A Memo on Raspberries

Dear self,
In the future when you decide to splurge on organic raspberries, eat them within the 24 hours after you buy them. Consider even eating them right after you buy them. You don't want to relive the great mold disappointment again.

Love,
Me

Exercise Quick Tip: Music Video Challenge

image from Wisconsin Historical Images on Flickr

Tired of your regular workout routine? Dance it up.

Put on a song with a great beat and just start moving around. You'll be burning calories, working off any stress, and having some fun.

For an extra challenge, find a music video online and try to follow the moves. Go ahead, you know you want to put on Thriller.  

Exercise: Taking It Home

Way back in January I wrote about how it can be confusing with all the information out there to know how much time should be spent exercising. And I spoke of how just even ten minutes makes me feel better. Well it's not just the quantity of time working out that matters. It's what you do with that time. Of course ten minutes of running will probably give you a better cardiovascular work out than ten minutes of slow crunches, but, dependent on your running posture, the crunches will probably have a greater effect on toning your abs than the running.

There are so many other options for exercise besides running and crunches though. If you like machines, most gyms have a bevy of options right there. I get bored on machines though - yes, even if there's a TV on in front of it. I actually am not a real big fan of going to the gym. Someone was kind enough to bring me on a guest pass to a very nice one recently. I enjoyed the class we took there and having lots of equipment ready-at-hand. Yet the idea of circling the parking lot looking for a spot because the time you can go to the gym is the same time 200 other people have available is not my idea of revving myself up for a good workout. I'm also not a fan of getting all sweaty and then having to bundle up to go to the car when its cold outside.

image from Koisny on Flickr

So, as you may have guessed by now, working out at home is my preference for my dedicated exercise time. Joining a gym is not out of question for the future but right now exercise videos are my prime (but not only) guidance. You can do them whenever you're ready. No parking lots. No waiting. No having to be seen by other people while you work out - if you want.

My go-to DVD series is The 10-Minute Solution. Each DVD has 5 ten-minute workouts to chose from that go with whatever the theme is for that particular DVD. But the best part is, they have a menu built in so you can chose however many of the 5 you want to do and what order you want to do them in. This lets you mix it up and not have to do everything in the same order every time. Also, if you have several of the DVDs you can do something like focus on just your arms one day and do all the arm exercises from several different approaches. It's important to let your muscles recover by not intensely focusing on the same area two days in a row.

I'll talk more about specific exercise DVDs in the future, but for now I'll leave you with this tip. Nervous about investing in an exercise program and finding out you don't really like it? Try before you buy. Check your local library. There's also exercise DVDs available from Netflix (although the selection seems to come and go).

©2011 Memo To My Health. Please do not republish our content without notifying us and getting permission.

The Many Ingredients of a Twinkie

Way back when in my post about Michael Pollan's "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants." mantra, I mentioned the idea of staying away from foods with more than five ingredients. That's much harder to do when you're eating highly processed foods (which is the point). That way you tend to me avoiding chemicals and getting real, whole nutrients. Plus, as mentioned in Process Food Land: Adventures in More Questionable Marketing, when you're eating processed food you have to look out for things like products that appear to have blueberries in them until you read the label and find out your eating a piece of blue-dyed starch.


When it comes to Twinkies though, both these concepts get yanked even further. There's no way you're expecting to eat any real whole food when you eat a Twinkie (which, by the way, I haven't done in at least 15 years). They're made without any real dairy products that could spoil quickly. According to a 75th anniversary of the Twinkie article in The Washington Post, "Twinkies are basically flour, sugar (three kinds of it), oil, eggs and chemicals (mainly preservatives and stabilizers)." 

FD&C Yellow #5 from Dwight Eschliman's 37 or Ingredients

So why this Twinkie interest all of a sudden? Through the website Good.is, I discovered Dwight Eschliman's 37 or So Ingredients - a project in which Eschliman photographed various Twinkie ingredients. I previously didn't even know what some of these ingredients would look like. According to Good, his mom kept him away from processed food, meat and dairy. When he got older though he discovered foods like the Twinkie, but by the time he had kids of his own, found his skepticism of these kinds of foods renewed. 


Feel free to check the project out as see what a lump of animal shortening looks like. Yeah, that's right... a Twinkie's not necessarily vegetarian. 


©2011 Memo To My Health. Please do not republish our written content without notifying us and getting permission.

Jamie Oliver Rescheduled

If you're looking for Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution tonight you're going to have a hard time finding a new episode. ABC has suddenly decided to push the rest of the season off until sweeps are over. So the next episode won't air until June 3rd. At least they'll air them...

©2011 Memo To My Health. Please do not republish our content without notifying us and getting permission.

Food Rut

While I know people who can enjoy eating the same thing every day, I am definitely not one of those people. Well. Scratch that. Partially. Once upon a time I made myself a quesadilla every other day. But that was pretty much the exception. That was also before I realized I felt even better practically eliminating dairy from my diet than just limiting it.

onion image from nikkorsnapper on flickr

Anyway, here I am, feeling like I'm stuck in a food rut. I guess if you had to put a label on my current eating behaviors it'd be vegetarian with days of intermittent veganism and pecestarianism but will eat other meats if they are put in front of her and her choices are limited. I feel like I keep defaulting to the same vegetables for dinner though - bell peppers, onion, mushroom - sautéed on the stovetop.

Put them with black beans, avocado and tomato (I know, still not quite in season) in a whole wheat or multigrain tortilla and you have vegetarian fajitas. Put them over whole wheat or spinach pasta with some olive oil and you have a pasta dish. Spread some pesto and olive oil on a whole wheat pizza crust, add some artichoke or olive and you have a veggie pizza (cheese optional). These are just a couple of my recent food escapades (which I can put up here in recipe form if there's interest), but I still feel like I need to shake things up.

Sometimes looking for recipes in the bigger and well-known recipe repertoires online get discouraging. You can often find a lot of meat and a lot of dairy use. I already know plenty of recipes like that. Luckily I'm currently reading The Okinawa Program (a review will appear on the blog once I'm finished). I knew there were recipes featured in the back of the book and I knew I was interested in the east-west diet blend, so I flipped ahead and started reading them. And voila. I got excited about a lot of them and will be trying at least one this week.

Sorry internet, books win this round.

©2011 Memo To My Health. Please do not republish our content without notifying us and getting permission.