Thursday, January 30, 2014

Busy? You Can Stay Healthy



Being busy can absolutely kill any diet. While rushing out the door you may think, “That fast food joint is just two blocks away. I’ll stop there and eat on the way to work.” When you consider liquidnutrition supplements versus a hamburger and French fries your brain my trick yourself into thinking that the burger will fill you up while the shake or smoothie won’t. When people have time to think about it they know that this simply isn’t true but most people may not know exactly how to create a quick and healthy meal in ten or fifteen minutes. Luckily, several types of meals can be finished quickly and easily.

Breakfast

When you think of breakfast, don’t think of cereal, waffles, or pancakes. Those, while easy and quick to make, aren’t easy to eat in the car on the way to work or at your desk. Some of the best desk-friendly breakfast foods, by far, are shakes and smoothies. Oftentimes you can find large bags of frozen fruits (with no sugar or preservatives added) at your local grocer for very cheap. Putting some in a Ziploc bag in the fridge overnight will let you simply throw them into the blender in the morning for a minute-breakfast.

Another great breakfast homemade fast food is the breakfast burrito. This one, like many on this list, will benefit from some preparation beforehand. Whenever you have the time, chop up the peppers, tomatoes, and onions to store in your refrigerator. When you’re ready to make the breakfast burrito it’s then simply a matter of throwing the eggs, meat, cheese, and veggies into a pan, wrapping it up, and running out the door. Don’t forget the hot sauce!

Lunchtime

One of the most beautiful aspects of lunchtime foods for a health nut on the go is that many of them can be cold. Also, anyone can make an acceptable lunch by simply putting ingredients together with no cooking needed. Mixing and matching your ingredients can make a variety of flavorful lunches with little or no effort. One day you can have a wrap filled with greens, basil pesto, mayonnaise, pine nuts, and meat of your choice, your favorite cheese, cucumbers, and tomatoes. If you’re in the mood for a pita the next day, simply replace the pesto and mayo with hummus, add olives and peppers, and put it in a pita pocket. Salad? Replace the sauces with a low-fat salad dressing and take out the bread. Lunch is the best meal for quick solutions. If you want it faster, it’s easy to slice some vegetables the night before (and even prepare the meal itself on the go).

Dinner

Sometimes you won’t need your dinner on the go but you’ll want your dinner quickly after a particularly stressful day. You simply might not have the motivation to slave over a hot stove. Traditional dinners, while rarely quick, usually keep very well if you want leftovers. Many times, with the right equipment, they can also be prepared while you’re doing other things or even while you’re at work. Crock Pots work wonders for making chili and soups while you sleep or work. Meals like gazpacho can be made fairly quickly, stored, and are designed to be eaten cold (so you don’t even have to re-heat it).

There are plenty of ways to eat healthy for every meal, including fantastic liquidnutrition meals that require no preparation at all. Just grab and go!

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Getting Over Your Weight Loss Plateau



It’s an unfortunate fact of weight loss that there will be plateaus. Every now and again you’ll hit a point where it feels like your body can’t lose any more weight no matter how healthy you’re eating, how much you’re exercising, whether you’re eating solid or liquidnutrition, or what kind of diet you’re on. There may be a lot of reasons for this plateau, but all of them are easy to overcome with some determination and strategy.

Don’t Give Up

The first thing you’ll need to have when you’re traversing this plateau is a good attitude about it. Not everything pays noticeable dividends all the time. Noticing that you’re not losing weight - but not gaining any back - is a good thing. Keeping in mind that the weight loss isn’t coming, but you have noticed some more firmness in your arms, legs, or stomach is another fantastic way to think.

Keep Track

Every few months it’s important for dieters to take another look at their eating habits. Just because you may have a few months ago, at the start of your weight loss journey, doesn’t mean you should keep your habits the same or even that you haven’t unknowingly fallen back into bad habits. Keep track of what you’re eating, drinking, and doing and see if you can find where things are going wrong, what can be cut out, or what can be added. If it’s that there aren’t certain nutrients coming into your diet then add some reinforcements, like a liquidnutrition supplement, if it’s that you accidentally went back to idly snacking on bad foods, cut it out.

Switch Up Your Foods

Sometimes your portion sizes will creep back up and you’ll find that, instead of 2,000 calories per day, you’re eating 2,100 calories or getting too much of that in fats or carbs. By switching over to low-fat sources of protein, like fish or different cuts of chicken, you will be able to reduce the amount of fat you’re taking in. These will not only allow you to eat more food throughout the day, keeping you feeling fuller; it will help you to eat the right things as well as not get bored with your diet.

Push Yourself Further

If you’ve taken a look at your diet, made the appropriate changes, and even found a better way to eat so that you’re getting all of your nutrients in a filling way at an even lower amount of total calories, then good for you! The next thing that you can do to step up your weight loss is to simply push yourself harder during your exercises.

It’s easy to not want to have people see you fail to lift some weights at the gym or feel embarrassed on the treadmill. The fact is that working your body out to the point that it’s no longer able to lift those weights or run that speed is a good thing. The human body is an incredible, but very lazy, machine. It wants to get the best results with the smallest amount of work possible. Unfortunately, its idea of “best results” are often at odds with yours. While your idea of “best results” is getting a beach body in time for summer, its idea of “best results” is getting the necessary work done with the least amount of energy expense. Getting into a routine with your weights or cardio is going to put your body directly into this place. Putting more weight, more reps, more speed, or more incline onto your regular workout will switch it up for your body and allow you to start dropping pounds once again.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Detoxing Your Body With a Juice Cleanse



Juice cleansing can be healthy if done correctly, but have detrimental effects if done incorrectly. For this reason, make sure you’re consulting your doctor and doing plenty of research before going on a juice cleanse.

With a juicing cleanse the idea is to simply clean out the parts of your body that have been negatively impacted by poor nutrition, artificial colorings, flavorings, and preservatives. There are plenty of liquidnutrition supplements that can help you along your way, but you’ll also want to make sure that you’re drinking plenty of all natural juice that you can make at home.

The first step to kick starting your health with a liquidnutrition diet is to get prepared. Some advocates of a detoxing juice cleanse will espouse the benefits of one or two month juicing programs. For a beginner this will likely be impossible and not something that you’d want to even attempt. For a beginner to the world of the juice cleanse a few days should be plenty. Plus, it’s easier to get prepared for a three day juicing rather than a sixty day one, especially if you don’t know how your body will react to it.

Make sure, when you go to the store before your cleanse, to get plenty of nuts and produce. Apples, bananas, spinach, kale, cucumbers, oranges, and anything else that you can think of that will taste good with the other ingredients. Many beginners get in the trap of “fruits go with fruits for breakfast” and “vegetables go with vegetables for dinner.” This isn’t necessarily true. You can put quite a bit of spinach in a fruit smoothie before it changes the taste. And you’ve eaten a salad with blueberries and strawberries before, haven’t you?

The most important thing is to buy plenty of food. It’s likely that you’ll need around 64 ounces of liquid food per day to avoid feeling sluggish and hungry and to keep your calories up. In order to save time and energy, simply juice your meals at the beginning of the day and drink the stored drinks throughout. This will encourage a type of liquid “grazing” which is also generally good for the body.

It is also important that, during the cleanse, you are drinking plenty of water. Usually it is advisable to drink more than you usually do in order to alleviate any residual hunger that you may experience during the first few days of your cleanse. Many people, to switch up how they get their water by drinking non-caffeinated tea or warm water with a splash of lemon. It’s these strategies that can help break up the monotony of only drinking water during a cleanse.

Another helpful tip to expand your ability to get fats and proteins in your diet during a cleanse is to make your own almond milk. By keeping almonds submerged in water overnight they soften up and can be easily blended into almond milk that is cheaper and more natural than the almond milk that can be bought in the store. Not only that, it is packed full of nutrients that you may be missing on your liquid diet and it tastes great with the majority of your smoothies.

After you get through your first cleanse you will hopefully feel much better and be able to go back to healthy eating habits, but remember that juice cleanses aren’t usually just a one-time endeavor. They can occur as often as you feel you need them, usually once every few weeks, but the important thing is to not go overboard and listen to your body.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Fantastic Foods for a Liquid or Soft-Food Diet


As liquid and soft-food diets become more prevalent in health magazines and body detoxes you may be wondering how you can get on board without having to only drink smoothies for days at a time. Although smoothies are the go-to food for liquidnutrition, there is an entire world of foods that you can eat, no matter how particular your palate is.

Risotto

Risotto can be your high-class health food while you’re on your soft or liquid diet. There are common types of risotto, but the base of a great risotto is rice, a fat (use olive oil rather than butter for a healthy version), a splash of wine (use real wine, not sodium-heavy, bitter cooking wine), broth, and the proper preparation.

Once you perfect the technique, you can customize your risotto to your liking. Some great variations on the theme are:
Caprese salad risotto with mozzarella, basil, and tomatoes
Beet and goat cheese risotto
Thai curry risotto

Oatmeal

What could be simpler and more delicious than oats, brown sugar, and your favorite fruits? Not much. The amazing secret that most people don’t know is that oatmeal can be prepared in dozens of ways to start, or end, your day.

You can add a little variety to this classic mainstay by adding some interesting touches, such as:
Omelette-style with eggs, avocado, and veggies
Mint, vanilla, and walnut oatmeal
Asian-style with soy sauce, mushrooms, seaweed, and sesame seeds

Frozen Yogurt

A fantastic dessert for any time of year is frozen yogurt. It can generally be prepared to be healthier than its sister food, ice cream, so that means it can make its way from time to time into your liquid or soft-food diet.

Some unique and flavorful frozen yogurts that can find their way into your bowl are:
Chai tea
Strawberry-jalapeno
Berries and goat cheese

All of these foods are great tasting and can be made great for you, (and great for your liquid or soft-food diet), but if you’re running out the door and don’t have a lot of time for a meal, you can always grab a quick smoothie or delicious liquidnutrition supplement.