General nutrition tips for healthy lifestyle.
General nutrition tips for healthy lifestyle.
Is your kitchen a mystery to you?
Are you spending more time (and money) at restaurants because you think making food in the kitchen is a complicated or laborious process?
If so, it's time to wake up. You don't need to be a culinary wizard to make a good meal. You don't need to spend hours hovering over the stove-top to make delicious food.
There are a few simple kitchen tools that you can take advantage of to make amazing meals for yourself and your family without becoming a kitchen slave. Hint - the microwave is not one of them, sorry.
Making food should be fun, engaging, and efficient. And my hope is that this post will inspire you to get back to making your own meals & regaining control over your food.
Let me show you what kitchen tools will help you do just that.Continue Reading
What does your typical plate look like?
What's on it? Maybe some meat. Some potatoes, rice, or pasta. Maybe a couple slices of bread. Perhaps some vegetables.
With thousands of different items being sold all across North America, the number of combinations of foods you can put on your plate is, almost literally, exponential.
And it's perhaps why nutrition has become so complicated.
Knowing what to put on your plate for optimal health and performance has become a daunting task, but an ever more important one as every meal you have is either going to make your more or less healthy.
In this post, I want to introduce you to the Better Plate Theory - a simplified guide to building a better plate of food that will help optimize your health, boost your energy levels, and keep the weight down.Continue Reading
The world is obsessed with (counting) calories. Proclaimed to be the currency of weight loss, calories are all the rage. We’ve convinced ourselves that the caloric input vs output model is the end-all and be-all of weight loss.
Only what if it isn’t? What if we’re wrong? What if restricting calories isn’t the full solution? That’s the question I want to explore in today’s (lengthy) article.
I’m going to reveal the four problems I see with calorie restriction and what I deem to be a better (more complete) way to long-lasting fat loss. Let’s dig in.
One week it’s on me. Next week is on her. It’s more fun that way.
Anyway, a couple of Thursdays ago it was my turn to make the plans. Since it was way too cold to step outside, I thought I’d make it a nice evening in.
I brought out the wine (Fuzion from Argentina). Picked a nice movie (can’t remember). Made a nice dinner (it was spectacular – her words). And then I brought out the chickpea cookies.
Ooohh the never-cease-to-impress simply delicious chickpea cookies.
Long story short, they were a hit. And ever since I posted a picture of them on my newsletter, I got swarmed with emails from people demanding the recipe.
So here it is. The recipe for the most delicious chickpea cookies you’ll ever taste. Continue Reading
A few weeks ago I got myself a new tool.
I’m sadly attracted to shiny new tools.
But this is one that I’ve been eying for quite some time. And when I saw it sitting on the store shelf by itself with its price tag slashed three times, I knew it was time to take action.
I swooped in, dropped some bills, and was told that I just grabbed the last unit in the store.
Meant to be.
I stuffed it in my car, drove back carefully to my apartment like I was bringing home a new born, and unpacked it with such a love and care to make sure it stayed in supreme condition.
This is how I continue to treat my brand spankin’ new slow cooker – the original Crock Pot.
But what’s the big deal right? A tool is just that – a tool. Nobody cares about tools. You don’t care about tools. You care about what one can do with those tools.
That’s what I like about you.
So today I’m going to show you what I’ve been able to do with my brand new crock pot. I’m going to show you how I used it to make a week’s worth of absolutely delicious sweet potato beef stew in just under 60 minutes.
We all indulge.
It’s a fact. We’re human after all.
The concept of ‘treating ourselves’ has been around since the first ever batch of chocolate chip cookies came out of the oven.
It appears that we have this urge to regularly indulge in foods we know (100%) make us less healthy. We’re rebels. We want to break some rules. We want to live a little.
We want to ignore some of our most essential eating habits.
And so every so often we say screw it. We throw our middle fingers up to the world and let our taste buds go crazy.
And it feels good. It feels damn good.
But what happens to your body when you indulge? What consequences do we suffer when we decide to break our rules and make poor food choices?
After reading this post, you’re probably going to hate me. It’s OK. I’m ready for it.
But, if I’m lucky, this post might give you a slightly different perspective on the effects of food indulging.
Why do we get fat?
It’s a question that has perplexed the scientific community for decades.
It’s a question many of us think we know the answer to, but really we have no idea. Truth be told, we completely underestimate the complexity behind the process of fat accumulation.
While I’ll save the specifics of why we get fat for another post, I wanted to share a few interesting studies that can provide some solid insight into the true reasons we’re carrying around all that extra weight.
And, more importantly, why we’re struggling to get it off.
Oh, and let me be the first to say that it’s far from what you’d expect.
Let me show you what a few rats and ground squirrels can teach us about the process of getting fat. Continue Reading
People sometimes tell me that I ask too many questions.
But so what?
As the old Chinese proverb says:
He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.
I prefer my foolishness to be temporary.
So I like to ask questions. Good questions. Interesting questions. Questions that make people think and reveal things they typically wouldn’t.
Every now and then I’ll pose a question on the B2F Facebook page in the quest to get a better understanding of how I can serve my readers (you) better with my content.
This stuff helps me gauge what you’re struggling with. What you’re most interested in. Or what you need a little more clarification with to help you along your journey to a better body.
So here was one question I posted recently:
“Which habit do you have that you want to get rid of?”
The answers were somewhat predictable, yet unusually skewed to a common spectrum.
They went something like this… Continue Reading
This past weekend was my girlfriend’s birthday.
And I wanted to make her something special.
Every year for my birthday she makes me an incredible raw food birthday cake: no refined sugars, no flour, no baking required. Just raw, natural ingredients.
She knows me too well.
So this year I thought I’d return the favor and make her something a little bit extraordinary.
I put my Googling skills to use and dug up an incredible raw food blueberry cheesecake recipe. I grabbed the mighty food processor, put on some good tunes, and got to work.
Let me show you what I created. Continue Reading
I want you to imagine something for a second.
Imagine that everything you know about food – or you think you know about food – is now gone. It’s no longer there. That part of your brain has been erased.
To you, there are no such things as calories or carbs. You’ve never heard of vitamins, minerals, nutrients, digestion, or anything related to food consumption.
To you, food is just, well, food.
Now, with that in mind, let me ask you a question…
If I give you a random food to eat, something you’ve never seen or eaten before, how would you know whether that food is ‘good’ or ‘bad’?
If you knew absolutely nothing about a food or its ingredients, how would you know whether to classify it as good (as in, sure I’ll eat it again) or bad (as in, I’ll never touch this again)?
Think about that for a second because it’s very important.
Hint: there’s a bit of biology involved.
The answer is actually fairly simple.
But, what you’ll soon discover might scare you.