Paleo: were the ancestors right?

A diet that I have been hearing about for quite some time is the Paleo Diet. By definition, paleo means a healthy way of life because it is designed to work with your body’s genetics to help you stay lean, strong, and energetic, as according to robbwolf.com. I wasn’t sure how I would feel about it or even if I should do it, but one of my friends said it was one of the best things she has ever done.

My friend, Dedee, is a vegetarian and has been for about a year. She said it was difficult at first because she was worried there would be very few options for her. That is when she started researching the paleo diet.

“I found it to be both helpful and easy to do. There are many different recipes that are easier to find on sites, such as Pinterest, than I thought.”

The basis of a healthy paleo diet is:

lean proteins- turkey, seafood, chicken

fruits and vegetables

healthy fats- avocados, olive oil, fish oil, nuts

The nice thing about this diet is that you don’t necessarily have to be vegetarian to get the proper benefits out of this diet. It is based on gaining a healthy lifestyle by eating a balance of foods.

Some of the benefits of this diet are (as according to robbwolf.com):

1. More effective workouts

2. Clear skin and better teeth

3. Improved sleep patterns

My goal for the next few weeks is to give the paleo life a try since I am going to be having surgery soon and won’t have the option to work out. I will also use the recommendations of the nutritionist from past posts, JoAnn Daehler-Miller, by buying frozen vegetables and frozen lean meats. Olive oil lasts a long time since you only need a little bit as well as nuts. I will let you all know my progress as I go!

Recipes to Impress Your Pals at Friendsgiving

So, it is getting closer and closer to Thanksgiving. Which for most means a week at home with a large meal around a family table. For a couple of my friends, however, it means a long week of late hours at work and tons of homework without being able to go home.

I have been invited to quite a few “friendsgivings” since I won’t be able to go home as well. Different people in my friend groups are both vegetarian and non vegetarian, so it got me to thinking what foods I was going to have at these gatherings.

I looked up on Pinterest some different recipes that are both healthy and low cost to give your friendsgivings some delicious options. The first article that I found useful is called “25 of the Best Paleo Thanksgiving Recipes.”

I have been hearing about the paleo diet quite a bit over the past couple years and according to paleocomfortfoods.com, the definition (to them) means eating real foods that are natural and healthy. These foods consist of lean meats, seafood, vegetables and fruit for carbs, and fats such as avocados. This means basically anything you could catch or grow.

In this article, two recipes stood out to me that look delicious for both my vegetarian/gluten free friends and my non vegetarian friends are Spicy Lime Sweet Potato Mash and Grain Free Dinner Rolls. Both recipes are both easy to make and only require a few ingredients. The ingredients that are common household items are salt, butter, eggs, and olive oil. The ingredients that are recipe specific are:

sweet potatoes (you can get at Walmart for between $.30-$.50 depending on how many you get)

lime or lime zest (less than $1)

tapioca (8oz is $3.12)

cilantro (around $3)

king arthur brand of gluten free flour ($6.14)

   

The biggest issue that comes with people who are vegetarian versus those who are non vegetarian is most obviously, meat. So, for my friends who are both, at my friendsgiving I would have a meat option and a non meat option. For a meat option, I would chose a recipe called Easy Crock-Pot Turkey and for the meatless option I would chose a recipe called Easy Brown Rice Risotto with Fresh Mushrooms and Oregano. Once again a lot of ingredients for these recipes can be household ingredients that you have every day, but the ingredients that are recipe specific are:

turkey ($18 at HyVee for a medium size bird)

yellow onions (chopped at Walmart for around $5)

minced garlic ($2.98)

vegetable broth ($2.88)

brown rice ($3.48)

baby portobello mushrooms (frozen for around $3)

oregano leaves ($2.48)

                                           

The best part of these recipes is that you can split up the cost with your friends! The prices match the quality of the food and the leftovers will be just as good as the meal!

Happy Thanks/Friendsgiving to everyone!

Necessary Protein: are Protein Shakes Beneficial?

This week I needed to go grocery shopping and decided to bring my roommate along with me. We stopped into HyVee and went straight for the Health Market section and I considered buying protein powder because I had heard I could use it in smoothies as a meal supplement. I had also heard that it was a good way to help fight hunger throughout the day and would help keep me from eating too much.

That’s when my roommate said, “you know that isn’t actually true right?” This then lead me to do some research because I, in fact, didn’t know that.

Turns out, my roommate was right. Protein shakes (which is where protein powder is usually used) aren’t beneficial if you don’t use them correctly. According to the article, “A Practical Guide to Protein Shakes,” most people think the same things that I thought and are ingesting these shakes without knowing all the facts about them.

Protein shakes are usually mixed with fruit and therefore, they have a ton of calories. On average, an individual should be consuming 45 to 60 grams of protein a day and if you are eating a well-rounded diet, then you don’t need the extra protein or the extra calories.

Most individuals like myself believed that protein shakes were a good meal substitute. WRONG. Our bodies should be taking in less calories than we are burning off so if you eat two to three protein shakes a day and follow that up with sitting on the couch all day, you are making no progress.

These shakes are also stigmatized as being a supplement when actually the two are completely different. A supplement has the necessary nutrients your body needs whereas like it was stated before, the shakes are high in calories.

Moral of the story is, I saved money by not buying the $20 protein powder and instead bought frozen chicken breasts for $7.19 that will give me all of my necessary protein to keep my diet balanced.

Fitness Trackers

I have recently been obsessed with fitness magazines-online and offline. The magazine that I read most online is called Shape Magazine and they have a number of articles ranging from fitness trends to reviews about workout clothing. They are pretty great!

I was scrolling through the main page where all of their various articles are and I came across an article that I found not only fascinating but extremely relatable. One of the big hypes that come along with fitness are the tools to track your progress, i.e., fitness bands, watches, apps for phones, etc. Shape Magazine’s article, “Should You Really Be Tracking Everything?” discusses the mental thoughts behind workout tools and the main question, “do they actually work?”

The main summary is that most of them DON’T work! Trackers are a mental thing mostly. They give us the impression that we can track our productivity and track our exact calorie shed, but according to the article, fitness trackers aren’t to be used more than one week out of every month.

Now, as most of you can guess, the big time fitness trackers like the Garmin Vivofit Fitness Band, The Nike+ Fuelband SE, and the Jawbone Up24 are quite expensive. Garmin’s is $130, Nike’s is $149, and Jawbone’s is $125. When you have student loans, rent, and food-among other things-to pay for a tracker that actually doesn’t work very well doesn’t seem all that worth it.

Bands like these are designed to show an individual their calorie shed, steps they have taken, and some can even record your sleep. When they are on for more than they are accessible to, they can easily mis record your sleep patterns, causing you to feel less energized, and calorie shed, which can lead you to believe you have burned less calories.  A big one for especially members of my own family are the step trackers. The article discusses that the mental aspect of it is that one can look down at their tracker and say, “Oh I have taken 1,000 steps today I am losing a lot of weight,” when in actuality that leads to the individual then not getting up and actually working out.

By then not working out, your body stays at the current state it is at and many people then have the impression they can eat whatever they want. I know this has happened to me multiple times. I have gone out and gotten a tracking watch that I figured would be worth it because it would ultimately help me lose weight and become fit but in reality, it didn’t help all that much and I spent more money than I wanted to.

The main take away that I received was trackers are not necessarily going to give you the best results you want. I personally don’t think it is worth it to spend $149 plus tax to get a gadget that in the long run won’t help me and that I will again have to replace in a shorter period of time because of overuse.

Another fitness tracker that goes along with the same idea of this article are the apps that are designed for the iPhone or any other smart phone. I personally have tried an app called “Lose It!” It is free on the App Store through Apple and it has an interesting set up.

 This is the basic look of the app when you are going to download it. Once you have downloaded it, you go through a process where you put in your weight, your gender, and how much weight you want to lose or what weight you want to maintain.

Once all of that is done, then the page will look like this:

It shows you your log for the day and what type of calorie “budget” you have then you can get started adding in foods you ate and what exercises you have done for the day (or lack there of).

The app uses many different ways to try and find out what food you are specifically eating so that it can track the amount of calories to the T. The feature that I found that did this the best is the barcode. You can pull up the barcode feature and scan the barcode that is one the item of food you have purchased from the store and it will tell you what the calorie count is from whether you ate half the can of corn or the whole loaf of bread (I promise I didn’t do this even though I love bread).

Here is what the barcode feature looks like:

 

The biggest thing I learned about this app: it is extremely disheartening. You can look at your favorite unhealthy food like a frozen pizza and see that one slice holds 1,245 calories and you realize you shouldn’t be eating it very often. This is problematic for me because frozen pizzas are not only delicious and one of my favorite foods, but they are also very cheap. You can get a Jack’s brand pizza at the store for around $2-$3. But once I saw the calorie count I was then unsure of how I should approach the next step.

The other thing I found with this app is that it does have the set amount of calories you should be consuming for the day and that should make you want to eat more healthy types of foods, but it also gave me a chance to be sneaky about how I stayed in my budget. I felt like sometimes I could eat whatever I wanted like chips and salsa as long as I played around with how many chips I should be counting out of the bag to get the smallest amount of calories. It is like the other fitness trackers, it’s a mental thing.

While yes, the app is free, as are many other fitness food tracking apps, it’s not worth it. It is more important to just make foods that you know are healthy instead of wasting all that time counting calories and finding out ways to “cheat the system” to be able to buy foods that are unhealthy. The biggest upside to this app was that it was an eye opener for me-it gave me a chance to see that I should move towards a healthier lifestyle through food and exercise.