All eyes are looking south today as the South Carolinians head to the polls for one of the most influential votes in this election year. It’s an event with weeks of build up, and voters across the country are anxiously waiting the results to hear if Romney, Gingrich, Paul, or Santorum, (or maybe even the Colbert/Cain ticket) moves a step closer to the GOP nomination.
Prepare a Carolina-inspired feast today, with all of the hospitality and flavor Southern recipes are known for, and less of the fat and calories that make the foods famous.
Read Full Post >
Will the NFC send the San Francisco 49ers or the New York Giants to the Super Bowl? It’s a bi-coastal battle on the field tomorrow that will land only one of these teams in the Midwest to fight for the highest honor in professional football.
Keep those resolutions rolling like a good winning streak and stock your watch party with healthy food disguised as game-day favorites. Only you’ll know that a few calorie corners were cut.
Read Full Post >
For years I’ve espoused the many benefits of weekly meal planning. I rave to anyone (and even brag a little) about how it ensures we have home cooked meals most nights, how it keeps our grocery budget in check, eliminates a lot of food waste, and leaves little room for excuses about time. I can’t remember the last time I heard “What’s for dinner;” if I do, I point to the calendar on the refrigerator door.
From pen and paper to iPhone apps, there are numerous ways to adopt a meal planning habit in your house. Food On The Table is one digital tool that helps families plan meals almost effortlessly. The cooking, well, that will require a bit more muscle. I spent some time this week “playing” with the app and site, and asked Josie Maurer at YumYucky.com to take a look with me as well. She’s an equally health-conscious and busy mom who hasn’t quite adopted the meal planning strategy that I have. However, I think FoodOnTheTable.com changed her mind.
At FoodOnTheTable.com, or through their Android or iPhone app, you can make a weekly meal plan that is family-friendly (read: the kids will like it), keeps you organized, and reduces strain on your grocery bill. The app is free, as is a base subscription on the site; however, for more bells and whistles a monthly subscription is offered.
The site and app are both designed well. In fact, Josie and I agreed on her note that “It’s very interactive and highly visual, which encourages easy to understand navigation.”
Read Full Post >
Ricky Gervais is going to make that tuxedo look pretty good tonight. In 2010, inspired by his girlfriend, Gervais lost more than 20 pounds. He said at the time that it wasn’t about the weight, but instead, “It was more that I was a fat, lazy, out of shape slob, to be honest.” 
Nothing could be further from a description of tonight’s Golden Globes host, a gig that requires as much energy as it does personality and thick skin. This will be the British actor’s third go at hosting the awards show, which can foreshadow the upcoming Oscars. He’s brutally honest, but with that brutally entertaining, which is what these often cut-and-paste awards shows can need to hold an audience’s attention. Last year, Gervais’ biggest joke might have been about the collapse of Charlie Sheen; this year, a bounty of Hollywood divorces in recent news could fuel his sharp tongue.
Gervais’ weight loss first made headlines in 2010, when we first reported on it. Fortunately, his focus on fitness hasn’t waned in the past year. At that time, he credited much of his weight loss to the sport of running, something he and his girlfriend Jane Fallon enjoy doing together in their Hampstead Heath, London neighborhood; or, when traveling, he’ll pound the pavement in NYC first thing in the morning.
Read Full Post >
Last week the DASH Diet wasn’t exactly a household name, although it should have been. Since US News and World Report announced its Best Diets of 2012, DASH Diet is about all anyone can talk about, or search for online.
“It was exciting to see it happen again,” Marla Heller, MS, RD told us this morning about learning that DASH Diet had received the top recognition from US News for the second time in six months. “The first time it happened last summer was over the top.”
Her book, The DASH Diet Action Plan, was the result of research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “My patients couldn’t really understand [the information]. I knew I needed to break it down,” she told us about publishing the book.
She says it’s been a challenge to get the word out about the healthy eating plan, citing its only likely downfall is “that it doesn’t have the sex appeal of a fad diet.”
If lacking sex appeal, or even a slimmed-down celebrity endorser, is the DASH Diet’s only negative attribute, we have to ask, why aren’t more people on it? Heller and I discussed how a “diet” has come to be revered as a packaged set of rules and organized eating instructions. However, most health experts will agree that the real definition of a diet is just what you eat. Which is why Heller proudly calls her DASH Diet an eating plan.
“It’s just common sense,” she said. “Not enough people have any idea how to put together healthy meals.” She says DASH Diet can re-educate.
Read Full Post >
