacity had decreased by 11 percent over thirty years of being couch potatoes. Despite all that, in six months they were able to achieve the same degree of cardiovascular fitness they had enjoyed as twenty year olds, which proves it’s never too late start an exercise programme.

The gains of fitness can be achieved with out fanatical and intense activity. One study at the University of Colorado found that after a three month exercise period consisted mainly of walking a study of groups of sedentary men with an average age of fifty three had improved to a state comparable to that of men who had exercised for years. Walking is a great way to increase our cardio vascular fitness it is a way to connect the inner and outer worlds, to give time for the evolution of thought without being lost in one’s thoughts it is a way to connect to those around us in a world fast becoming disconnected. Walking even connects us to our history as a species.

Walking in the sunshine has the added benefit of improving bone strength both from doing weight bearing exercise and the opportunity to create vitamin D on the surface of our skins that does our bones a world of good because of its involvement in calcium metabolism.

Walking by ocean or waterfall or after a rainstorm has the added benefit of boosting mood due to al the negatively charged particles in the air.

So do your whole being a favour and done those walking shoes

See you on the trail

Nancy

In our last post we spoke about weight loss and the importance of keeping blood sugar levels stable by consuming small frequent meals which included complex carbohydrates especially but not exclusively non starchy fruit and vegetables, and whole grains. Other foods to be included in a weight loss programme are:
•    Lean protein like soy, other beans, low fat dairy products, and moderate amounts of lean meat poultry and eggs.
•    You should also consume healthy fats such as avocado, and cold pressed oils, for example, flax seed oil, extra virgin olive oil, nuts and seeds, fish liver oils and fatty fish.
•    “The balance of carbohydrate, fat, and protein in each meal makes a big difference to how your blood sugar rises and how you are able to burn fat”. The aim as we’ve said earlier is to keep blood sugar and insulin production on an even keel
•    In general aim to have an equal portion of carbohydrates and protein at each meal. Include non starchy vegetables and fruit in two of  these meals
•    Eat 5-6 small meals of whole foods  a day instead of three large meals
•    Divide your plate so one third is made up starch, the other of protein, and two thirds of vegetables
•    Keep portion sizes reasonable eg. Palm or fist size for carbohydrates and protein and thumb size for fats
•    A sample meal might consist of : salmon, brown rice, broccoli, and raw vegetable salad with and olive oil and lemon juice dressing
•    A snack could include a piece of an apple a dozen almonds or equal amount of sunflower seeds

All the best

Nancy

Exercise revs up our metabolism (i.e. the way our bodies utilise the energy we gain from food) enabling us to stay lean. Eating certain foods also helps us lose weight and stay lean. In order to lose weight we need to program our bodies to become fat burners instead of fat storers.

Glucose, the end product of digestion and the body’s preferred fuel source is removed from the blood by the hormone insulin, and delivered to the body’s cells where it is used for energy.

If we frequently consume foods that release their sugars into the blood stream quickly (for example, white flour products, sugar, white rice) and do so to excess, we produce a lot of insulin to deal with the onslaught and our blood sugar spikes, then  drops dramatically. When blood sugar spikes the excess sugar is put into storage as fat, when it drops we feel wobbly and lethargic.

To burn fat and stay lean we need to keep our blood sugar even.  Foods that release their sugars slowly into the blood stream, and eaten frequently, in small amounts at a time, achieve this.

Complex carbohydrate foods contain slow releasing sugars. The ones that are the most beneficial to maintain leanness are those which have a medium to low glycemic index and a medium to low glycemic load, as these carbohydrates have the least adverse influence on blood sugar  . These include non starchy vegetables, most fruit (exceptions would be bananas, raisins and mangos), oats, barley, whole meal pasta, whole rye bread, whole wheat bread, beans.

These carbohydrates contain as well water and fibre which are also important for staying lean.

Until next time, think “complex!”

Nancy