NEW meals

NEW meals

Nutritious Easy Wholesome meals

Forget the diet food, forget the packaged food, avoid fast food - let's get real, as in real food.  We eat for health and to provide our body with the necessary nutrients to maintain health.  Not to say we also expect to love our meals.   Afterall , it's part of the quality of our life.  So let's focus on quality whole food, prepared well.  Let's re-program ourselves to love "real food" served as a meal instead of to fill our bellies and cravings. The focus of our meals should be on using whole foods and nourishing ourselves both physically and mentally. 

While packaged, processed foods might seem like the only way you'll get dinner on the table, there's lots of ways to prepare meals using real foods to serve a nutritious meal - fast.  All that is required is learning how and shopping ahead of time to have the food in the house.  So make the commitment to serve only whole foods.  Let's share easy-to-prepare recipes including crockpot recipes.  My last entry, a recipe for Salmon with Pasta and Greens, certainly fell into this catgegory.  Here's another entry.  I hope to see more provided by you!

Tostados (a NEW meal)

2 corn tortillas per person
1/2 to 3/4 ground meat (I used ground elk or lean beef or turkey is a good alternative)
1/2 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 8 oz can tomato sauce
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp oregano
1 tsp paprika
salt and pepper to taste
cayenne pepper to taste (optional, adjust according to taste)
1 can non-fat refried beans, heated

Toppings, your choice:
shredded Romaine lettuce
shredded purple cabbage
shredded cheese
tomatoes
green onions
cilantro
low-fat sour cream
salsa
olives

Place corn tortillas in over or toaster oven.  Bake at 350.  Turn over after about 5 minutes and continuing baking until crisp on both sides.

Brown meat in a skillet.  As meat is browning, add onions and garlic.  Drain meat when brown.  Add tomato sauce and seasonings.

To serve:  Spread each crisp tortilla with refried beans, add meat and toppings.  ENJOY!

I served this with sliced cucumbers dressed with seasoned rice vingar and called it a NEW meal :)

Update: Spring Break Schedule

There's some changes for next week.  Here are the times and classes that will be offered, all others are cancelled due to Spring Break.

Monday  12:10 TRX Noon Express

               1:00 p.m. open session for all

Tuesday  9:00 a.m. Hard Core (challenging)

              10:10 a.m. Balancing Act (all levels)

              12:10 TRX Noon Express

              6:00 p.m. Zumba (all levels)

Wednesday 10:00 a.m. Barre None (all levels)

Seafood Watch Pocket Guide

Here's a link to help you be informed about the seafood you choose.  http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/cr_seafoodwatch/sfw_recommendations.aspx

Quick Work Night Dinner

This dinner takes me about 15-20 minutes.  Plan about 30 minutes the first time you're preparing it.

Salmon with Pasta and Greens

2 large fillets of Salmon (wild caught is best, should serve 3-4)
1/2 box Barilla Plus spaghetti or angel hair pasta
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1/2 lemon, zest and juice
1 heaping Tbl. capers, rinsed
Extra virgin olive oil
Basil (I buy a tube of fresh basil from City Market)
1 bunch of red chard (or spinach or kale)
salt and freshly ground pepper

Put a big pot of water on to boil for the pasta.  Meanwhile mince garlic, clean and slice the red chard into ribbons (or any other green).  You'll need 2 frying pans; one for the red chard and one for the salmon.

Add pasta to the boiling water. 

Swirl about 1-2 tsp extra virgin olive oil in a cold frying pan, add the red chard and garlic.  Turn the heat on medium high.  Toss the greens until wilted, add salt and pepper (I also add a few grates of fresh nutmeg).

Heat a swirl of extra virgin olive oil in the other pan over medium heat.  Add salmon filets and season with salt and pepper.  Flip over after about 3-4 minutes.

The pasta should be done by now.  Drain and add the rest of the minced garlic.  Add a swirl of extra virgin olive oil, 1 tsp or so of the basil, capers,  lemon zest and squeeze the rest of the lemon juice over the top.

The chard and salmon should be done by now.

To plate:  Use about 1/4 of the pasta.  Place a salmon fillet on top.  Gently mound the swiss chard on the side.  ENJOY!

I love this meal; it's healthy and very tasty.

Cereal "wars"

I'm often asked what cereals do our 7-year old eat.  When she was 5, I taught her how to look at the nutrition label for sugars and she could have any cereal with 8 grams of sugar or less.  That approach works pretty well but there's still the begging for cereals with a higher sugar content.  This morning, she's happily enjoying "Chocolate Cheerios", which has 9 grams of sugar per serving.  Our deal for purchasing "Chocolate Cheerios" is that she mixes it with regular "Cheerios" (which only has 1 gram of sugar).  So now we are both happy; she has her chocolate cereal and I don't need to worry about a bowl full of sugar-laden cereal.

It's a great approach for anyone.  If you love your sugary cereals, make it a healthier choice by mixing it with a low-sugar cereal.  For example, if granola is what you want, try mixing it with a low-sugar bran cereal or grape nuts or mix all three.  Personally, I've always been a cereal mixer.  Then I add fresh fruit on top. 

Why settle for just a bowl of cereal when you can create your own gastronimic masterpiece for breakfast!

High-Intensity Interval Training Is Time-Efficient and Effective, Study Suggests

ScienceDaily (Mar. 12, 2010) — The usual excuse of "lack of time" for not doing enough exercise is blown away by new research published in The Journal of Physiology.

________________________________________

The study, from scientists at Canada's McMaster University, adds to the growing evidence for the benefits of short term high-intensity interval training (HIT) as a time-efficient but safe alternative to traditional types of moderate long term exercise. Astonishingly, it is possible to get more by doing less!

"We have shown that interval training does not have to be 'all out' in order to be effective," says Professor Martin Gibala. "Doing 10 one-minute sprints on a standard stationary bike with about one minute of rest in between, three times a week, works as well in improving muscle as many hours of conventional long-term biking less strenuously."

HIT means doing a number of short bursts of intense exercise with short recovery breaks in between. The authors have already shown with young healthy college students that this produces the same physical benefits as conventional long duration endurance training despite taking much less time (and amazingly, actually doing less exercise!) However, their previous work used a relatively extreme set-up that involved "all out" pedaling on a specialized laboratory bicycle. The new study used a standard stationary bicycle and a workload which was still above most people's comfort zone -about 95% of maximal heart rate -- but only about half of what can be achieved when people sprint at an all-out pace.

This less extreme HIT method may work well for people (the older, less fit, and slightly overweight among us) whose doctors might have worries about them exercising "all-out." We have known for years that repeated moderate long-term exercise tunes up fuel and oxygen delivery to muscles and aids the removal of waste products. Exercise also improves the way muscles use the oxygen to burn the fuel in mitochondria, the microscopic power station of cells.

Running or cycling for hours a week widens the network of vessels supplying muscle cells and also boosts the numbers of mitochondria in them so that a person can carry out activities of daily living more effectively and without strain, and crucially with less risk of a heart attack, stroke or diabetes.

But the traditional approach to exercise is time consuming. Martin Gibala and his team have shown that the same results can be obtained in far less time with brief spurts of higher-intensity exercise.

To achieve the study's equivalent results by endurance training you'd need to complete over 10 hours of continuous moderate bicycling exercise over a two-week period.

The "secret" to why HIT is so effective is unclear. However, the study by Gibala and co-workers also provides insight into the molecular signals that regulate muscle adaptation to interval training. It appears that HIT stimulates many of the same cellular pathways that are responsible for the beneficial effects we associate with endurance training.

The upside of doing more exercise is well-known, but a big question for most people thinking of getting fit is: "How much time out of my busy life do I need to spend to get the perks?"

Martin Gibala says "no time to exercise" is not an excuse now that HIT can be tailored for the average adult. "While still a demanding form of training," Gibala adds, "the exercise protocol we used should be possible to do by the general public and you don't need more than an average exercise bike."

The McMaster team's future research will examine whether HIT can bring health benefits to people who are overweight or who have metabolic diseases like diabetes.

As the evidence for HIT continues to grow, a new frontier in the fitness field emerges.

Latest Research

Extreme obesity affecting more children at younger ages

(Electronic health records used to study 711,000 children)

March 18, 2010 (Pasadena, Calif.) – Extreme obesity is affecting more children at younger ages, with 12 percent of black teenage girls, 11.2 percent of Hispanic teenage boys, 7.3 percent of boys and 5.5 percent of girls now classified as extremely obese, according to a Kaiser Permanente study of 710,949 children and teens that appears online in the Journal of Pediatrics.

This is the first study to provide a snapshot of the prevalence of extreme obesity in a contemporary cohort of children ages 2 – 19 years from a large racially and ethnically diverse population using the recent 2009 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extreme obesity definition. Previous research was based on recent National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data and included information on obesity but not extreme obesity.

"Children who are extremely obese may continue to be extremely obese as adults, and all the health problems associated with obesity are in these children's futures. Without major lifestyle changes, these kids face a 10 to 20 years shorter life span and will develop health problems in their twenties that we typically see in 40 - 60 year olds," said study lead author Corinna Koebnick, PhD, a research scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Southern California's Department of Research and Evaluation in Pasadena, Calif. "For example, children who are extremely obese are at higher risk for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and joint problems, just to name a few."

Researchers used measured height and weight in electronic health records to conduct a cross-sectional study of 710,949 children ages 2 – 19 years in the Kaiser Permanente Southern California integrated health plan in 2007 and 2008. Children in the study had an average of 2.6 medical visits per year where height and weight were measured.
The study found that 7.3 percent of boys and 5.5 percent of girls were extremely obese, translating into more than 45,000 extremely obese children in this cohort. The percentage of extreme obesity peaked at 10 years in boys and at 12 years in girls. The heaviest children were black teenage girls and Hispanic boys. The percentage of extreme obesity was lowest in Asian-Pacific Islanders and non-Hispanic white children.

According to the recent CDC recommendations, extreme obesity is defined as more than 1.2 times the 95th percentile, or a body mass index (BMI) of more than 35 kilograms/meter squared. Obesity is defined as more than the 95th percentile or a BMI of more than 30 kg/m2. Overweight is defined as more than the 85th percentile or a BMI of more than 25 kg/m2. The BMI is a reliable indicator of body fatness and calculated based on height and weight. For children, BMI percentiles are the most commonly used indicator to assess the size and growth patterns of individual children. The percentile indicates the relative position of the child's BMI number among children of the same sex and age.
"Our focus and concern is all about health and not about appearance. Children who are morbidly obese can do anything they want -- they can be judges, lawyers, doctors -- but the one thing they cannot be is healthy," said study co-author Amy Porter, MD, a Kaiser Permanente Baldwin Park pediatrician who leads the Pediatric Weight Management Initiative for Kaiser Permanente's Southern California Region.
"The most important advice to parents of extremely obese children is that this has to be addressed as a family issue. There is rarely one extremely obese kid in a house where everyone else is extremely healthy. It's important that everyone in the family is invested in achieving a healthier lifestyle," Porter said.

"This publication is only the beginning. Now we are trying to quantify the health risks and long-term effects associated with extreme obesity, determine which groups are affected most, and develop strategies for population care management to reduce these health risks. Children's health is important and we have a long way to go," Koebnick said.

More fruits & veggies!

This past weekend, I conducted a family workshop.  It was my first one and I wanted to make it positive about good things to eat instead of limiting the bad stuff.  So one of the goals was to bring about an awareness of fruits and vegetables - and how to get kids (and their parents) to eat more.  Did you know that only 2% of our kids in U.S. consume the recommended daily allowance on a regular basis?!  As a parent, I struggle with how to do this without resorting to tricks (i.e., hiding vegetable and fruit puree in other foods or covering it in Ranch or cheese sauce).  I want our daughter to LIKE fruits and veggies.  And the only time tested way to do this, is continual exposure.  One of the handouts I used comes from the "Healthy Kids Challenge" http://www.cigna.com/pdf/parents/5aday.pdf.  The handout includes a weekly chart for checking off the number of different colors of fruits and veggies that you eat.  We're on day 4 of using the chart and our daughter, who likes accomplishing challenges, has eaten at least 5 servings of fruits and vegetables (one day it was 9).  We only count fresh produce - no juices.  Let me know what works for you - or if you use the chart, how's that working?  I'm going to go eat my grapefruit now...

Join the movement to stop childhood obesity

As you probably know, the number of obese and overweight children and teens have doubled and tripled, respectively, in the past 30 years.  For the first time ever, the lifespan of our children is expected to be shorter than ours.  Here's a website with lots of information and links to other sites for helpful ideas, stats, etc.  http://www.letsmove.org/   What do you think?  How can we help locally?

Spring Break Schedule

Monday - regular schedule except 10 a.m. Barre None is cancelled
Tuesday - regular schedule
Wednesday - closed except for the 10 a.m. Barre None class
Thursday - closed
Friday - closed