Andrea Beaman is one of the most sensible and kind voices out there on the topic of feeding and treating yourself right. What other health and nutrition guru would admit to smoking the occasional cigarette (but only after a couple of drinks!), and explain it in a way that shows us how to quit all our unhealthy addictions?
Andrea was FitFam's guest on the December Member Call. Listen online (60 min) or download the mp3 below to discover:
- several healthy holiday treats
- whether short fasts during the holiday season will make things better or worse
- the mindset shift that allows anyone to "find the time" to prepare healthy food every day
- three convenience foods that can turn anyone into a healthy short-order cook on a moment's notice
- how to quit smoking by not quitting smoking
- the secret to breaking food addictions without struggling or feeling deprived
More articles like this one in: Yummm!, Radio, Q & A, Sticking with It, Weight Loss, Meals, Recipes, Food Shopping, Eating Out, Harmful Foods, Disease
Kathleen Melanson, Director of the University of Rhode Island's Energy Metabolism Laboratory, is conducting a series of brilliant and simple experiments about the connection between how fast we eat and how many calories we consume.
One experiment even got press in USA Today: 30 college-age women were asked to eat a meal of pasta and sauce with grated cheese, and a glass of water on two different occasions. One time they were asked to eat quickly, and were given a large spoon and bowl, and the other time they were asked to eat as slowly as possible, with a small spoon and bowl, and instructed to place their spoon down between bites.
The results: Keep Reading…
Q: My kids visit me (the dad) pretty much every weekend, and I'm committed to feeding them nutritious food and teaching them about being healthy. But their mom, who's responsible for them during the week, lets them eat whatever they want. I don't want their visits with me to turn into "food fights" - any advice on how to handle this situation? Keep Reading…
Q: Is it better to eat several small meals throughout the day ("grazing"), or two or three larger ones, assuming I'm getting the same number of calories either way?
A: Let's say you run a business, and one of the things you need to do is check and respond to email. If you're like almost everyone I know, you get lots and lots of emails. More than you want. More than you know what to do with. And more than you can effectively respond to with 100% accuracy and attention.
You can't just stop doing email. If you didn't communicate effectively with folks, you'd be out of business. But you can't just do email either. You do the minimum to keep you functioning, and then spend the rest of your time doing more strategic work.
Keep Reading…
Q: I want to get my boys off the fast foods, but I'm not ready to start learning how to cook. What ingredients should I definitely stay away from And are there any ingredients that sound bad but are OK? Keep Reading…
Julie's Health Club blog shared an article questioning whether Whole Foods is selling out by offering products from Coke and Pepsi (Odwalla and Fuelosophy, respectively). The post sparked a spirited discussion, and as offen happens, I found myself sort of agreeing with everyone, despite the fact that they were disagreeing with each other.
So I called my dear friend Danny Warshay, who has as good a pedigree in the natural foods business world as anyone I know. He's a serial entrepreneur, has an MBA from Harvard, years in brand management at Procter & Gamble, and five years as a founding partner of Health Business Partners, a natural foods investment and mergers and acquisions consultancy. He's now the managing director of DEW Ventures, whose portfolio includes Culinova, a "functional foods" company that seeks to put healthy and tasty in the same foods. He's met the CEOs and founders of many of the companies that product the "health foods" we see on our supermarket shelves, and helped to midwife dozens of acquisitions of these little "mission-driven" companies by much larger ones.
I recorded the call, which you can listen to online or right-click the "Download mp3" link to download to your computer or iPod: Keep Reading…
Q: How do I get a kid to change from being used to eating junk food to healthy food? Sugar and fat just make foods so much yummier and I imagine there's some major withdrawal from being used to sweet and fat foods.
A: Sugar and fat make foods yummy not because God hates us and wants us to look bad in bathing suits and spandex, but because these substances are chock full of easily digested calories. For most of history, living beings faced two big problems: getting a date on Saturday night, and getting enough food to stay alive during the famine. In those days, it made sense to load up on the calories you found in a big slab of animal fat or hanging from an extremely ripe fruit tree, because who knew if that was the last food you'd see in a week.
Keep Reading…
This recipe is based on Jennifer McCann's Banana Oatmeal Cookies. I've added sesame seeds and chocolate chips, and streamlined the process to make it a little simpler. Thanks, Jennifer!
Ingredients: Keep Reading…
These sweet, quick and completely healthy snacks are cheaper and better versions of the raw food "bars" - like LaraBars - that have sprung up everywhere and cost a pretty penny.
If you know a chocolate lover, you'll make them a friend for life with this recipe: Keep Reading…
In today's Disease-Proof Blog, Gerald Pugliese writes in a sad and amazed tone about the American love affair with fried food:
America is obsessed with fried food! And you don’t need to be a health expert to see it. Fried and deep-fried foods are all around us, from French fries to deep-fried Twinkies, Oreos, and Coca-Cola—like drinking it isn’t bad enough. Yes America, we’ve got a frying fetish!
Never is it more evident than at local carnivals and state fairs.
Well, your intrepid FitFam blogger has done the unthinkable: I went undercover to the North Carolina State Fair last month, and managed to capture these exclusive photos of ACTUAL signs advertising ACTUAL fried foods that I could smell, see, and get that tickling feeling in the back of my throat that preceeds an urgent need to vomit.
I'm no Morgan Spurlock, willing to actually put it into my body, but I still think it took a lot of intestinal fortitude (literally!) to take these pictures. Gerald, please sit down before viewing… Keep Reading…
