Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

I LOVE this commercial for the new Weight Watchers plan:

I’ve always felt at war with the part of myself that wants to eat EVERYTHING. Seeing hunger personified by that furry orange thing was so motivating to me. It was like Weight Watchers gave a body to the demon that has haunted me my entire life. With that fluffy and orange body, it is so much easier to see the constant desire to binge as a pathetic monster that needs to be ignored and shunned.

Via: Funnymoods: Weight Watchers has a new program and it’s called Momentum

Last year, I wrote a weekly plan to get you on track for a healthy and active life. If you followed the plan last week, then here is the link to this week’s plan:

• Starling Fitness » New Year’s Resolutions: Week 3

The Short Version:

• Reduce your daily caloric average by 100 calories. Write down EVERYTHING you eat including measurements and calories.
• Avoid the feeling of deprivation by finding non-food activities to nurture yourself.
• Eat three or four servings of vegetables every day.
• Save enough calories to eat one serving of dairy products each day.
• Increase your mileage. Walk 1.0 miles five days this week. You are allowed to increase your speed to the point of sweating, but if you are sore the next day you MUST go slow again.
• Give yourself kudos for coming this far.

Last year, I wrote a weekly plan to get you on track for a healthy and active life. If you followed the plan last week, then here is the link to this week’s plan:

• Starling Fitness » New Year’s Resolutions: Week 2

The Short Version:

• DO NOT change your eating regime at all, but write down EVERYTHING you eat, including the measurements (i.e. 1 cup of rice) and calories.
• You are allowed to ADD two or three servings of vegetables every day, but you are not allowed to restrict anything in your diet.
• Increase your mileage. Walk 0.75 miles five days this week. You are allowed to increase your speed to the point of sweating, but if you are sore the next day you MUST go slow again.
• Give yourself kudos for coming this far.

It’s a new year and I’m sure you’re all fired up to be healthy. Last year, I wrote a weekly plan to get you on track for a healthy and active life. You can get started here:

• Starling Fitness » New Year’s Resolutions: Week One

If you are ready to get going with your fitness and eating plan, start there and get started RIGHT!

If you just want the short version, here it is:

• DO NOT change your eating regime at all, but write down EVERYTHING you eat.
• You are allowed to ADD a serving or two of vegetables every day, but you are not allowed to restrict anything in your diet.
• Start exercise slowly. SLOW, SHORT and EASY. Whatever you were thinking of doing, cut it in half. Recommended exercise: Walk 0.5 miles five days this week.
• Check with your doctor.

There are a lot of ways to keep track of the food you eat, but one of the simplest ideas is to use Twitter as a food journal. Since you can send a tweet from a computer or your cell phone, Twitter is with you WHEREVER you go. It’s pure genius.

For those of you not familiar with Twitter, it’s a social network site that asks the simple question, “What are you doing?” You have 140 characters to state what you are doing all day long. One of the most simple ways to keep track of your food is to use Twitter.

If you already have a Twitter account, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/lauramoncur/.

For a tutorial on how to set up an account, please read more: (more…)

As you’re enjoying the holiday today, remember to:

• Keep the meals light: No matter what is served at Christmas you can keep your meals light by choosing small portions. Don’t deny yourself the traditional foods that you only get once a year, but keep the portion size SMALL and you’ll give yourself a present this year.

• Put away the food after the meal: Leaving the food out is an invitation to graze all day long. After the meal is over, put the food away.

• Take a walk with your family after Christmas Dinner: You’ll burn off some of the calories and prevent food coma.

• Play in the snow with the kids: Christmas is the one time of the year when parents actually PLAY with their children. Make it an active time and throw some snowballs or built a snow fort in the backyard.

• Remember it’s a holiDAY, not a holiWEEK: Christmas is ONE day. Don’t continue celebrating with food after today is over.

As always, have a happy holiday and be here bright and early tomorrow morning for more inspiration!

You can only buy Clementines during this time of the year, and lately, you can only buy them in a HUGE bag. I’ve talked about Clementines before:

• Starling Fitness » Clementine Season

My favorite aspect of clementines is how easy they are to peel and the fact that they have no seeds. I DON’T like that I have to buy a huge container of them instead of being able to just buy a couple at a time. The big box of clementines inevitably goes bad before I can finish them all.

NOT THIS YEAR!

This year, Mike had a great idea. We took half of the clementines, peeled them and put them in plastic bags to freeze them.

“I don’t think you can freeze citrus,” I told Mike. “They’re going to go bad anyway, so let’s just try it,” he replied, “Maybe they’ll be like frozen grapes.”

Just last week, I tried using the frozen clementines in a smoothie and they worked PERFECTLY!

Clementine Smoothie

• 1 cup frozen clementine sections
• 1 cup skim milk
• 2 tsps of healthy oil (I like to sneak it into treats so I don’t notice it)
• 1 packet of Stevia (or Splenda) – optional (most of the time the clementines are sweet enough)

Put all the ingredients into the blender and mix on high until smooth.

1 serving – Approximately 250 calories – 5 WW Points – 2 fruit, 2 oil and 1 milk serving.

The smoothie tasted like a healthy dreamsicle, and I LOVE that I get to check off so many boxes on my food journal.

Clementines are only available for a short time each year, so make sure you grab a bag of them and enjoy them both fresh AND frozen.

I had never heard of freezing grapes until about five years ago. We had just moved into our present house and the back yard had grape vines. We had so many grapes that there was no possible way for us to eat them all. A friend of mine recommended that we freeze them.

You don’t have to do anything special, you just wash them, pull them off the vine and freeze them in a ziploc bag. You can take them out later, defrost them to eat. You can eat them frozen (my favorite after a hot workout). You can put them in smoothies to make delicious grape shakes. Here is my recipe for that:

Grape Smoothie

• 1 cup frozen grapes
• 1 cup skim milk
• 2 tsps of healthy oil (I like to sneak it into treats so I don’t notice it)
• 1 packet of Stevia (or Splenda) – optional (most of the time the grapes are sweet enough)

Put all the ingredients into the blender and mix on high until smooth.

1 serving – Approximately 250 calories – 5 WW Points – 2 fruit, 2 oil and 1 milk serving.

Without frozen grapes, eating healthy would be much more difficult for me. If you are having a hard time getting all your fruit servings in, get a bunch of grapes today and freeze them in one cup bags today. Then all you need to do each day is take out one bag and you knock out two servings in one punch.

I have been racking my brain trying to think of easy things to cook just like the Mexi-Beans and the Italian Beans. This week, I came up with this one.

Refried Beans – 5 Points – Serves 3

Ingredients

• 1 can of fat-free refried beans
• 1 small can of corn
• 1 bottle of salsa
• 3/4 cup of shredded cheese
• 3 tsp of Mexican seasoning
• 3 Glad or Ziploc bowls

Directions

• Open the can of refried beans and divide among the three bowls.
• Drain the can of corn and divide among the three bowls.
• Open the bottle of salsa and divide between the three bowls. This is ALOT of salsa, so if you’re sensitive to spiciness, make sure you choose the mild.
• Add 1 tsp of Mexican seasoning to each bowl. You can also spice it up with Tabasco sauce, taco sauce packets from Taco Bell, etc.
• Add 1/4 cup shredded cheese to each bowl.
• Cover the bowls and put them in the fridge.

When it’s time to eat, pull out a bowl from the fridge, crack the lid and cook in the microwave for 2 minutes. This recipe makes three meals and it’s EASY!

I usually heat one up immediately (only takes one minute when everything is at room temperature) and then store the other two for later. I count this as one protein, one dairy and two veggies. It’s a little more points than Mexi-Beans, but it’s a nice change of pace so I don’t get bored eating the same thing all the time.

This funny photo from Lolcats says everything:

It reads:

Diet: Fish (on the thin cat)
Diet: Birds (on the thin cat)
Diet: Yorkshire Terriers (on the medium sized cat)
Diet: Cheezburgers (on the fat cat)

Sometimes I like to believe that no one can tell what I have been eating. If they didn’t see me eat it, they can’t tell, right?

Wrong.

They can tell EXACTLY how I eat just by LOOKING at me. My body reveals my diet far more readily than I like to believe.