Month: February 2015

Cut Out the Crap!

The Appalachian Barbie4 Comments

Hey guys!  Hope you’re all staying cozy and warm during this nasty winter storm.  I was just sitting here enjoying a warm bowl of oats and watching the snow fall and got to thinking about the American diet and the struggle for the average person to get fit in a world so heavily influenced by “fast” food and “convenient” boxed and frozen dinners.  One of the biggest challenges in the journey to a healthy lifestyle is learning how to eat correctly.  Re-teaching your mind -and body- to not just consume, but also enjoy, whole nutritious meals can seem like a daunting task.  Well I’m not going to sugar coat it–

YOU.  HAVE.  TO CUT.  THE CRAP.

I mean that literally and figuratively.

I don’t want to sound mean in the following paragraphs.  But it’s time to get real and stop making excuses.  I hate excuses.  Everyone has one and all it is is another version of lazy.  I’m sorry to tell you but we’re all busy.  We’re all tired.  We all have outside circumstances that could influence our schedules.  But the answer is to MAKE YOURSELF A PRIORITY.  Human nature is to make time for the things that are important.  I can guarantee that you make time in your busy schedule to watch your favorite tv show, or get your nails done, or go to the bar for a drink after a stressful day.  So these are the things that are important to you.  It’s time to make yourself and your health your most important priority, because at the end of the day, why would you put that other stuff first??  That tv show, or your nail appointment, or that cocktail have never done anything for you and in the grand scheme of things what is it going to matter?  The things you are fueling your body with are going to have much more of an influence on your life in the long run than missing an episode of Real Housewives.

Along with getting real, it’s time to starting eating real.  No good can come from living on a diet filled with processed, preservative rich, mystery crap that comes from a drive-thru window or a box in the microwave.  It’s disgusting.  For god’s sake, pick up a box of hamburger helper and try to decode the nutrition information.  If you can’t pronounce it, don’t flippin eat it.  I am not trying to toot my own horn or be obnoxious, but one of the things I am most proud of is conquering the addiction to fast food. I’ve probably eaten fast food 4 times in the past 2 years and I felt disgusting each and every time. Anything that is sold so cheaply and to such a mass quantity of people can’t be good.  Not even subway! Their lettuce comes in a vacuum sealed bag, filled with preservatives so it can survive the distribution process without turning brown.  You’re ingesting that.  Lean Cuisines, Weight Watchers Meals….even most “protein bars” are full of awful crap that the human body should not be trying to break down!  It’s high time to stop eating for convenience and start eating for your health.

With all that being said, there is good news!  You don’t have to spend all day every day planning meals and thinking about workouts.  (Although for some of us, that sounds like a good time.)  With a little bit of scheduling, a healthy, nutritious diet can be just as convenient as hitting a drive thru on your lunch break.  The biggest step you can take to getting healthier is setting a schedule and sticking to it.  Scheduling out time to meal plan, a day to hit the store for the week, and time to prep your meals will soon become second nature if you just stick to it for a month.  This type of lifestyle will also be hugely beneficial to your budget.  I allow myself $75/wk for groceries and I only go to the store once a week.  That means that I better get what I need and if I run out, it’s tough titty said the kitty.  Make do with other stuff until the next trip to the store.  When you think about it, $75 is less than 3 average trips to a restaurant.

So here is a sample of how I schedule my diet planning:

-On Monday evening, I discuss with Mitch what he wants to eat for the upcoming week.  (The only meals we actually cook every day are breakfast and dinner.  The rest of our meals are already prepped.)

-On Tuesday afternoon we go to the grocery store with our list.  This process usually takes an hour from start to finish.  Always on the list-skinless boneless chicken breast, tuna, spinach, brown rice/quinoa, almond milk, steel cut oats, egg whites, fruit…..

-Tuesday evening or Wednesday, we put 6 lbs of chicken in the crock pot to cook.  You can do this before you go to work, or before you go to run errands. ( This is where I get annoyed with people who say they have no time to meal prep.  Really??  You don’t have time to open a pack of chicken and put it in a slow cooker with some  water?  )  I also cook up my rice/quinoa for the week.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Prepping things this way makes meals as easy as grabbing a handful of shredded chicken and weighing it to your specifications.  Or grabbing a 2/3C measuring cup and scooping out your grains.  Throw those in a tupperware together with a big handful of spinach.  When it’s time to eat, throw on a splash of teriyaki and microwave for a minute and a half.  Done.  There is lunch.

It also is helpful to get in the habit of eating basically the same thing every day except for dinner.  I know it sounds boring, but once your body gets used to it, it starts to crave these meals.

Weaning your body off of these processed, sugar and preservative filled crap foods is going to physically be a challenge as well.  Just like a heroin addict, your body is going to detox off sugar.  I promise.  You will feel like crap.  You’re going to feel off.  Maybe get headaches.  Maybe even sick.  this is your body withdrawing from the unnatural junk it’s been used to.  But don’t despair.  It only lasts a few days.  And then your body is going to start rejecting the bad stuff.  These days, if I eat things I’m not supposed to, my body physically rejects it.  I can’t eat red meat more than 3 times a month.  Dairy makes me violently ill.  If I eat pasta I will bloat to the point that my pants don’t fit.  I am completely, physically miserable.

This doesn’t mean you have to eat boring, bland brown rice and chicken every day.  It just means educating yourself on healthy substitutions!  For example–

Say you heat up a packet of microwave quaker oats every morning.  INSTEAD, scoop out 1/4C of steel cut organic oats into a small pot with 1C of water.  Once it starts to boil, it only takes around 10 mins to cook.  In that time you can be cooking a healthy egg scramble, making your coffee or even blowdrying your hair.  Add a spoonful of vanilla greek yogurt, 1 packet of stevia and 1/4C of fresh blueberries for berries and cream flavored.  Or a dash of cinnamon sugar and a drizzle of maple syrup for maple brown sugar flavored.

OR

If it’s burgers you crave–prep a 1lb pack of 93% lean ground turkey into 4 4oz patties.  I like to mix up my meat with a few dashes of low sodium Dale’s and a tablespoon of burger seasoning (seasoned salt, pepper, garlic powder).  Throw them on the grill or skillet with some nonstick and serve them on a toasted whole wheat english muffin or high fiber bread loaded with greens and tomatoes

French fries- don’t buy a bag of frozen crap.  Slice a potato, toss in olive oil, sea salt, pepper.  bake for 20 mins on 425 degrees.  finish off under the broiler for a couple minutes to get that crisp outside layer.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

The goal for changing the way you eat is to eliminate all the unneeded fillers and crap and stick to minimal wholesome ingredients.  When eating, less is more.  Give it a shot.  I promise you’ll feel better and look better!

Is Cleansing/Fasting Just a Trendy Way to Starve?

The Appalachian Barbie2 Comments

Hey everyone!  I hope y’all had a chance to get out and enjoy this beautiful 65 degree February weather today.  I had a wonderful day with my best friends brunching and perusing around a bridal convention.  This was my first experience at one of these shindigs, and, to put it lightly, WHOA that was a lot of estrogen in one room!  However, I got a lot of great ideas, made some great contacts, and most importantly, gorged myself on delicious samples. Everything from appetizers to entrees to cakes, we tried it.  To say I was miserable on the way home would be an understatement-I had to unbutton my pants.  So tonight seemed like the perfect opportunity to start that mini-cleanse I’ve been debating on for awhile.  Cleanses and fasts are hotly debated topics in the health world.  A lot of people would say that depriving yourself of food in any manner is not healthy.  On the other hand, you have a lot of people who say fasting is a time tested cure-all for most of the body’s ailments.  So after extensive research, the following are MY opinions on the subject and MY diet.  I am not recommending you follow this advice as no two people are the same and you may have to consult with a professional.  So with that out of the way, here we go.

Let’s start with researching cleanses and fasts throughout history.  In recent years, many celebrities have come forward with their use of cleanses, more specifically, the Master Cleanse, or Lemonade diet.  The term Master Cleanse is practically synonymous with Beyonce for me, due to her famously using it to drop a drastic amount of weight for “Dream Girls.”  However, the Master Cleanse has been around since the 1940s, invented by Stanley Burroughs and published in the mid 1970s in a book under the same title.  Basically, it’s a juice fast where you live on warm lemonade, made with lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper for 10 days, then over the course of 3 days you re-introduce veggies and fruits and soups to your diet.  Mr.Burroughs recommends basically a vegan diet by frowning upon basically any meats or dairy products in a person’s day-to-day diet.  There have been plenty of other fasting diets over the course of the past century.  Slim Fast, grapefruit diet, juicing… the list goes on.  However, let’s go back further in history.  In every great religion there is documented use of fasting for spiritual purposes.  In the New Testament, within the books of Luke and Acts, fasting is often mentioned in relation to prayer or to clear the mind before making important decisions.  Likewise within Buddhism, the Buddha did not experience the great awakening until after fasting and meditation.  Muslims are most notoriously documented for their use of fasting during Ramadan, a month-long event where they refrain from eating or drinking between dawn and sunset.  I could go on for days listing each religion and their use of fasting but that would get boring and we need to move on.  So even FURTHER back in history, if you want to consider the diet of ancient man, they naturally practiced fasting because, well, they had no choice.  Hunters and gatherers had seasons of plenty and times where there was no food to be had.  Their bodies had to acclimate to storing all the food they could and efficiently distributing all their energy when food sources were scarce.

So, there is your history lesson for the day.  With all that being said, I have drawn my own conclusions on fasting.  First, I find short term fasting to be a safe and effective practice.  Performed in no more than 3-10 day increments, I find that cleansing and fasting can be a terrific way to become more in tune with your own body, shed nasty toxins that are weighing you down, and strengthen your own mind and will-power.  Long-term fasting to me seems stupid and wasteful.  Ancient man did not willingly go hungry for weeks at a time, nor should I.  That statement leads me to my second conclusion: I don’t believe in a full-blown, liquids-only, starvation fest.  Instead, I like to maintain small daily liquid cleanses in addition to a supremely clean diet to aid in a healthy body and weight loss.  For example, beginning tomorrow, I will start my morning with a Master Cleanse lemonade (8oz of warm water with 2T of pure lemon juice, 1T of pure maple syrup and a dash of cayenne pepper) within 10 mins of being up.  I have noticed that this practice helps me with waste elimination, something I struggle with due to my crippling IBS, which may be TMI but to be honest this is a horrible ailment that myself and millions of other people suffer with and deserves someone talking about it because it sucks.  Anyway, I’ll follow that with a very clean breakfast, a post-workout protein shake with added veggies and fruits, lunch of fish and rice or quinoa, then replace my 2nd snack with another Master Cleanse lemonade.  Dinner will be chicken with veggies.  At night prior to bed, a cup of organic senna tea (a natural herbal laxative).  I also will drink a bit of warm water with sea salt to also move those toxins out at some point during the day. The goal is for me to get my body as clean as possible, to alleviate any nasty crud I’ve picked up from working in a scummy bar, and to get rid of all the crap food I’ve eaten and re-set my internal system.  This type of cleansing seems much more manageable than a full-blown liquid fast.  For me personally, I workout far too much and work in a very physical job where I can’t function on ZERO calories.  Ideally I would like to incorporate yoga into my morning routine during this time. I am really bad about stretching and yoga can really help your body stretch and push bad things out and give you more of a sense of control over your own mind. However, I say that I would like to start doing yoga in the mornings like, once a week, so we will see how that goes.

I will update post-cleanse with an update.  If any of you have any tips or fasts you have performed yourself, let me know!  We can discuss!  Til then have a blessed day.