a quickie for your arms

Have ten minutes before the kids wake up? Before you have to start getting ready before work or school? How about a few minutes in your office before your next meeting? You can do this any time!

challenge accepted, nay sayers.

After my last post about not eating all the disgusting crap the food industry has been trying to pass off as nutritious, I received a lot of positive feedback and also some seriously deluded folks telling me it isn't possible to eat that way while busy with work and kids. Well ye of little faith, challenge accepted. For the month of March, my family and I will be going as close to completely unprocessed as possible. There will be no boxes of pasta, store bought bread, crackers, cookies, etc. I will be making all snacks, sweets, and meals. No more convenience food for the toddler. No more passing off half a box of crackers as lunch for myself. It's go time.

Over the course of the next month, I will post recipes, complete with pictures (woot, woot!) as well as tips and tricks I have learned along the way to make this process a bit easier. I will be shattering the theory that it can't be done while busy with a family. I have a two year old and a five month old. Game on. Granted, I am a stay at home mom with a side personal training venture, however, I don't find myself with excess time while sitting on the couch channel surfing and eating chocolate. I'm busy, too. So...I will be making it work. I don't think it will be super easy, but it will be possible.

My goal is to cleanse the family in March and then continue with a less strict, feasible way of living for the years to come. I will write down if I notice behavior improvements in myself, the husband, and toddler. I will write down things that work, things that don't, and things that are just plain ridiculous and should be left to buy at the store or Farmer's Market.

Just for fun...here is the family that will start down the road to unprocessed in mere days.

eat food, not crap.

Some people, I used to be one of them, will look at packaged foods with a "fat free," "low fat," and "sugar free" label as good for them and make the purchase. I would hope that with the vast research and findings on the horrors of artificial sweeteners, anything labeled as "sugar free" or "diet" should be avoided like a diseased wiener (unless you have some medical condition that requires consumption of these types of foods as diagnosed by a licensed physician, not your well to do friend). Fat free and low fat options should, in my opinion, also be avoided whenever possible. The process used to make foods fat free and low fat involves chemically leaching the fat out of a whole food. Any time you need modern science to "fix" a food, there is a problem. Our bodies are pretty amazing and were made (by whomever or whatever you chose to believe created them) to process food. Not diet soda and GMOs, but food. Why not give your body what it was made to have? You aren't going to fill the gas tank in your car with water, right?

I have noticed many articles making appearances on Facebook in the recent months trying to scare people into eating healthy. I like scare tactics, they're fun, but they don't seem to be effective. If they were, nobody would smoke cigarettes. So, I urge you to do your research about what you are putting into your body, before you do. If you wouldn't feed it to your small child, chances are, you shouldn't be eating it.

Below are some articles I find interesting and potentially helpful to read before your next trip to the grocery store. While I'm thinking of grocery stores, a good rule of thumb is to buy most of, if not all, your groceries from the outside aisles of the store. This will include the "fresh" stuff: produce, dairy, eggs, bakery bread, etc. The inner aisles carry the highly processed, overly sugared, boxed 'food' that more often than not contains ingredients only scientists can pronounce. I don't know about you, but I don't want a scientist making my food.

For your reading pleasure:

things Americans can eat, but other countries ban

some scary stuff in common foods

**I was going to post a link for how horrible artificial dyes are, but there are too many! It will require it's own post. Stay tuned.

engage your core

Today I was in a fitness class and we were talking about the midsection and abs and how to keep things nice and tight, especially after babies. Everyone has tried countless sit ups, crunches, etc. to get a flat stomach, but there are only so many back bending, floor laying exercises one can do before deciding it's boring and giving up.

A common phrase shouted out during fitness classes, is "engage your core!" this means to essentially flex your stomach. Suck it in like you're in a bikini (speedo?) and the most attractive person you've ever seen is looking your way. Now, stay like this throughout your workout, but remember to breathe. This is going to help move the toning process along. Another way to think of it is to draw your belly button back towards your spine. Give it a try.

The beautiful thing about engaging your core is that you can do it all the time. Stuck in traffic? Engage your core. Walking the dog? Engage your core. Sitting at your computer at work? Engage your core. You get the point, you can always be doing something to enhance your level of fitness. In fact, if you are stuck sitting at a desk job, or just a desk, or in a chair, give this exercise a try: engage your core and lift your right foot (keep knee bend ninety degrees) off the ground for a count of three, and lower it back down for a count of three. Repeat with your left foot. Do this ten times with each foot. Do this several times a day if you fancy...happy core engaging!

crossfit--not for everyone

Like most people interested in fitness, I have been hearing, seeing, and reading about Crossfit in vast abundance over the last few years. I've stumbled upon the Crossfit Games on TV, seen the crossfitters running short distances down the street just to go back into the gym to perform some seemingly crazy maneuvers, and I've clicked on links posted on Facebook warning people of the dangers of Crossfit and how it will most definitely ultimately end in serious injury or death. So, what's a girl to do? Try it out, of course!

This past Saturday I joined my new pal Lindsay at her gym for "Share the Pain."  Crossfit North Marin welcomed newbies with open arms to sweat and grunt and Burpee their way to a healthier place. I thought about coming home straight after the experience and writing about it, but decided I needed to let the workout settle in and give myself time to digest it all before judging it. 

I had a blast during the workout and the coach (I want to say Travis) was wonderful! All of the people at CFNM were welcoming and super helpful, eager to show the new weakling how to decipher the code on the white board. I gathered that people are encouraged to test and push themselves to reach new personal records, but do so safely. It was a far cry from all of the preconceived notions I went in to the class with. I wanted to lift heavier like the other ladies (who, by the way, are phenomenal she-women who manage to look incredibly beautiful while lifting weights that would make the average man look like a total pussy), but because my heavy weight-lifting days have long passed, I was the small girl in the back using a bar with no weight plates. I felt like an idiot. Nobody else noticed, so I eventually got over it \and got a killer workout in. 

I guess the point to all my rambling is to go ahead and give it a try! Don't go in expecting to keep up with the rest of them, go in with an open mind, and bring water, a lot of it!  

yoga--give it a try

I was introduced to yoga in college and fell in love. It was a brief affair that ended rather abruptly when I decided it was boring and all the spandex was uncomfortable. This was before the days of LuLu Lemon and cute yoga pants that you can see in mass quantities everywhere from the school drop off line to the grocery store. It was sweats and gaucho pants. It was camel toe and stinky feet. You get the point. It wasn't hip yet. Pilates was, so I dropped yoga and switched my mat in for a thicker one.

Anyhow, in the last few years I've began picking up my practice again. Sidebar: it has always irritated me how yoga is referred to as practice--I have no idea why, but it does. I revisited yoga in 2011 when I was pregnant with Norah, the little darling was breech and laying right on my sciatic nerve. It sucked. I started with YouTube videos and a DVD I bought back in college when yoga studios weren't conveniently located next door to every Starbucks on every street corner. I filled the third trimester days with yoga, then quite once the baby came. I picked it up once again this past pregnancy and have stuck with it. It has been almost a year of several times a week sessions and I really do feel great!

This article lays out five health benefits of yoga that you may not know about. You don't need to go to a fancy yoga studio or pay for classes in the park, you can check out DVDs from the library, watch for free on YouTube, even check out on demand. I haven't seen any on Netflix, but Amazon Prime has some decent ones. You will be able to see what movements and poses work for you and which ones cause pain. You will begin to see a change in your strength and flexibility along with many other things.

Give it a try, it may be boring at first, but it will bring some positivity and balance to your life and fitness regime. Just because you aren't dripping buckets of sweat doesn't mean it isn't benefiting your body.

it's not as expensive as you think

People so often complain about the high cost of healthy foods and blame the obesity problem on that, well, there was a nice comprehensive study done that blows that right out of the water! Here is a nice morning read for you all.

Yes, eating "healthy" will cost you a small bit more, but it isn't going to break the bank in most cases. This isn't to say that there may be the person who legitimately cannot afford to spend an extra two dollars a day, but when you consider the health benefits that those two dollars will give you and all the money on medical bills and expenses it will save you, it seems totally worth it to me!