Here Come the Holidays...There Goes my Waistline

The holiday season is upon us once again, and it’s time to celebrate with family and friends. Unfortunately, for many it also becomes a time for over-eating and weight gain.  I know many people struggle with this, including me, so I am putting together Healthy Holiday Tips for a nutrition talk that I am doing next week to a group of fabulous women.  I’m so excited about helping these ladies enjoy the holidays without over indulging or feeling guilty, that I’d like to share a few of my tips here with you!  The holidays don't have to mean weight gain. Focus on a healthy balance of food, activity, and fun.  By implementing a few simple tips that I am going to share with you, you can stay healthy through the holiday season.

Healthy Holiday Tips

1.  Eat regular meals!  Skipping meals can lead to overeating.

• Eat before you go to holiday parties.  Eat a healthy meal or snack with protein, veggies, and healthy fat.  This way, you’ll only be tempted to lightly graze on the goodies on the buffet table. 
• Bring a healthy snack choice to the party, such as a veggie platter, fruit salad, or your favorite vegetable dish, so you’re guaranteed to have a healthy option. 
• Eat a protein packed breakfast. Set yourself up for success by getting a healthy dose of protein in the morning, as this has been shown to prevent overeating later in the day.

2.  No guilt!  Enjoy your favorite holiday dishes in moderation. 

• Pumpkin pie, eggnog, and stuffing only come once a year.  Enjoy a piece of pumpkin pie and a small helping of stuffing.
• Choose your indulgences wisely.  Instead of wasting calories on foods that you can have any time of year, pick items that are truly special and unique to the season, like your mother’s sweet potato pudding. 
• If you overeat at one meal go light on the next. It takes 500 calories per day (or 3,500 calories per week) above your normal/maintenance consumption to gain one pound. It is impossible to gain weight from one piece of pie!
• Be realistic.  Don’t attempt to lose weight during the holiday season, but to maintain. 

3.  Celebrate the season in non-food ways.  Often times the holidays are associated with food, beverages, and treats.  Take the focus off food and remember the reason for the season, to be with family and friends.

• Enjoy company: Plan group activities with family and friends that aren’t all about food. Walk on the beach or in the park with the family, hike with friends, or take time to decorate with your special someone. 
• Turn candy and cookie making time into non-edible projects like making wreaths, dough art decorations, or creating a floral centerpiece.  Try serving a holiday meal to the community, playing games or going on a walking tour of decorated homes.

These are just a few of my Healthy Holiday tips that I will be sharing at my nutrition talk next week.  I am getting excited to share this information with the ladies.  If you’d like to learn more about staying healthy during the holidays, or would like to know more about my nutrition talks, send me a message and we can set up a time to chat.  Your first consultation is absolutely free!

CrossFit Zen

Okay, it sounds like an oxymoron, I know, but this is the philosophy of my approach to CrossFit I have created for myself.  CrossFit is known to be very intense and intimidating, where beefy specimens throw around ridiculous amounts of weight and are highly competitive with one another.  Well, this may be true for some CrossFit affiliates, and it could possibly be true for the CrossFit box I attend.  However, I have decided to create my own approach to CrossFit.  I love the workouts, the personal attention, and the community that come along with CrossFit.  All I have to do is show up and I see friendly faces and they tell me what to do.  And since I love it so much, I want to be able to participate for as long as I possibly can.  Like all healthy relationships in life: everything in moderation.

I have changed my approach to CrossFit over the years.  I started in January of 2012 with my two good friends, Mary and Anna.  We would have a blast learning the new movements, laughing at our lack of knowledge, and celebrating a 25# PR for our overhead squat!

At the time, I was also running and paddling so I had a lot of other activities that I partook in, and would frequent the box about two times a week.

Flash forward to January 2013 where after cursing my last marathon and telling myself, “I’d rather be crossfitting” for 26 miles, my participation in running faded, and I started attending CrossFit more frequently.  This is when I drank the cool aid, folks.  You’re probably thinking, “I was right!  CrossFit is a cult.”  Not so fast.

I was deep into CrossFit and was sad on my rest days when I didn’t make an appearance at the box.  I was recording lift weights and WOD times and attempting to increase my PRs.  I joined the Barbell Club where we worked on strength and power lifting.  I had a group of people I would train with and compete with.  Along with heavy lifting and constant high-intensity competition came aches and pains, and I started getting pain in my wrists and shoulders.  I was always comparing my workout score or my lift weights to other people.  And after a while, this exciting, encouraging, and enjoyable became a place where I would walk out unhappy and frustrated with myself.  Why was this happening?  I used to love this place.  It would give me so much joy and I would leave in good spirits.

When I took a look, I noticed that I was not following my intentions of why I love CrossFit.  I didn’t join CrossFit to be super competitive or to be an elite athlete.  No, I joined because I enjoyed the workouts, I loved the community, and I got stronger doing it.  A total win-win!  I had gotten caught up in the competition of it all and started comparing myself to other members.  It’s not fun to compare yourself to other people, and in fact, it can be down right miserable. 

So, I took a step back and looked at why I enjoy CrossFit.  I revisited my intentions and the reasons why I joined in the first place.  I love the way I feel when I am done.  I love how strong it has made me, and consequently I feel stronger in general.  I love the unpredictability of the workouts.  You go in not knowing what movements you are going to do that day.  I love the community and encouragement other members give each other.  In my intentions, there was nothing about lifting a certain amount of weight over my head or getting a sub 6-minute Fran time. 

Now, my current approach to CrossFit is what I call Zen CrossFit.  I workout for myself and remember my intentions.  I don’t lift as much weight as I used to, and that’s okay.  Because I’d rather be CrossFitting when I’m 70 with light weights than CrossFitting until I’m 40 with heavy weights and having to stop because of injuries.  I’ll pass on the injuries, please.  Before class I will check in with my body and see what it feels like.  Does it want to do more cardio or more lifting, and I will set my weight accordingly.  I don’t compare myself to anyone!  People’s scores from previous classes are up on the board for people to see, and I just ignore them for the most part.  Sometimes I will reference to see what someone comparable to me did if I am unsure of what weight to use.  But for the most part I just look and see who has been in for the day.  I stay present with the workout and focus on form and technique, concentrating on the specific movement I am doing at the time rather than watching other people and seeing what round they are on, or if I am ahead of them. 

This approach has been working out in my favor!  I am enjoying CrossFit again, I am sans injuries, and I feel positive, energetic and confident when I am done.  My body feels lighter, and I can recover quicker from workouts.

So, when it comes to working out, find a form of exercise that you love to do, stay present, remember your intentions, and don’t compare yourself to others. 

Creativity in the Kitchen

So, it’s the end of the month and the end of the week, so that means taking inventory of the fridge and pantry and making amazingly delicious and creative meals out of ingredients like, sauerkraut, eggs, and walnuts.  This is where I make some of my most interesting meals. (Interesting has many interpretations) I was in need of some breakfast, no wait, make that brunch, as it was already 11:30am.  I had slept in until 10am, which is pretty unheard of for me.  Was I out partying last night, you say?  No, but I did make it to that Halloween party:

I’m not much of a partier, so it was an early night, with a couple of episodes of Awkward before bed J.  I think I was just tired form having a busy week, and needed a good night’s sleep.

So, I took inventory of what I had in the fridge, and between my roommates plethora of leftovers that they never eat, nor will I, I found some eggs and left over sweet potatoes from dinner the other night.  So I decided to make a simple egg scramble.  I melted some Kerrygold butter in the frying pan, and if you haven’t tried it yet, you need to!!!!  It’s butter from Ireland and is made from cows that roam out on the green fields of Ireland and graze peacefully on the abundance of grass there.  Something like this:

It taste much better than your average butter, and is healthier, as cow products made from cows that are fed their natural diet of grass have a lower content of Omega-6 fat, and too much Omega-6 fat causes inflammation in the body…now nobody wants that!  You can find it at Costco and most grocery stores.  Here’s a visual for you:

So, after the butter was melted, I cut up some sweet potato into small pieces and warmed them in the butter.  Once the potatoes were warm, I added three eggs.  Now I am fairly lazy when cooking.  Well, maybe not lazy, but I like to make things as simple as possible.  So when I want scrambled eggs, instead of whisking them in a separate bowl, which just makes more dishes to do, and when you are the dishwasher, you care about these things, I just crack the eggs into the pan, let cook a little and then stir with my spatula.  When you have a nice amount of butter, coconut oil, or bacon grease, this works well, as the eggs don’t stick to the pan and can be mixed nicely.  I used about half a tablespoon of butter.  While the eggs are cooking, I stir periodically.  This whole process doesn’t take very long.  Maybe 10 minutes from when the idea sparked in my head to when I was sitting down ready to eat. 

When I looked at my finished product, it looked a little monochromatic; yellow sweet potatoes and yellow eggs.  As a health and nutrition coach, I teach my clients about eating colorful foods and having a variety of colors on your plate.  This ensures that you are getting a variety of vitamins and minerals.  Well, all I had was yellow, so what could I do to add a little color? I knew I was out of spinach, and I wasn’t feeling the red onion left in the veggie drawer, so I found some tid-bits of parsley left and added them to the top of my scramble.  Ahhh…this looked better.  And it was delicious!  The parsley made the dish. 

So when it looks like you have nothing to eat in the fridge, take inventory, and be creative!  You never know what you will get.

Spaghetti Squash Chicken Pesto

When I first heard about the idea of going grain free, I thought that there was NO WAY this was possible!  I was eating toast, beagles, pb&j, pasta, cereal, rice, crackers, and granola bars on the daily.  Grains were a HUGE part of my diet and I was very skeptical of going grain free….how is this humanly possible?

However, I was challenged to go sans grains for 30 days, along with, dairy, legumes, or added sugars, and having somewhat of a competitive spirit, I took on the challenge.  Fast forward four years, and there is no way I would ever go back to eating grains as a food staple.  As there have been amazing changes in my life by eliminating grains from my diet.  Over the past four years, I have experimented with recipes, some successful and others, shall we call “learning experiences”. J  

I look back to my first nutrition challenge, and yes, I made it through and I was able to feel the difference in my body with having more sustained and lasting energy, no more sugar crashes or crazy sugar cravings, and improved mental clarity, however; it wasn’t very exciting and at times frustrating in the sense that I didn’t know what to eat instead of grains.  I was eliminating a lot of food, however not sure what to add back in to replace those foods.

Now, I have years of recipes under my belt, and find eating grain free exciting and oh so DELICIOUS!  So, to save you some agony, I wanted to share a food that I only discovered recently, and wish I had known about years ago!  

Being part Italian, I was raised on pasta.  It was a staple in my household, along with bread.  So, the thought of not eating pasta made me think that I was going to have to give up those secret family Italian recipes that I loved so much!

Once I discovered this food, I was in love!  It was so useful to me and added a whole new realm of possibilities in the kitchen.  And I was able to eat those scrumptious family recipes I had been craving.  This wonderful, magnificent food I am talking about is spaghetti squash!  When cooked, spaghetti squash creates stringy noodles that replicate pasta.  I was now able to make “spaghetti” and meatballs, and “spaghetti” carbonara without suffering the consequences of eating a plate full of inflammatory gluten, and a blood sugar spike.  Not only did I feel amazing after I ate spaghetti squash, I was consuming significantly fewer carbs than if I had eaten the same amount of pasta.  One cup of spaghetti squash has 9 grams of carbs verses a cup of spaghetti having around 40 grams of carbs.  Spaghetti squash also contains antioxidants such as Vitamin C and Vitamin A, as well as fiber, potassium and Vitamin B6.  What’s not to love about spaghetti squash?

I am sharing with you a recipe that is deliciously, filling, and well rounded with macronutrients; proteins, fats, and carbs.  I used a store bought pesto to save on time. However, it took some looking around and label reading to find a pesto that used olive oil and not soybean oil, canola oil, or some other inflammatory fat.  Look at your local farmers market or health food store for pesto made with olive oil.  If you choose to be ambitious, I set a link to a recipe for pesto below.

Ingredients:

·      1 medium sized spaghetti squash

·      1 cup pesto sauce Many of the store bought pestos contain inflammatory oils such as soybean or corn oil.  If you are unable to find a pesto that only contains olive oil, here is a great one to make at home.  

·      1 lb chicken breast

·      Olive oil

·      Sundried tomatoes (optional)

·      Fresh basil leaves for garnish (optional)

Directions:

1.  Preheat oven to 350 degrees 

2.  Cut spaghetti squash in half lengthwise

3.   Remove seeds with a spoon or fork and save for toasting J

4.  Place halves face down on baking sheet and cook for 40-45 min.  The spaghetti squash should be somewhat soft to touch when done.

      

      5.  While spaghetti squash is baking, heat a large saucepan on the stove and add a tablespoon of olive oil.  Cook chicken breast until cooked through.  

      6.  Once chicken is cooked, slice chicken into bite sized strips and set aside.

      7.  Once spaghetti squash is finished, allow to cool for a few minutes and then shred the meat of the squash with a fork into the saucepan. The spaghetti squash should come out easily and will be stringy like spaghetti. 

      8.   In a saucepan, on low, mix the spaghetti squash, chicken, and pesto sauce until warm.  I added sun-dried tomatoes and some fresh basil from the garden.

        9.  Serve warm and enjoy!

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