4 Delicious Post-Workout Snacks For Recovery

Post workout is an ideal time to eat a small meal with both protein and carbohydrates to help repair and build muscles and replenish your energy stores, respectively. It’s best to eat within 60 minutes of finishing a workout because that’s when your muscles are most receptive.

Chocolate Milk

Chocolate milk is an awesome post-workout snack and it’s delicious, too. I like Organic Valley chocolate milk served ice cold after I go for a long run or do a power Vinyasa class. I pour it over a large glass of ice and savor it as I cool off. Research also shows that drinking chocolate milk after a strenuous workout may help lessen muscle damage and aid in recovery.

Strawberries and Cream

The cream is healthy Greek yogurt sweetened with stevia. I love Fage 2% Greek yogurt mixed with a small dash of stevia (or sweetener of your choice) topped with sliced strawberries. Or you can make a dip and swirl each strawberry in it. Greek yogurt is loaded with protein—between 15 and 20 grams per container depending on the brand and size—and strawberries have antioxidants that can also protect your cells against damage.

Banana Smoothie

Bananas are chock full of potassium which helps keep your muscles from cramping. Potassium is the main electrolyte that powers muscles and adding it to a whey protein shake makes for an amazing recovery drink. Whey’s amino acids are quickly absorbed by muscles boosting recovery and growth. I make mine with 1 scoop of whey protein powder, 1 frozen banana, ice, and unsweetened vanilla almond milk.

Strong & Kind Roasted Jalapeno Bar

This new bar from Kind has 10 grams of protein and it’s made with 100% whole ingredients: almonds, pumpkin seeds, hemp seeds, pea crisps (made with pea protein isolate), and spices. The jalapeno flavor has a great kick to it and there’s no weird, chalky artificial taste like some protein bars have. Almonds are a good source of vitamin E and antioxidants which can help fight damage caused by inflammation. I find this bar is perfect after a strength-training workout as I always crave something savory after a good sweat. Great for when you’re on the road and need to pack something with you easily.

5 Super Great Foods that Should be in Your Daily Diet Today!

Superfoods! You’ve heard the term bandied about, often breathlessly. While it may sometimes be treated like the magical edible stuff of comic book characters and mythic heroes, this class of foods is really just exceptionally nutritious and healthful. Superfoods generally contain both exceptional amounts of healthy nutrients and exotically named compounds that do indeed do superhero-like things, such as prevent cancer.

Best of all, many of these superfoods are delicious too.

1. Eat Nuts, Resist Death

If you’ve cut nuts out of your diet because someone convinced you that they were making you gain weight, then have fun dying young. That may sound dramatic, but the verdict reached by a recent study on the health benefits of eating nuts is unequivocal: Nut consumption reduces the risk of death.

Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the research found that eating just a handful of nuts a day—any kind of nuts!—decreased people’s risk of dying from any cause by 20 percent over the course of 30 years.

Also! People who regularly eat nuts weigh less.

2. Quinoa's Here to Stay

This week the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Committee announced that 2014 is officially the International Year of Family Farming. We’re still a month and change away from the new year, but the end of the International Year of Quinoa is nigh.

Don’t expect that to bring an end to people gushing over all things quinoa.

Thing is, this pseudo-cereal—it’s a seed that behaves like a grain—is a nutritional wonder. Not only is it a complete protein, containing all nine amino acids (a feat no other plant-based food achieves), but it packs a ton of that essential nutrient into its small, tidy package: One cup of quinoa contains a full 8 grams of protein. The same amount of brown rice only contains 5 grams. Furthermore, quinoa sports significant amounts of calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, and iron.

3. Pour On the Olive Oil

If you’re inclined to feel guilty whenever you add an extra pat of butter to something bubbling away on the stovetop, you should cultivate the exact opposite response for those times when you drizzle on more olive oil. See, this is the kind of fat you should be consuming more of. A key component of the Mediterranean Diet, olive oil has been shown to help fend off all sorts of health ills: cancer, heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, and more.

The latest research on olive oil and the Mediterranean Diet should be of particular interest to women: Consuming olive oil in concert with whole grains, vegetables, fish, and nuts gives women “a 40 percent greater chance of living past the age of 70 with no cognitive or physical ailments and no chronic diseases.”

4. Kale Loves You, but Do You Love Kale Back?

There it is, in your salad, fighting cancer with its sulforaphane. And it’s over there, in your juice, supplying you with more of vitamins A and C then you need in one day. And again, at dinner, kale appears on your plate, sautéed with garlic and chile, finished with a touch of lemon, providing you with the bile acid sequestrants your body can use to lower cholesterol and help avoid absorbing dietary fats.

So the question is, What have you done for kale lately?

5. Got Goji?

The raisin-like dried fruits of two Chinese species of boxthorn are widely extolled for their health properties. Since the fruit became popular in the West, there’s been some debate over its superfood status. Some say that with its astronomically high concentration of vitamin C and many antioxidants, it’s a godsend. Others call it a marketing scam. But goji has centuries of traditional Chinese medicine to back up its healthful rep. Just keep that history in mind when you eat goji berries: In China, they’re treated as a healthful food, something to be cooked and eaten alongside other ingredients—not something to gorge on exclusively simply because it's good for you. 

Source: http://www.takepart.com/photos/five-superfoods/got-goji?cmpid=tpfood-eml-2013-11-30-super

Power up your brain w/ these 5 Steps for a better breakfast

Does every morning start like a scene out of Zombieland—and you’re the zombie? Skipping breakfast may be to blame. 


A review of 134 breakfast studies conducted by the University of Leeds in the UK found that your memory, problem-solving skills, verbal fluency, and several other measures of cognitive ability all suffer when you miss the most important meal of the day.


New research provides a road map that can help you get the most from your breakfast and your brain every morning.


5 Steps for a better breakfast

1. Protein power. Eating a protein-rich breakfast resulted in a nearly 20 percent boost in brain activity compared to either no breakfast or a breakfast high in sugar, Japanese research shows. That’s because protein, unlike sugar, provides your brain with a consistent energy source, the study says. Eggs are a great source of hunger-quelling protein, not to mention a lot of other good stuff.
2. A "better" source of caffeine. A recent study from the University of Bristol in the UK found that just 20 to 30 milligrams (mg) of caffeine boosts brainpower—regardless of how alert the subjects felt. That’s about 100 mg less than your average cup of coffee. Higher doses didn't provide any additional brain boost. So have a small amount of dark chocolate in the morning. Research has shown dark chocolate improves blood flow and cholesterol levels, and may even help you lose weight. One ounce—or about two 1-inch squares—containing 70 to 85 percent cocoa packs roughly 25 mg of caffeine. (For more great food choices, hit me up and I'll be happy to help)

Snacking Associated With Healthier Overall Diet

It seems counter intuitive to suggest that people should be snacking more but a study published in the November 14, 2011, edition of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association concluded that increased snacking could positively impact overall diet quality.

 

Claire A. Zizza, PhD, associate professor of nutrition at Auburn University in Alabama, and co-author Beibei Xu, PhD, found that people who snack between meals tend to have healthier diets than those who stick to eating only at regular mealtimes. Study subjects who snacked more frequently consumed less sodium and ate more fruit, whole grains and milk than their counterparts. In addition, the more subjects snacked, the more likely they were to eat both healthy snacks and healthy meals. Still, frequent snackers fell short of eating enough vegetables, and the overall healthiness of the study participants' diets left room for improvement.

Zizza and Xu used data from 11,209 people aged 20 and older who participated between 1999 and 2004 in the larger National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which includes interviews and physical exams. The researchers used a standard scoring system that ranks the healthiness of diets on a scale from 1 to 100 (100 being healthiest). They discovered that the more times a day people snacked, the higher they tended to score. Those who reported never snacking scored 49.3, on average, while those who snacked four or more times a day averaged 51.6.