Eat Less, Eat Better with Nature's Pharmacy

Healthy eating habits are ESSENTIAL to obtaining your health and wellness goals! (and I don't just mean what you are eating) As your fitness coaches we can only do so much with our effective and efficient Heart.Muscle.Mind cross-training workouts. We optimize the calories out part of the energy equation that governs our body fat/weight, and do all we can to keep you motivated, enjoying your experience and exercising regularly. The other half of the equation, the eating "calories in" segment, is to a large part left to your own efforts apart from our workshops, 1 on 1 nutrition coaching and using our Cookin'Up Health fresh meal service (which is improved and reduced in price so you need to try it!). I want Fusion to do more to that end of emphasizing and coaching you on adjusting your eating habits in a sustainable way to get results. We'll be doing this in several ways including more focused newsletters, principles based workshops, weekly reminders/tracking tools, and even a new 4Week Eating Overhaul Challenge detail below. In addition our new Heart.Muscle.Mind Eating Principles, will be introduced by Jesse Frank at this Saturday's Nutrition 101 session, address the core healthy eating practices, backed by clinical studies, that work together with smart workouts to get you looking lean and feeling great. I cannot express how important your eating habits are too reaching your goals. I often see people frustrated that they are working out as much as their schedule allows but they are not seeing the results that they believe they deserve for their exercise efforts. The answer is that unless you are working out almost everyday to burn up calories, it is going to be really challenging to get fat loss results without adjusting your eating habits, i.e. EAT LESS. And if your goal is muscle gain this can be even more important to EAT MORE. In a way fat loss is just that simple, EAT LESS, even if you didn't change what you were eating or workout, if you eat less you will start losing fat. So if that is your goal get super focused on EATING LESS and we'll share with you all the way to try and execute on that strategy successfully, which is the real key. One quick tactic you can try immediately is USING A FOOD JOURNAL to look at everything you are eating. This is a proven and powerful tool as studies have shown that those trying to loose fat that kept a food journal had double the weight loss of those that did not keep the journal. Double! The simple act of writing down what you eat or are about to eat, helps bring awareness to your food choices which regulates the amount and quality of your food, without any diet specifics at all. I also want to share with you below the God's Pharmacy video segment that my Mom sent me a while back that I hope will help inspire you to focus on eating more vegetables and fruits as a way to EAT LESS calories if that is your goal and/or get all the major nutrients that your body needs. The video makes a beautiful connection between the physical traits of vegetables and the body parts that they help keep healthy. Nature's/God's Pharmacy Video This video piece is called God's Pharmacy, but for me Nature is my higher power so I call it Nature's pharmacy. The pictures, info, and music are nicely put together to drive the point home. CLICK HERE TO VIEW/LISTEN Also here is a link to a blog where someone connects the claims to actual nutritional info. CLICK TO VIEW LIST OF CLAIMS Veggies and fruits have such low calorie density that it is almost impossible to overeat them while at the same time they have massive nutrient densities. With all the great benefits you would think we would eat them more, but hardly anybody does. 4 tactics to jump start your plant eating: Eat in Technicolor: Look at every meal you make/eat/buy, to make sure it is colorful and hence contains at least some vegetables Eat a big colorful salad everyday if possible to get a bunch of servings in at one meal. Make a mix of veggies the base of your meal rather than starches like rice or pasta Buy a bunch of fresh (not dried or juiced) fruits and keep them at work for easy snacks to quell hunger. Since most Americans don't eat enough fruits and vegetables a large and dubious Vitamin and Supplement industry has arisen from nowhere. I have always intuitively thought Vitamins and Supplements are unnecessary if people just ate properly, but they have fed people a million non researched reasons to take this vitamin, that herb, etc, etc. Nobody seems to ask for proof that these things actually work and then a few years later a study comes out that proves the claims do not hold up, like Echinacea for colds, remembers that one. And please lets all stop promoting this false idea that Vitamin C somehow helps cure a cold. Nutrients are preventative in nature and we should eat and live in a preventative mindset rather than get sick and then try to cure it with super nutrient pills. This month the NY Times had two articles with studies finding that taking vitamins doesn't seem to get the job done, while diets with the actual vegetables and fruits that contain these same nutrients do have an impact. "Consumers spend money on dietary supplements with the thought that they are going to improve their health, but there's no evidence for this," said Marian L. Neuhouser, the lead author and a nutritional epidemiologist with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. "Buying more fruits and vegetables might be a better choice."