I love cooking my own meals. There are many benefits to cooking at home: it’s cheaper than eating out, you can alter ingredients to suit your tastes and dietary needs, and you can control your portion sizes more easily.
However, there is a downside: it can be difficult to know the nutrition information for the meals that you are cooking. You could spend hours searching for the nutrition information for every ingredient you use to cook with, combining the totals for each ingredient in each recipe, and then dividing the totals by portions. Honestly, that sounds like a lot of work to me. So, you can imagine how excited I was to discover Foodily.com.
Foodily.com is a cool new recipe search website that offers recipes from popular websites such as All Recipes, The Pioneer Woman, Martha Stewart, and many more. Users can search the entire database for recipes that they want to cook based on ingredients, keywords, and even ingredients that they do not want to cook with. You can also filter your results by recipes that originally appeared on a blog, ones that contain high levels of fiber, are low in fat, or are considered to be low carb. Now, you can search many Internet recipe website at one location to find one that meets your dietary needs or satisfy that late night craving. Think of it as the Google for recipes.
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Photo: Star Wars Wikia
It’s been nearly 35 years since Carrie Fisher first made the hearts of science fiction nerds all around the world skip a beat as Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy. But even a Princess can’t stop the sands of time and the weight loss difficulties that come with aging.
Since last November, Fisher has been endorsing the Jenny Craig diet and has apparently been reaping the diet’s benefits – she has reportedly lost 30 pounds.
“I feel much better,” Fisher, 54, tells People. “My blood pressure is down.”
Back in her Star Wars heyday, Fisher was a very petite 105 pounds, but like anyone else who goes on to live a sedentary lifestyle, the pounds began to pile on.
Last year Fisher decided to go public with her weight issues. In her autobiography, Fisher reveals that she has suffered from bipolar disorder and drug issues. However, it wasn’t until she went on tour to perform her autobiographical play entitled “Wishful Drinking” in 2009 that her weight started to go up.
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Whether you’re at your computer chomping on a bag of pretzels or watching television shoveling spoonful after spoonful of ice cream into your mouth, mindless munching is one surefire way to pack on the pounds. In fact, just mindlessly eating 100 calories a day, the equivalent of a large apple or a palmful of almonds, can lead to gaining up to 10 pounds in a year.
To prevent this mindless eating weight gain, put into practice these five ways to beat unintentional extra calories.
1. Never get too hungry. The more powerful your stomach growls, the more likely you are to ravenously consume a surge of calories before your body and brain can register that you’ve had enough. Therefore, aim to eat every three to four hours with meals and snacks comprised of healthy carbs, good fats and a lean protein.
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Recently, I was profiled in Redbook magazine, answering the question, “Should you put your child on a diet?” My reply was yes.
I’m not advocating starting your eight year old in the Weight Watchers plan, packing the lunchbox with Slim-Fast shakes and enrolling your daughter in a prepared meal plan. I’m also not advocating counting calories with your child, focusing on the number on the scale, or instructing her on weighing out her meals. Rather, I want to talk about helping your child to be healthy, and in some cases, this does mean keeping an eye on her weight.
One of my own daughters began to look a bit heavy. At her 6 year old pediatric check up, her doctor told me that she was getting too heavy and she illustrated this by comparing her growth curve on the chart. She told me that I needed to begin to keep an eye on her portions. I decided that I would begin an experiment. Without telling my daughter what I was doing – because I had no desire to call her attention to the issue – I decreased her portion sizes slightly. She had been eating a little bit more than she probably should have been, and had also become fairly sedentary due to an exceptionally rough winter. It’s tough to get out there when it’s cold and wet all the time.
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In 2005 the US Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion made major changes to the Food Guide Pyramid. Vertical stripes replaced the building blocks to help represent moderation by the narrowing of each group from bottom to top, proportionality by the different widths of the stripes, variety by the new colors introduced, and the importance of physical activity and gradual improvement through the steps and slogan “Steps to a Healthier You”.
Recently, the USDA released new dietary guidelines for 2010, but the changes aren’t nearly as drastic. As Kelly said so well, “While it may be surprising that not much has changed since 2005 when our health obviously has, the new 2010 Dietary Guidelines show that how to eat healthy hasn’t changed, we just need to follow the guidelines now more than ever.” So just how do you follow the Dietary Guidelines for health and even weight loss? I have been teaching clients how to do this for the last five years with the help of the USDA and MyPyramid.gov.
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