Fitness & Wellness

There’s a lot of people who work in offices throughout Houston, Tx, who want to find healthy snacks for those bouts of midmorning and midafternoon hunger. Some are lucky enough to have access to a refrigerator and some are not. Either way, bringing personal options that are lower in calories and high in nutrients is far better than opting for the food from the candy machine, overeating at lunch or gobbling down the first thing they see at the gas station after work. Many of these options actually save money, too.

Save money and eat healthier homemade microwave popcorn.

Don’t pay the high price for a bag of microwave popcorn, when you can make dozens of bags for the same amount of money that have fewer calories. All it takes is a brown paper lunch bag and some popcorn kernels. Just pack up ¼ cup of popcorn kernels in each bag, fold the top several times and it’s ready for the microwave. You can even keep some seasoning at your desk, such ones in stores, like a ranch or dill pickle, or make your own. You can melt a few bittersweet chips that are 60 percent cacao up to 80 percent cacao and drizzle, then top with some sea salt for a treat everyone will want to try.

Take some nuts and seeds.

Keeping a bag of trail mix that’s exclusively made of seeds and nuts, with maybe a few pieces of dried fruit thrown in for sweetness at your desk can help you relieve that midafternoon hunger. If you’re not good at eyeballing portion size, take it in individual serving sizes. Eating a whole bag of trail mix at one serving will not make you thinner. To make it less expensive and control portion size, cut the whole dried fruit before time and just add a few small pieces to each bag of trail mix.

Keep energy balls on hand.

There are a number of recipes for energy balls on the internet that provide high protein that gives long term protein and quick energy to boost you immediately. If you want a salty caramel flavor, try these balls. There’s no added sugar. They take a cup of fresh medjool dates or regular dried dates, a cup of cashews or other nuts and seeds–raw is healthiest, but you can use roasted, 2 tsp of vanilla extract and a pinch of sea salt. Combine all the ingredients in a food processor, adding a bit of water if it’s too dry to form a ball. Roll in balls the size of a golf ball and chill in the refrigerator. They stay good for a month refrigerated, but can stay in the freezer for months. You can take frozen ones to work with you and let them thaw throughout the day for a morning or afternoon treat. There are 70 calories, 2.8 g fat, 8.9 g carbs, 1.6 fiber, 6.1 g sugar, 3.5 g protein in each ball.

• Keeping it simple is often the best route to take. Take a piece of fruit. Whether you choose an apple, orange, banana or pear, they don’t need any special preparation.
• Sprinkle some unflavored Greek yogurt that has live cultures with a few nuts or some blueberries or strawberries for a yummy healthy treat. You need a refrigerator in your office or this one.
• If you have a refrigerator available, take some fresh veggies for a snack and a little dip made with powdered ranch dressing and Greek yogurt.
• Plain oatmeal packs are a filling option and you can store those packets in your desk and then have your treat ready as long as you have water, a mug and a microwave. Sprinkle on some cinnamon.

One of the things I emphasize when I talk to clients in Houston, Tx is that when you want to lose weight so you fit into your jeans, you have to eat green. That doesn’t mean everything you eat should be green, just that you should eat healthy and include a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables in your diet. You need to workout to tone your muscles and get that curvy look everyone loves. Working out also helps you burn calories, but the real secret to losing weight starts in the kitchen.

Eating healthy isn’t dieting.

When you think of losing weight, you normally think of going on a strict diet where you wave good-bye to all your favorite foods, lose weight and then go back to old eating habits, which makes you regain the weight you just lost. Instead, eating healthy simply means making smarter choices when it comes to food. It means less processed foods and more whole foods. You can eat that way for the rest of your life and be healthier for doing it, too.

Don’t worry, you’ll still be able to have some of your favorite foods.

If you love cake, when you healthy, you can still have some cake occasionally. You just can’t have it every day and must remember portion control. It means eating one piece of cake, not the whole cake. Don’t worry if that happens, either. You aren’t falling off a diet or anything, just taking a step back one day from what’s now your normal healthy eating habits. Go back to healthy eating the next day.

You’ll never feel starved or deprived.

One of the things that most people love about healthy eating is that they never feel hungry. You’ll even learn to make substitutions that don’t effect the taste of the food, just makes it healthier and lower in calories. For instance, eating brown rice has more nutrients than the same amount of white rice, but fewer calories. Substituting Greek yogurt for sour cream on a potato also saves calories but gives you that same creamy taste.

• You’ll be amazed at how much you like the new way of eating and on those rare days you go back to old eating habits, how unsatisfying it is.
• Cutting out products with added sugar is one of the biggest changes. It’s hard because sugar is so addictive. Make sure you have plenty of fruit for snacks and gradually switch your snacks to other options that aren’t sugary.
• Learning to eat healthy means you can eat anywhere without worry about falling off a diet. You simply make the smartest choice of food when in restaurants or at parties.
• When you combine regular exercise with a healthy diet, not only will your jeans fit better quickly, you may even find you have to buy a smaller size much sooner than you thought possible.

One of the most requested exercises are butt exercises. Many of the clients in Houston, Tx just want a toned sexy butt, but others want to make their backside bigger or shrink their booty. I put together some butt exercises that help achieve each desire. There are everyday things you can do to boost your booty and get your glutes in shape for that bikini. One of those is to take a walk. Walking helps get the glutes into shape. It’s especially good if you walk on uneven terrain and climb a few hills. Riding a bike can also improve your bottom. Not only will these exercises help you tone your butt, they’ll make it smaller, especially when combined with clean eating.

Tone your butt with hip lifts.

A hip lift may look simple, but it can be tough. Lie down with your back on the floor and arms to your side. Bend your knees, keeping your feet flat on the floor when you do. Lift your hips up toward the ceiling, creating a triangle. Hold, squeezing your butt muscles and hamstrings for a minute and lower your bottom back down. As you get more proficient, when you’ve raised your butt, keep your thighs parallel to one another and straighten one leg, pointing it straight ahead. Hold for a few seconds, then lower the foot back to the floor, followed by lowering your hips.

There’s a lot of great exercises you can do for your butt with exercise bands to enhance them.

If you’ve never done butt kicks, getting on bended knees on all fours and kicking back and up, one leg at a time, that’s a good place to start. To make it more difficult, stretch an exercise band around both your feet, making the kick up a lot tougher. Putting it around your calves and side stepping also boosts your glutes, as does doing deep squats with a band just above the knees.

Build a bigger butt with barbells squats.

Deadlifts, lunges and hip thrusts are also great butt builders, but the key is to ensure you have sufficient resistance. Heavier weights and fewer reps are the key. If you have a really heavy lift, do only two to six reps. For moderately heavy, eight to twelve reps is good and for light—but still heavy for you, twenty reps and no more will build your butt. Exercise your muscles more frequently, meaning do exercises three times a week.

• A great butt exercise that’s easy to do and burns extra calories too is to take the stairs. Climbing stairs builds a beautiful booty.
• Switch out that easy chair for TV watching or chair at work with a balance ball. It improves your core muscles while glamorizing your glutes.
• Lie on your back. Do a bridge and squeeze at the top of the bridge. That helps boost the strength and tone of the glutes.
• If you want some quick results, do a reverse lunge. Instead of stepping forward and squatting down, step backward with one foot and squat.

I get a lot of questions from clients in Houston, TX about the potential of grains affecting their digestive health. Grains are extremely difficult to digest. It’s easy to understand why grains are difficult and could be troublesome to digestion. They are seeds and seeds have hard outer casings. Many seeds were created that way to encourage spreading the plant to different areas. The casing doesn’t digest, protecting the seed through the process to be eliminated elsewhere, conveniently in it’s own supply of fertilizer. That hard shell is what helps the plant survive, but also can cause digestive problems.

Survival is the ultimate goal of all living things.

Grains contain phytic acid, which may be part of that ultimate plan for self-survival or just an unhappy coincidence. It affects how the body absorb minerals. Phytic acid blocks the absorption of important nutrients in the small intestines and potentially lead to bone loss. The modern way of processing grain can increase the potential for damage to digestion.

Complex proteins are hard to digest.

Grains contain complex proteins, which are hard to digest. One of those proteins is gluten. Recently, there’s been an awareness of how it can affect the body negatively and create health issues that range from digestive to neurological. One reason people have become more aware of the problem is that people seem to be more affected by it. It might be because the amount of gluten in wheat has increased. In the 1960s it was hybridization to create a variety with bigger grain, improving the yield. Since then, it’s become the prominent and almost exclusive variety grown. It contains higher amount of gluten. It’s hard for the body to break down that protein, so it wreaks havoc on the digestive system. The disaccharides in grain are equally difficult to process, creating another digestive problem.

Grain may interfere with the digestive enzymes.

Your body needs enzymes to digest food and seeds use enzyme inhibitors to help prevent sprouting when conditions aren’t right. Those two facts go together to create a problem in the digestive system. Grain enzyme inhibitors don’t just block the seed enzymes, they block the digestive enzymes, too. In order to get rid of the inhibitor, you have to prepare grains properly. That can mean soaking, sprouting or fermenting them. Modern grain products don’t use those methods.

Digestion requires an enzyme to act as a catalyst.

All digestive actions start with enzymes. Since grains are seeds, they contain an enzyme inhibitor to help prevent the seed from sprouting if conditions are good for growing. These inhibitors may help the seeds to grow in the right conditions, but they certainly don’t help your digestion. By ingesting grains that aren’t prepared properly, we’re passing on these inhibitors to the digestive system, slowing or halting the process of digestion.

• Leaky gut, a newer complex of conditions, is thought to be related to the more prevalent appearance of grains in the modern diet. The symptoms of leaky gut often include somewhat unrelated symptoms.
• There are some examples of grain products on the market that use older techniques to rid the grain of enzymes, sour dough bread and sprouted bread are two. Since legumes contain the same substance, it’s always important to soak dried beans before preparing them.
• Giving up grain entirely can help you find out if your digestive troubles come from it. If your symptoms disappear, you might consider re-adding them using more ancient alternatives, such as amaranth, sorghum, millet and kamut.
• Not only does the preparation techniques of soaking, fermenting and sprouting help eliminate the phytic acid in grains, it also makes the disaccharides grains contain easier to digest.

One thing many people in Houston, both men and women, is to gain lean muscle mass. Lean muscle mass gives you those wash board abs and that sculpted look everyone strives to achieve. Achieving it means losing weight and building muscles. That takes a special program that’s more than just a workout or a healthy diet, it’s both. No one will be able to see the results of all the work you’ve done if it’s covered in a layer of fat. Not only will building more muscle tissue make you look toned and fabulous, it also helps you keep weight off permanently.

Lean muscle mass starts with what you eat.

One of the fitness greats once said that building muscle mass starts in the kitchen not in the gym. He was absolutely right. You have to eat healthy and focus on specific foods to build the muscles you want. If you’re building more muscles, it’s a fine balance between eating enough to ensure you’ll have all the nutrients and energy to do the workout and build muscle tissue and not overeating, so you put on fat not muscle. Protein is a top priority when you’re building. It should be about 15 to 33 percent of your diet. Salmon, chicken breast, lean beef and Greek yogurt are good sources. Approximately 20 percent should be healthy fat that’s necessary for building muscle and the rest made up of carbs for energy.

Get the most from your workout with compound exercises.

Strength-building exercises definitely builds muscle tissue and burns massive amounts of calories at the same time. The best type of strength-building workouts are those with compound exercises. Compound exercises use several muscle groups and joints at one time, so they’re also more efficient. Barbell deadlifts, bench step-ups and barbell squats are a few compound exercises that help.

Go easy on the cardio.

When you do cardio workouts, you’ll definitely burn calories, but unfortunately, they come from both fat and muscle tissue being used as fuel. That can set back your muscle building program quickly. Another error is to workout too often or too long. After about 75 minutes, maximum muscle growth is reached and more can only make you move backward. Working more than four times a week can also be detrimental. It doesn’t give your body time to heal those micro fractures and develop the scar tissue that creates larger muscles.

• When you’re building lean muscle mass, eat carbs earlier in the day. It not only boosts your energy throughout the day, there’s less chance it will be stored as fat that can occur if you eat it before bedtime.
• You’ll boost your recovery time if you have adequate healthy fat in your diet. Make sure you include avocados, nuts, olive oil and flaxseed, for example, to help you workout harder. People often fail to build muscle tissue because they burn the candle at both ends. You need adequate sleep to boost your muscle growth. Sleep is necessary for the body to heal the microtears that become bigger muscles.
• Go bigger and push yourself. While working out more often is counterproductive, lifting heavier weights and challenging yourself actually boosts your muscle development.