Category: dieting/obesity

Summer Shape Up with Balance Bar

  • May 28, 2015
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Memorial Day was Monday.  I had the pleasure of watching my dad receive an award for being a Vietnam Vet.  Memorial Day is also the official start of summer for me.  With only a few days left of work, it really signifies summer and of course, time to wear white pants/shorts!  Yeah! As I told you in this post, I love Balance Bars and how yummy and good for you they are.  They are the perfect snack to have on hand in your pool bag or beach bag or thrown in your purse for an emergency snack. According to a recent survey by Balance Bar, 43{c754d8f4a6af077a182a96e5a5e47e38ce50ff83c235579d09299c097124e52d} of Americans feel most balanced during the summer! As we’re approaching June 21st, it’s the perfect time to get outside,

Bringing Awareness to Your Breath

  • May 28, 2015
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Guest post written by: Lucy Hendricks We live in a society where our minds are going 100 mph, running through thousands of thoughts each day; most of which are completely useless and repetitive. We never have the chance to slow down and chill out. Although, stress is not necessarily a bad thing, you do need to be able to adapt to it and manage it. At Gym Laird, we try to help people manage their stress with the concept of the Imaginary Stress Cup. All of life’s daily stresses go into the imaginary cup. If you want to look good and feel good, the way you manage your stress can have a big impact on your results. Most people are aware of the more obvious stressors; sleep, nutrition,

Summer 2015 Goals

  • May 27, 2015
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Happy Summer!  Today was my last full day of work so I am officially on summer break! Hallelujah!  I love those kids but teachers need a break at the end of the year!  Summer is that time for us to rejuvenate and get ready for the next year.  I had a wonderful year in fifth grade but the awesome thing about being a teacher is you get the opportunity to start over every year! This summer, I have lots of things going on and I have a list of tutoring students but I still want to set goals so the summer doesn’t go by and I’m like, “Agggghhhhh!  Only a week left of summer!  I better start on that to-do list!”  Anyone

The Unbearable Guilt of Not Cleaning Your Plate

  • May 27, 2015
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(CC BY-SA 2.0) Ross Catrow/Flickr Children are starving in India. Or Poland. Or China. Or Biafra. Or Africa. You may have heard one or the other of those, depending on your age, from your mother when she urged you to clean your plate as a child. Now with the emphasis on a healthy weight, many people want to cast off that habit, but they still feel bad about “wasting food.” What to do? The Smaller Portions Solution The most important thing you can do is to put less food on your plate. You may be making enough food to feed family members who no longer live with you. Or aging and changes in activity levels may have left you in need of fewer

Escaping the Bonds of Fast Food Chicken Addiction

  • May 26, 2015
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(CC BY-NC 2.0) rocor/Flickr Disclaimer: I don’t eat chicken, but some of my best friends do. I am not talking here about the regular grocery store chicken or the happy free ranging bird that you prepare yourself. I am addressing fast food chicken. For the first time in a century, Americans are eating more chicken than beef, and much of this is in the form of fast food chicken, with purveyors of the All-American burger adding chicken items like crazy to their menus. I imagine chickens are crossing the road in record numbers in an attempt to escape this carnage, but to no avail because chicken eaters want their chicken, and they want it now. So what’s the problem? You are getting

Diet Pepsi Looking to Kick Some Aspartame

  • May 25, 2015
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(CC BY-SA 2.0) Terry Ross/Flickr There was a dramatic development in the world of Big Soda last month. PepsiCo announced the first major reformulation in its Diet Pepsi brand in some thirty years. As of August, the company will replace the artificial sweetener aspartame with the artificial sweetener sucralose. The change is not being made for purposes of improving the beverage’s nutritional content, which will remain approximately zero. And it’s not being made because the Pepsi people think aspartame is harmful. Pepsi has always claimed it to be utterly benign, and the federal government has the company’s back on this: according to the Food and Drug Administration, aspartame has been the subject of more than 100 studies that have repeatedly found it to

Obesity Doesn’t Just Happen To Us

  • May 22, 2015
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(C BY 2.0) mst7022/Flickr To paraphrase the wonderful dearly departed comedian Phyllis Diller after her near-death experience from a heart attack: Don’t worry about dying, you can’t do anything about it, it just happens to you! From everything I’ve been reading about obesity, it’s the same thing, We can’t do anything about it, it just happens to us. Now before you feel I have just gone all Alfred E Newman with this “What Me Worry” attitude about it all, think about all the studies on the topic of obesity and where the blame always goes as well as the proposed solutions to it all. All the research relating obesity faults microbes, the environment, the food industry, the food, lack