Not To Pick on Anyone…

Off the top of my head, I remember reading the well known “Body for Life” book some years ago, which offers some great approaches to interval training, but always getting disheartened at the nutritional suggestions — not because they weren’t solid in terms of eating well, just because they were so sparse, always feeling like something you’d be served in prison.

We’re talking plates of whole wheat pasta with a tiny sprinkling of lemon juice. A very minimalist approach to improving the taste of anything. Austere, spartan meals that made me think they could be eaten in a cold, antiseptic gym (if you were so inclined).

Forget the oil, cheese, sauce, fun cooking, interesting variety — this was the ultimate notion of food as purely fuel and little else.

Is Gas Romantic?

Think of all the rich, wonderful connotations that “fuel” provides. It makes you think of cars, oil rigs, “There Will Be Blood”, and the wonderful smell of gas stations. Why associate this with what should be an enjoyable experience, one we get to do over and over again, 3+ times a day?

The Temptations of Science

When we’re doing exercise for cool, complex, detailed reasons — because interval training gets our post-workout oxygen consumption level higher, or because we’re trying to propel our bodies into an ideal fat-burning state, there’s a temptation to see what we eat as simply substance that goes in, gives us energy, and fuels our exercise. That’s cool, to a certain extent, except when it becomes the primary way we see our food.

We’ve written about the importance of ceremony when it comes to food — about how sitting down and eating your meals at a table, which for some can seem like an impossible or overly superficial solution, can add an extra element of gravitas necessary to something (eating) that you might otherwise be ignoring.

Breaking Our Own Rules

Hell, we’ve probably used “food as fuel” dozens of times in our previous articles, and there’s no doubt we’ll do it again. We’re trying hard to give you good advice that isn’t blindly hewed to one specific side or another, so we’re definitely not saying stop thinking about “food as fuel” forever.

It’s more that our mental approach to fitness and nutrition can often be so ingrained and feel so natural that we don’t realize how much its tropes are influencing how we eat, how we see food, and how we work out in relation to it. And we’re trying to challenge some of those notions.

Do You See Food as ‘Fuel’?

Tell us about it! Do you get a kick thinking about fruits & vegetables powering your body like gas powers a car? Or does the metaphor strike you as inadequate, ignorant of food’s centrality in our lives? There’s no right answer here, but if we know you, there could be a phenomenal discussion in store.

You don’t have to follow one particular example of it, and really you don’t have to follow it at all, if you don’t want to, but being here in Malta and seeing directly how people eat so differently from North America has just made us want to write about it constantly. So we started thinking of three ways you can get some of the best things about the diet without upending everything about your current routine.

Savor Your Meat By Making it Scarce and Expensive.

When you have chicken or beef several times a week, you not only cease to make it a special meal, but you also simply eat it too much. If you steer your weekly meals around vegetables and grains, the few times you have meat, you’ll be able to enjoy it that much more often.

One of the best ways to do this? Buy better meat. Go out and buy some delicious, premium quality, grass-fed, beyond-organic steaks from your local butcher. Or get some really good prosciutto from the Italian shop and do something with that. Decide to spend some real money on meat, ignore the feedlot stuff, and watch as your financial commitment forces you to slow down and really enjoy the meat you’re eating.

Create Your Own Junk Food.

This is one of Michael Pollan’s new Food Rules, and it’s perfect, really. There’s no question that people following the Mediterranean diet eat what we might call “junk” food — you’ve got your potato chips, your french fries, your varieties of donuts.

Seriously, every European culture basically has a version of deep-fried dough with sugar on it that they trot out for the dozens of festivals celebrated each year, and these things all taste a bit different and are called a billion different things and are fundamentally bad for you in terms of the amount of fat & sugar in them, but hey — they’re homemade, they actually spoil, and they take work to prepare, so you can’t just sit there, sucking them back on a daily basis.

Make a Pledge to the Good Fats

North Americans eat way too much “vegetable oil”. Most of it is inserted/injected into products and we don’t really find out what kind of vegetable is providing this oil. Could be corn, could be something else. Lord knows it’s not extra virgin olive-oil, as anyone using that on the label will trumpet it loud and clear, and it’ll be reflected in the price.

But here’s the thing: good quality olive oil isn’t that much more expensive outside of Italy or elsewhere. So much of it is exported that the prices are down, and it’s not hard to find it at a slight premium. Take a little vow — if you’re going to eat “vegetable oil”, make sure it’s only olive oil.

Why These Little Restrictions Are Easier to Do

It’s a lot easier to explain to someone that you’ve “decided to cut out X” or “are eliminating Y” from your diet, than to announce a whole-scale change in every last thing you eat. We try and cut out fats or cut down on carbs all the time — why not pick an ingredient or two instead? It’s kinda fun, restricting yourself like this, and watching the changes that result.

Pick a “meat night”, announce you only eat junk food you make from scratch, or skip 100% of the foods that have just “vegetable oil” on them. With little steps like these, you’ll be on your way to eating better in no time.

Mediterranean Readers — Over to You!

We’ve got a lot of readers from all around the Mediterranean and beyond — so tell us: what are your favorite things about your own diet? Or if you’ve visited or stayed in Spain, Italy, Greece, and so on — what did you notice the most about eating habits there?

Simple as that, really — there is not.

At the end of our article on Domino’s Pizza, we asked you to talk about some of the things you hate when it comes to food marketing, and one thing that got mentioned a whole lot was this new campaign from Taco Bell — the drive-through diet.

Yes, the Drive-Through Diet.

We wanted to point out one of the main, crazy marketing ideas that they’re using with this campaign — the idea that there is anything diet-related about eating fast food (to be fair, Taco Ball insists that the word ‘diet’ is being used in the general sense, as in what you eat every day, but we all know that’s not how the marketing intends it to be interpreted).

You already know where we stand on diets in general — the way they’re sold to us nowadays, a ‘diet’ just doesn’t really work — take a look at our article on ‘easing’ yourself into eating ‘real food’ on a regular basis for some of our reasons why.

What Are The Fundamentals of Fast Food?

But beyond that, it’s the notion of how fast food restaurants can offer any kind of ‘diet’ products and still make people want to come back for more. Remember, fast food is:

• Cheap
• Full of things that make you want to eat it again
• Fast

All these things are (mostly) incompatible with good eating, at least on the scale the fast food restaurants operate on.

First, It’s not very easy to make healthy food for an extremely cheap, centralized price. Second, it also takes a bit of work (more than the average fast food employee is ever paid to do) in order to make food enjoyable. Fast food replaces that with chemicals, salt, and fat. And finally, it’s fast as anything, meaning you barely notice yourself eating it, often not even at a table, until suddenly it’s all gone.

How Can These Be Made ‘Diet‘?

So how do the companies sell anything, using this model, that might be considered ‘healthy’ for you?

It’s easy — increase the sodium. Crank up the salt, to hide the fact that you removed all the carbs/fat/whatever, and trumpet the lack of fat. Don’t talk about the salt, though. Oh Lord, whatever you do, don’t mention the salt.

Here’s a choice quotation from Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, who did some research on fast food companies’ more ‘healthy’ offerings:

“When we take these other things out of food we often add back salt, and the salt is so far in excess of what would be considered a healthy quantity that it definitely counteracts any healthy benefits.”

And from the same useful New York Times article, we’ve got a spokesman for Taco Bell, talking specifically about this drive-thru diet. What does he say? Well: he said “his company was hoping to reduce the sodium in its main ingredients without sacrificing taste.”

Notice the word choice there — was hoping. They’re still working on it. And they’ll be working on it for a while, because there’s just no feasible way for these guys to offer healthy, cheap, ultra-centralized food that doesn’t have some serious, serious caveat.

Should We Trust Fast Food Companies?

And finally, a good piece of advice from Elizabeth Somer, a dietitian quoted in the same article:

“The fast-food restaurants have not led the troops in healthy eating yet, so there’s no reason to believe they’re going to change their colors now.”

That’s a key point right there — why trust a business that made all its money selling fat, salty, unhealthy products in gargantuan proportions in the first place?

You Only Gotta Remember Two Things.

And so speaking of ‘the basics’, it seems like all of Michael Pollan’s recent work is about the useful simplification of his previous ideas. He’s gone from the long Omnivore’s Dilemma right down to Food Rules, which is more of a handbook. And in some of the interviews he’s been giving for his new book, he’s talked about how there are only really “two things you need to know” about how a large portion of the world eats today.

In other words, he’s boiled down his hundreds of pages of research, dozens of unbelievable facts about the industrialized food process, organics, feedlots, and nutritionism into two fundamental facts that everyone needs to take away from all this — a kind of starting point.

What Are They?

So — what are the two ‘fundamentals’ Pollan has been talking about? If you’ve been reading us (or him) regularly, it’s nothing you haven’t heard before, but it bears repeating:

#1: Any society that eats the ‘western’ diet (processed foods, a lot of meat, fat and sugar beyond what is normal, refined instead of whole grains) gets ‘western’ diseases.

and…

#2: Any society that follows a ‘traditional’ diet (no one diet in specific, just anything that came ‘organically’ from human culture rather than the industrial food complex of the past 60 years) has far lower rates of these diseases, or in some cases barely sees them at all.

Cause or Coincidence?

I mean hey  — let me play the devil’s advocate for a second here. There are surely other factors at work here, right? There are other lifestyle choices that come along with ‘industrialized’ diets, and maybe it’s those things that cause the diseases, and not the diet. Or maybe ‘traditional’ diets take a lot of physical work to prepare, and that’s what keeps heart attacks down, or… well, you get the picture.

Pollan is telling us no. It’s not just correlation, it’s causation. That one thing (the western diet) is, according to all the research he can muster, not just coincidentally linked to western diseases, but actually a cause of them.

Do Scare Tactics Work?

We’ve talked about how scare tactics don’t help smokers quit, and in the same vein, worrying about diseases probably won’t help you change your diet, either. But look at it in a positive way, instead — if you do change it, you’ll be emulating all those societies that follow the traditional diet, that don’t have to deal with the unbelievable consequences of those diseases (as much) because they just don’t seem to be afflicted at the same rate. When you consider it like that, well, hey — it could change everything.

Is There a ‘Late Night Eating’ Myth?

If we’d been writing this article a few months ago, there’s no doubt we would have quoted a few common responses online, and told you that in the end, there’s zero evidence to support time-of-day eating theories. A calorie in is a calorie out, in other words, and your body doesn’t process food or calories different when you’re sleeping than when you’re awake.

If you do a search online, you’ll find lots of evidence for this theory. Take a quick look at these quotations:

The common assumption is that eating late at night will not give your body the chance to burn off the calories and you will gain weight. The truth is that your body processes calories the same way at night and during the day. The problem with late-night eating is that people tend to indulge in junk food rather than something healthy and that is what leads to weight gain.

— askmen.com

There is no magic time after which the body stores fat. For instance, if you eat the same exact meal at 6 pm or at 8 pm, is one more caloric than the other? No, each meal has the same number of calories. What really matters is the total amount of food and drink you have over the course of a week, or a month or longer, and how much energy you expend during that timeframe.

— Columbia University

This is a very commonly-believed weight loss myth. But it doesn’t really matter when you eat, only how many calories you eat and burn in a day. Whether you’re eating in the morning or at midnight, your body turns any extra calories into fat.

— about.com

So It Seems Like a Myth. But Hold On…

But then, hang a second — there’s a BBC article floating around from last September that seems to go against what all these studies are saying:

Scientists found that when mice ate at unusual hours, they put on twice as much weight, despite exercising and eating as much as others.

The study, in the journal Obesity, is said to be the first to show directly that there is a “wrong” time to eat.

In the end, what does this tell us? We have one study that shows a definite link in mice. We have lots of other studies (some with monkeys) that show no link whatsoever. And we have lots of circumstantial evidence that points to bad eating habits getting worse at night. That shouldn’t really be a surprise — when we aren’t sitting down for a proper meal, but rather just scarfing food out of the fridge, all those things that kick in: portion control, the sense of taking more time to eat, talking with someone else at the table — they just aren’t there.

Everyone’s a Scientist (Including Us!)

But there’s a larger issue here: we’re at risk of being snowed over by studies and facts, and there’s nothing like a good diet study to make everyone (ourselves included) an amateur scientist. Really, is there any other aspect of our lives in which we trumpet (or parrot, or dismiss) the results of scientific studies so much as with diet and exercise?

I’m not trying to push an anti-science approach, but there have been tons of studies that both prove and disprove many of the big nutritional theories out there. Michael Pollan addresses this science-fixation quite well in In Defence of Food — he says America “knows more” about what it eats than any other nation in the world, and yet it eats worse than nearly all of them. Again, read all the studies you want, but always remember that the media loves to hype up what looks like a definitive myth-smashing or myth-confirmation study, often at the expense of coherency.

The Internet Makes it Easy to Prove Either Side.

Just as a reminder, if you search online for “eating late at night”, you’ll get two BBC articles on the first page of results. One is called ‘Eating at night myth exploded’, and the other is called ‘Eating late at night adds weight‘. Both report scientific studies in a way that’s accessible to the general public. One is right, one is wrong; or wait — both are wrong. Or maybe both are right.

In the end, we think it’s best to move past the minutia of studying mice and monkeys to figure out if it’s a good idea to eat that sandwich at 2AM. If you’re doing everything else right, eating well and with lots of variety, in moderation, and working out, these are the kinds of debates you can start to forget about.

What About Spain?

After all, there’s a very healthy Mediterranean country out there by the name of Spain. They eat notoriously late, but they also eat very well. While obesity has doubled in Spain over the last 23 years, it’s not due to some epidemic of late eating, which has gone on for a very long time. Rather it’s the same old culprits — prepared and fast food, and increased ignorance of traditional cuisine.

So — if you’re already eating well, you probably don’t have much to worry about. On the other hand, there is some new evidence that suggests cutting out late night eating might make a big difference — to both the healthy and the not-so-much among us.

Over to You!

We’re curious about your experiences — have any of you cut out eating late at night? Did it make a difference? Are there any of you following a great nutritional plan, exercising regularly, who still hit the fridge (or eat meals) really late, with no effect? Are you in a country (like Spain, or Italy) that eats dinner closer to 9PM than 6PM? Tell us about it!

This is a recipe that I came up with over the holidays. Frederick loves it and encouraged me to share it here with you guys. I hope you will enjoy this meal. It is really delicious! Let me know how you like it.

You will need: Whole grain bread chopped in pieces, chicken breasts (1/2kg) chopped in pieces, butter, apple, large tomato, broccoli, celery, mushrooms, green or red pepper, 2 large onions, 4 garlic cloves, mixed nuts with raisons or just walnuts. Spices: sage, oregano, thyme, nutmeg, black pepper, cayenne pepper, salt.

Saute one large onion with a little bit of olive oil in a large pot.

Add chicken breasts, salt, pepper, a piece of butter and 2 or 3 glasses of water. Cover with a lid and let it cook until the chicken is done. Tip: a little more butter will give it a really nice taste.

Chop up all of the fruit, veggies and mushrooms except the garlic – this goes in later.

Saute the mix on a skillet. Add a little piece of butter and the spices. You can experiment with the amount of each spice. Be careful with the cayenne pepper so that you don’t make it too hot.

Add about 3 handfuls of mixed nuts with raisons into the skillet and saute until the vegetables are soft.

Put the bread pieces in the casserole bowl. I used 3 whole grain buns. When the chicken is ready, pour the sauce over the bread and mix the chicken with the bread.

Add the garlic cloves chopped in little pieces and mix it in. You can grate some cheese over the top. I used the Gozo goat cheese which is delicious – the only goat cheese that I actually like. Put it in the preheated oven (230°C ) and leave it there for 15 to 20 minutes until the cheese is melted on the top or until the bread on the top is crunchy. You have to watch it, because it is easy to burn the top.

This is what my small portion looks like. Plan your meal according to your daily activities. Are you going to sit infront of your computer for the next 3 hours? Then you should eat a really small portion and include more vegetables. Are you going to be active? If this is the case then take a slightly larger portion.

]]> http://www.bodyrock.tv/2010/02/02/farmers-chicken-recipe/feed/ 224 http://www.bodyrock.tv/2010/01/30/should-i-be-drinking-a-crazy-amount-of-water-every-day/ http://www.bodyrock.tv/2010/01/30/should-i-be-drinking-a-crazy-amount-of-water-every-day/#comments Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:45:18 +0000 Frederick http://www.bodyrock.tv/?p=6528 The “8 glasses of water per day” argument gets thrown around a lot in pretty much every diet/nutrition/piece of advice you can find. Your doctor has probably suggested it too. But is it really necessary? Is it the right amount?

Here’s the thing — there was a study published in 2008 from the University of Pennsylvania (click here for the link), which suggested that a lot of the big claims that get attached to drinking large amounts of water — weight loss, cleansing toxins, stopping headaches, keeping your skin healthier — had very little evidence behind them.

So — should we still be drinking all this water, if it’s not solving all those problems we thought it was?

MOST DEFINITELY.

There are two main reasons for doing so.

1. If you’re following any of the exercises on the site, you are sweating, and you are doing some intense physical activity. There is absolutely no doubt that you need a lot of water to keep your body hydrated. If you’re exercising in any way, drinking water is beyond fundamental. The nutritional boards of most countries suggest somewhere between 1 to 2 litres per day for an ‘average-sized’ person. But do remember — if you have a big mug of tea, that (mostly) counts towards your quota, too. We’ll explain why below. But first, to reason #2:

2. While huge amounts of water don’t contribute directly to weight loss, consuming a good amount of water can temper your hunger — a lot of which is mental, anyway. If you eat out of habit, or too often, try switching to water (sparkling, if regular water bores you terribly), and your “hunger” suddenly won’t be as bad.

Those Water Drinking Myths.

What some of these recent studies found is that we still manage to take in a lot of water during the day, and that many of the common things we hear about ‘diuretics’ aren’t really that severe. Stop me if you’ve heard this one — “drinking coffee, even though it’s full of water, doesn’t give you any of the ‘benefits’ of water.”

It gets even crazier — it often feels like coffee and tea are placed on the same level as beer. Now beer is definitely a water-based drink that will make you dehydrated, because the amount of times it will send you to the bathroom (and all the other fun things alcohol does to your body and brain) can throw your fluid intake right off, especially if you drink a lot of it.

But when you drink 8 cups of coffee in a day, your body is still receiving a huge amount of the water that’s in that coffee. The presence of some ground coffee beans doesn’t suddenly render that water completely useless — the real issue is simply the 8 cups of coffee per day. That’s a lot of caffeine, and probably a lot of milk and sugar for some, too.

If you can replace half or more of those coffees with water (we know, it’s not easy), 99% of the benefit will come from reducing the coffee/milk/sugar/caffeine intake, not from some inherent, magic quality ascribed to huge amounts of water. But that argument applies to a lot of diet-related issues — it’s not always the positive qualities of the new food/drink that matter, as much as the reduction of the old, harmful one.

What to Avoid!

• Flavored water drinks with extra ingredients.
• Energy/Sports drinks.

When you start downing these — especially the sports drinks — after a workout, you’re looking to rehydrate yourself, which makes it all the more likely that you’ll over-consume what is essentially a sugar-filled soda. Besides — we should save our sugar intake for something that tastes better, anyway — something we can eat in relative peace — without the post-workout demands of our body bearing down on us.

Let’s Talk About It.

We’re not trying to be intentionally controversial — even if some of the claims are a bit dubious, the drink lots of water claim is fundamentally good and sound in the end. And there’s no discounting the placebo effect, either — if we feel like lots of water is making us healthier, it probably is, even if it’s not doing everything the claims always say.

But we still want to know — what do you think? Feel free to start a conversation in the comments. We love reading everything you have to say, especially when tons of different viewpoints get involved!

Domino’s is Admitting Their Old Pizza Was No Good.

I’m not begrudging Domino’s marketing department (or whatever ad agency thought this up) — it takes some serious cojones to admit the one product you built your nationwide brand on isn’t really that good, and there isn’t exactly a storied tradition of companies doing this to great effect (New Coke).

But what really grabbed me was this — there’s something great about finding a new way to see an aspect of our lives (in this case, food): something that always used to trick you every time is suddenly exposed for what it is, and you feel like you’re seeing it, with all its flaws, for the first time.

What Domino’s is Trying to Convince Us Of.

Before, I might have watched the skillfully put-together documentary up on the Domino’s site and accepted some of its more subtle conclusions without batting an eye. Stuff like:

• Professional chefs in white robes prepare Domino’s pizza
• Said pizza is prepared in what seems like a kitchen
• Real ingredients appear to be involved
• Domino’s employs people who have been ‘making pizza’ for 25 years
• They care about more than just “adding a little something to the recipe”

Even though I know Domino’s is, at heart, a fast-food franchise, you might have had me fooled (or at least curious) with that video, at least before. Now, though, after Food, Inc., and Michael Pollan, and all the conversation and discovery we’ve had here on the site about real food, I only see one thing in this video. And what is that?

Cheap centralization.

This Isn’t A Restaurant, It’s a Corporate HQ!

Nothing about this video says ‘food’. Rather, it’s a test kitchen on a corporate campus, or maybe just in a studio somewhere. It seems more like… a laboratory than a pizza joint.

And that’s the point — it is a lab. The sauce has sugar. The cheese has to last for months. The ham is cured with 5 different sodium-based curing agents. The sausage has corn syrup solids. God knows where the vegetables come from.

All of this stuff is sorted out at the corporate HQ, delivered from a central facility, nickel-and-dimed to the last degree to maximize return, and then marketed as great, honest pizza, made by passionate people who care about “really good ingredients,” which is probably why the first ingredient for Domino’s ‘white sauce’ is soybean oil, along with 7 other preservatives.

If an honest marketing campaign just went ahead and showed us the factory where all those ingredients are put together (yeah, this’ll happen), we might be a little closer to reality.

You Want Real Pizza?

In the meantime, take a look at this video right here (colorful language warning!). This is an example of pizza with passion, of true care about ingredients, of a dedication to ‘real’ food that can’t survive elaborate franchising and centralization.

It’s a great feeling — being able to decode, however simply, the truth behind the way our food is advertised, and the more you do it, the better you’ll eat.

What Food Marketing Drives You Nuts?

Have any examples to share of crazy food marketing that really drives you crazy? Typical food-like substances trying their hardest to convince you that they’re wonderful for you? Share them with us — there’s nothing we like more than a good comment venting session!

So our main question is not whether we should ever drink milk again, but rather three smaller questions:

1. How much milk should we drink?
2. Is it important to drink skim, 1%, or low-fat milk?
3. Is organic milk really that much better for us?

The first thing we noticed is that there are no solid, set-in-stone answers to these questions. They’re complicated, and there are a lot of interests at stake here — milk is a big, fundamental food product, one that’s a big part of many people’s lives, and it’s definitely more complicated than just saying a simple yes/no.

How much milk should I drink?

If we look back at our own childhoods, there was no other drink that played as much of a role as milk did. Many parents never put any restrictions on how much of it we could drink, and the idea of a tall, cold, refreshing glass of 2% still has huge appeal for a lot of us.

But after reading some thoughts on the issue, and looking at the nutritional content, we think milk should be considered not an essential drink you can overindulge with (which is often how it’s marketed), but rather something that can be enjoyed in moderation.

The Got Milk? campaigns and various advisory boards have done a pretty fantastic marketing job over the years, and the idea of a tall glass of milk as fundamental for nutrients and calcium is practically ingrained into some of our minds. But it’s still marketing — milk isn’t exactly a miracle drink, and it’s got lots of calories and a not-insigificant quantity of fat.

That brings us to the second question.

Should we stick to skim milk?

We couldn’t really get a clear verdict on this one, so the common sense route is likely your best bet here. If you’re drinking milk in moderation (ie., not treating it like water), say in a coffee or two, then drinking anything between skim and whole milk is not going to make a gigantic difference, and you can pretty safely go with what you enjoy.

If, however, you’re a big-time milk drinker trying to cut down, and you don’t feel it’s going to be an easy thing to reduce the amount of milk you drink, switching to a lower-fat version might be ideal. In the end, milk can slip into that same category as fruit juice, or even pop — we don’t realize how many calories, and how much fat (or sugar, in soda’s case) we’re consuming, because these drinks don’t tend to leave us very full. Milk is better at that, but it still takes a lot of it to feel ‘full’.

Finally — organic milk.

Michael Pollan has plenty of things to say about the contradictions inherent in, say, Wal-Mart selling organic milk. In general, we’d suggest you pick up his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma and read the chapter on Big Organic — it all pretty much applies to milk, too. Let’s just say that if you’re concerned about cows not being treated very well and living in factory-farm/feedlot conditions, organic isn’t necessarily going to help you there. If it’s just antibiotics or hormones that make you nervous, maybe you’ll feel more confident buying organic.

It’s a difficult issue and there’s no clear answer — it depends on your ethics, on what you can find in your area, and on the compromises you’re willing to make, just like so many of our food-buying decisions.

Over To You!

Have you had trouble cutting down on milk? Has it been a part of your life for as long as you can remember? If you’re from North America, there’s a good chance milk is a big part of your diet — let’s talk about it!

My workout for today was the Ab Blitz Workout that I did on December 18 – you can check out the workout here. My old record for this routine was 30 minutes and 34 seconds. Today I have completed the workout in 29 minutes and 51 seconds. I was using my cool pink Gymboss Interval Timer to keep time as usual.

Yesterday we were talking about celebrities, their butts and inspiration in general. Some of you have pointed out that the most powerful inspiration for you are the people around you in your day to day lives. It’s not that the celebrities are not real people, but the image of them that we get to see is often unrealistic and of course most of the time we realize that. In today’s video I share with you a person who has been one of my real life inspirations. I am sure that you guys have people around you as well who inspire you on many different levels. Who are they and why do they inspire you? Is it more their inner strength or their appearance? Leave me your thoughts on this in the comments below.

Sweet Pepper Chicken

This is a very very simple recipe based on an old Czech specialty  - Kure na paprice. Originally this recipe requires white flour, cream, sour cream, and dumplings. I made just a few basic adjustments to make this meal less fatty and more healthy without loosing the great taste. There is no reason why we shouldn’t enjoy our meals and eat tasty food. If you can keep your portions small, then you don’t have to be worried about getting fat. For girls out there: eat like a lady not like a pig :) It sounds harsh, but this sentence is always in my mind when I eat and it’s helping me.

You will need olive oil (about 2-3 table spoons), 4 large onions, sweet  ground pepper, 3 chicken legs, salt, 150g of natural white yogurt, water, rolled oats, milk (optional), whole wheat pasta.

You will need a big pod. Heat up the olive oil in the pod and add the chopped onions. Don’t cut your fingers like me when you are cutting the onions :) If you have too many tears in your eyes I recommend to put the knife down.

Stir the onions for about 5 minutes and then add 2 full table spoons of sweet pepper. Add about 3 pinches of salt and place the chicken legs in the pod right on the onions. Add about 2 cups of water, cover the pod with a lid and let the chicken stew until it’s cooked. It will take about 40 minutes. Make sure that the water doesn’t cook off, so that you won’t burn the chicken and onions.

When the chicken is done, take it out of the pod and put it to the side. Take the yogurt and add it into the stew. Mix it well and add rolled oats to make the sauce thick. How much oats you will need depends on how much water you have in the pod. You can use milk to thin the sauce down if you need to. I didn’t have to use the milk at all. What you might like is also a little bit of fresh lemon juice to get the sweet and sour taste. Make sure that the sauce is salty enough and place the chicken legs back into the pod.

Serve with cooked whole wheat pasta. Enjoy your meal.

Zuzana.