Chicken & Strawberry Salad

You know summer is on its way when you start seeing strawberry themed items on the menus around town.  Check out myrecipe.com's recipe for this healthy yummy salad using one of summer's favorite treats.  

Photo: Randy Mayor; Styling: Rose Nguyen

Ingredients

• Dressing:
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon water
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 
• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• Get the salad ingredients . . .

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Weekend Challenge

This is a challenging one, scale the reps and distance as needed.

Run 1 mile
100 pullups
200 pushups
300 squats
Run 1 mile

Stressed Out? Tricks to Avoid Emotional Eating

By Tina Haupert from Health.com

A few years ago, I worked in a 9-5 desk job in an office where the kitchen was a ever-present buffet of donuts, muffins, cookies, and other larger-than-life pastries. I honestly can’t remember too many days when there wasn’t some sort of sweet treat tempting me to eat it. I often fell victim to those goodies when my stress levels rose, and instead of dealing with what was actually stressing me out, I temporarily masked my feelings with the treats. For a long time, I didn’t recognize this pattern was happening—until it led me to gain several pounds.

Even now when I feel stressed, I still crave sugary carbs, which are loaded with calories and fat and not helpful when it comes to maintaining my Feel Great Weight. It’s not always easy to overcome those emotions, but these tricks have certainly helped me (and will help you!) get a handle on stress eating.

Know your triggers. When I felt overwhelmed by a monstrous to-do list or frustrated by a difficult project, I’d often find myself turning to sugary treats for comfort, but learning my motives was key for controlling those cravings. Once I was more conscious of these triggers, I started to change my eating patterns.  Get the other triggers.  

Endive and Quinoa Salad With Poached Egg

By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN for NYTIMES.com

If you hesitate to buy salad greens that could wilt before you have a chance to use them, endive is a perfect solution. The tight bulbs will keep in your crisper for about a week without deteriorating. Make the dressing and keep what you don’t use in the refrigerator. It will keep until you use it up.

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

• 1 1/2 tablespoons of the following dressing:
• 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar, Champagne vinegar or sherry vinegar (sherry vinegar is my preference)
• 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar (optional)
• Salt, preferably coarse sea salt or fleur de sel, to taste
• 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• 6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, or 4 tablespoons olive oil and 2 tablespoons walnut oil
• 1 garlic clove, crushed

get the recipe for the salad.  

Weekend Challenge

50 Sit-Ups, 400 Meter Run- Sprint  Or Walk- (3 Rounds)

The 11 Healthiest Foods in America

Not sure what to be eating today?  Or just tired of deciding?  Stick to these 11 foods from yahoo.com and you'll be on track for staying healthy.

from yahoo.com

J.I. Rodale, the man who founded Rodale Publishing, launched the organic farming movement in America. A strong believer in the power of food to heal, he knew long before organic went mainstream that producing the healthiest food meant growing it in the healthiest soil, soil enriched naturally with organic matter, not synthetic, petroleum-based fertilizers that can rob it of vital nutrients and minerals. In a 1947 issue of Rodale's first magazine,Organic Gardening, J.I. Rodale outlined "The Rodale Diet," a simple recommendation of easily accessible healthy foods, grown without the use of toxic chemicals that, if followed 20 to 30 percent of the time would "give disease a smart punch in the solar plexus." And 65 years of nutrition science have proved him right. All of the foods he recommended back in the '40s, studies are finding, contain the highest amounts of disease-fighting antioxidants, essential fatty acids, and other vital nutrients that are deficient in the modern American diet. If you want to follow "The Rodale Diet," here's what you need to get started.  See the 11 foods from yahoo.com

Smoked Paprika Oven Roasted Salmon

I am a fish lover.  Well, I guess I should say that I love eating them.  If I really loved them I suppose I'd leave them alone.  Here's another way to prepare a favorite tasty friend of mine, salmon from freerangehuman.com 

from freerangehuman.com

• 1 lb wild salmon fillet, skin removed
• leaves from 4 sprigs fresh thyme
• juice of a tangelo
• zest of a tangelo
• 1 Tbs smoked paprika
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 2 tbs olive oil
• Salt to taste

get the directions from freerangehuman.com 

Weekend Challenge

3 rounds of:

Run with high knees for 15 seconds

and drop into a pushup, get back up

and run with high knees again for 15

seconds - repeat 5 times (Each pushup

counts as 1 rep)

Rest 2 minutes between rounds

Real But Not True

When I read this article from the HuffingtonPost.com contributor Tsoknyi Rinpoche I was struck by the idea of acknowledging emotions but also acknowledging their place.  I've been thinking a lot lately about my reactions to things being under my control (pretty much the only thing under my control btw) and how I can use that knowledge to care less.  Let me clarify.  I still want to love and care for my loved ones but I don't want to care when they do something I don't think they should.  Because, it's none of my biz-nas.  I've been trying to figure out how to acknowledge that I feel upset by their choice but then be done with it; to evict the feeling of disappointment -which isn't my business to even have-from my bod.  I feel like Rinpoche's article helps me think of my emotions in a different way.  What do you think?  Comment below!  

Real But Not True

 by Tsoknyi Rinpoche for the huffingtonpost.com 

When very strong emotions -- like fear, anger, or jealousy -- come up, it's very hard to resist giving up and giving into them.

For example, several years ago I was traveling on a very small airplane between Pokhara -- one of the lowland regions in central Nepal -- to Muktinath, a remote site high in the Himalayas. I was traveling to oversee the rebuilding of a Buddhist nunnery there, which had fallen into disrepair. The plane was supposed to depart at 8:00 a.m. in order to avoid the high winds that almost always develop later in the day. But in those days, airplane travel in Nepal was an uncertain prospect at best, and planes often departed hours later than they were supposed to. Eventually we left the airport, 3.5 hours after the plane was scheduled to depart and long after the winds had begun to blow.

As we flew between two huge mountains, our tiny plane was buffeted up and down by turbulence for almost half an hour. The few other passengers on board were screaming and crying, sure they were going to die. I applied a little method I hoped might steady me a bit: Instead of focusing on the movement of the plane, I looked out the window and focused on one of the mountains. But I must admit I was infected by the same fear that gripped the other passengers. Although we landed safely, I prayed that there might be another way to get back to Pokhara -- by car or bus -- but the only route in those days was flying. On the return trip, crammed in the same small plane with foreign tourists, I sweated so badly my robes began to get wet. I clutched the armrests tightly, and though doing so made me feel a little better, a part of me knew that no matter how tightly I clutched, it wasn't going to help if the plane really crashed.

The fear I felt on that return trip, however -- and the fear I felt for many years later, even when I was traveling on large commercial airliners -- was real, in the sense that I was fully experiencing it. However, as I looked back on each subsequent experience, I had to admit that it wasn't true. That is, it wasn't grounded in actual, present circumstances, but instead was triggered by residual memories of a past experience.

This sort of experience, in which fear or some other strong emotion arises in a context that doesn't necessarily warrant such a reaction -- or perhaps to a degree that isn't warranted by the actual circumstances -- that I've learned to engage in a little conversation with myself: "Yes, what you're feeling is real. I recognize and honor that. But this fear is not based on true conditions."  Continue on huffingtonpost.com

Ceviche

Ceviche is one of those dishes that I always order when I see it on the menu; especially in the warmer months.  It's so fresh and flavorful, cool and has avocado.  If you ask me, having avocado as an ingredient in any recipe indicates it's def. on the right track.  Now that I know how easy it is to make I like it even more!  Check out the recipe below from SimplyRecipes.com and tweak as you go to make a custom ceviche-mango perhaps?   

INGREDIENTS

from simplyrecipes.com

• 2 lbs of firm, fresh red snapper fillets (or other firm-fleshed fish), cut into 1/2 inch pieces, completely deboned
• 1/2 cup of fresh squeezed lime juice
• 1/2 cup of fresh squeezed lemon juice
• 1/2 red onion, finely diced
• 1 cup of chopped fresh seeded tomatoes
• 1 serrano chili, seeded and finely diced
• 2 teaspoons of salt
• Dash of ground oregano
• Dash of Tabasco or a light pinch of cayenne pepper
• Cilantro
• Avocado

Find out how to put it all together by visiting SimplyRecipes.com and enjoy!

Weekend Challenge

45 jumping jacks
15 squats
1 minute Plank
10 calf raises
10 lunges - each leg

repeat 3 times

How Long Does It Take to Recover From a Marathon

By GINA KOLATA, Reporter reprinted from the NYT.com

Nancy Gonce for Operation Boot Camp

I ran my first marathon this month. It went well, and despite my fears, I had fun. I met my goals — qualified for the Boston Marathon with nearly half an hour to spare and came in second in my age group. But the big surprise was my coach’s advice the next day.

It will take four weeks to fully recover, he told me. That seemed like an awfully long time.

I was running again in three days, and I felt better than ever when I ran the week after. Who says recovery should take weeks?

As it turns out, there’s not much rigorous research on recovery after strenuous exercise. There have been almost no long-term studies, and there’s little agreement on what to measure or how to measure it. This aspect of competition is rife with unsubstantiated dogma.

One popular notion holds that however many miles you race, that’s how many days it takes to recover: A 10-mile race requires a 10-day recovery. Dr. Timothy Noakes, an exercise physiologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, dismisses that advice.

“The days-for-miles recovery theory was popularized in the 1970s but was not scientifically based,” he said.

Hirofumi Tanaka, an exercise physiologist at the University of Texas at Austin, said the question of recovery “is a tough one.”

“The answer will be dependent on what element of recovery you are interested in,” he said. “We do have some information about how long it takes to replenish muscle glycogen, the primary energy fuel during strenuous distance running. But we have no idea on other elements.”

Athletes who consume carbohydrates and, even better, some protein after an event can refill their muscles with glycogen within 24 hours. But this is short-term recovery, not at all what my coach was talking about.  Keep reading on NYT.com 

Cauliflower Rice

I promise I'm not crazy or even cray cray.  Cauliflower rice is good and a good substitute/base for all sorts of meals that call for rice.  Lately I've been topping cauliflower rice with a curry, coconut milk and salmon   mix I make.

I eat paleo about 80% of the time; I don't eat grains, like rice.  So the CR is a great way to be able to eat those meals that beckon my taste buds for a rice base.  I've even been thinking about figuring out how to make is more grits tasting.  Now it doesn't taste so much like rice as serve for a substitute.  If you're a rice lover (hi mom!) this isn't going to satisfy.  If you crave the consistency of a grain and need a base for a soupier item you're welcome.

How I make it:

• I saute an onion in a little butter, olive oil or coconut oil until translucent
• while that's happening I cut the cauliflower head into manageable pieces and throw it in the food processor.  I pulse until it looks like rice or couscous
• then, I transfer the cauliflower into the pan with the onions and add a little chicken broth.  I make sure the onion and the cauliflower is well mixed.  
• Cover and let the cauliflower steam.  Usually, about 10 minutes.  

Put some salt and peppa on that stuff and put it in yo belly!  Try mixing all kinds of spices and share what you come up with!