Tasty Options For Protein Powder

Think that protein powder needs to be choked down? If so, you’re not alone. When most people think of protein powder, they think of a chalky like substance that’s only good for bodybuilders who are looking to add pounds of muscle to their frame.

Sadly, this isn’t correct at all. The fact of the matter is that most people are not taking in as much protein with their diets as they ideally should and this is holding them back from reaching their goals.

If you want to see the best results possible from your workout and diet program, getting sufficient protein is a must. And the great news? Protein powder doesn’t have to be choked down at all!

With any of the following smart strategies, you can come to actually look forward to getting your protein in for the day.

Let’s give you a few quick ideas to get started.

Protein-Yogurt Parfait

 

There’s no questioning the fact that yogurt is an excellent snack to have in your day. But, the average container of yogurt does only contain about five to eight grams of protein so this really isn’t going to do all that much to get your intake up higher.

Instead, mix half a scoop of protein powder into that yogurt. That’ll instantly add another ten to twelve grams and help enhance the flavor at the same time. With numerous fruit flavor options to choose from, you’ll be sure to find one that meets your preferences perfectly.

Top the yogurt with a few berries and flaxseeds to provide the carbs and healthy fats and you’re all set.

PB-Protein Oats

Second, the next great way to serve up your protein powder is mixed with your morning bowl of oatmeal. Oats on their own are a terrific source of carbs, but are very low in both protein and healthy fats.

Fix that in a hurry by simply stirring in a scoop of chocolate protein powder after the oatmeal has finished cooking and then mixing in a tablespoon of natural peanut butter as well.

There’s nothing quite like this sweet breakfast to start your day and it’ll provide your body with everything that it needs to keep you away from the vending machine come 11 am.

Protein Pancakes

 

Third, protein pancakes are another traditional favorite of many and will quickly replace the higher calorie, higher fat variety that you used to make.

With these ones you’ll want to mix together a quarter cup of dry oats, 2-3 egg whites, along with half to a full scoop of protein powder depending on the consistency you want them.

Then pour this batter onto a hot non-stick griddle and cook like you would a regular pancake. Serve with some low sugar maple syrup and you’ll have a hearty breakfast that treats your body right.

Muscle Building Protein Balls

 

Finally, the last way to enjoy protein powder other than having to have it with a shake is to prepare some high protein muscle building balls.

For this recipe, you’ll combine one cup of raw oats, half a cup of crispy rice cereal, one cup of natural peanut butter, 3-5 tablespoons of honey, along with 1-2 scoops of protein powder.

Mix this all together and then form into round balls. Place in the fridge to set for about two hours and then serve when you’re in need of a balanced, high calorie snack on the go.

So don’t think that protein powder has to taste horrible any longer. When you’re willing to get just a little creative with it, you’re going to find that it’s perfectly possible to get it into your day and reach those protein requirements needed for success.

How You can Stop Binge Eating

If you’re struggling with eating disorders such as binge eating and compulsive overeating – you’re not alone. There are millions like you. Even so, you must take positive action because you can’t live like this or you’ll harm your health severely. People engage in binge eating (eating large quantities of food even when they’re not hungry) to block out painful emotions. They’re using food as a crutch for comfort.

A typical binge-eating scenario plays out like this: You feel anxious or emotionally troubled and you eat a whole tub of ice cream at the end of a stressful day. Many people also report starting off strong on a diet and then giving up and binge eating because it was too much stress maintaining the diet plan. You’re not the first one this has happened to but the good news is, you can stop binge eating. What follows are seven tips that’ll help you to stop binge eating:

STOP BINGE EATING TIP #1: Face Reality – Weight Loss Isn’t Easy.

Let’s face it, the ads for weight loss products make it seem so easy but the truth is it’s not. And expanding waistlines prove it. The fact of the matter is losing unwanted weight and keeping it off is really one of the toughest challenges you’ll face. That’s because there are so many issues such as your personal level of self-discipline to consider. So take a realistic approach to weight loss and realise it’ll take time and it’ll take a lot of hard work – but it’s worth it!

STOP BINGE EATING TIP #2: Forgive Yourself and Let it Go. 

You’re only human and there will be days where you will cave in to the temptation to binge eat. It happens. Don’t let the feelings of guilt overwhelm you. You are not perfect but realise you must take positive action and that’ll mean you’ll get knocked off the horse several times. Just keep getting back on and don’t allow yourself to feel the torment of guilt.

STOP BINGE EATING TIP #3: Take 15-Minute Breaks. 

Here’s what I mean by this. Whenever you get the urge to binge eat or overeat, tell yourself that you’re going to wait 15 minutes before you touch any food. Just 15 minutes. During that 15 minutes period of time, get a grip on your emotions and distract yourself. I think you’ll be surprised by how at the end of that 15-minute period you’ll have no interest in binge eating or overeating.

STOP BINGE EATING TIP #4: Don’t Rely on Diets. 

I truly believe that there are no one-size fits all diets. And for many people it seems as if diets don’t work. So let’s try a different strategy if diets don’t work well for you. Instead of following a strict diet, try to slowly improve your eating habits. For instance instead of eating 5 junk foods a day, just eat 3 a day for the next 7 days. Then once that’s successful then keep pushing till you eat no junk food.

STOP BINGE EATING TIP #5: Moderate Portion Sizes. 

 

When you deprive yourself of the foods you love, it tends to be too much of a shock for the average person. You’ll then be left with cravings for the foods you’ve eaten for years and the temptation will be too overwhelming. So start out by moderating portion sizes. Instead of ordering a full sized pizza, try getting a smaller sized pizza, maybe a kid-sized pizza. Instead of eating on large, normal-sized plates, eat on smaller plates. By doing this you’ll have smaller portions of food available to you and will end up eating less.

STOP BINGE EATING TIP #6: Control Your Emotions.

Instead of trying to escape emotional pain, face those emotions and deal with them. If you don’t do this, they’ll torment you possibly for years to come. Face them down; get help if you must because most eating disorders are symptoms of deeper, emotional issues that are unresolved. Fix those issues and you may be surprised to find that your problems with food disappear as they have for many.

STOP BINGE EATING TIP #7: Get Support From Others. 

 

 

Can you overcome this problem by yourself; sure it’s possible. But why do it the hard way when you can get a circle of people to help and support you? Make yourself accountable to others and use that peer pressure to overcome binge eating.

Calories in Alcohol

It’s a question people ask all the time. “How many calories are in various alcoholic drinks?” That’s a good question because many people like to enjoy a couple of glasses of red wine or even a beer or two after a hard day of work. It’s a habit many people have.

And technically, drinking a couple of glasses of red wine a day could be considered good for your heart. Also, we all know what a killer stress is and a little bit of alcohol now and then can help diffuse built up stress. But the big problem is, alcohol isn’t much of a help when it comes to weight loss.

First of all, while engaging in some casual drinking, you may be sooner tempted to eat snacks and various food items that will pack on the pounds – especially if you’re out with friends. When you’re with a group of friends, all of whom are in a jovial mood, enjoying a few drinks, it’s hard to say “no” to pizza or similar high-calorie food items.

The second problem with alcohol is that the calories in alcohol are empty. What follows are some basic tips you might want to try when it comes to reducing your intake of the calories in alcohol:

Slimming Tip #1

You may want to give up alcohol for a week or even a couple of months till you hit your target weight.

Slimming Tip #2

Be forewarned that it’s so easy to abstain from alcohol all week and then go out on a Friday or Saturday night and binge. You will be tempted! So be prepared to deal with this reality. Keep in mind that one binge and you’ve undone days or even weeks of work.

Slimming Tip #3

 If you will be drinking some alcohol, you may want to try a small 125ml glass of wine. This is the same principle of eating smaller food portions.

Slimming Tip #4

 You can substitute alcoholic drinks with water or low-calorie soft drinks or fruit drinks.

When your body intakes alcohol, what happens is that the calories in alcohol are metabolised first before fat is burned and that’s not desirable when you’re on a weight loss program! What follows is a calories in alcohol chart to help you make better decisions

Calories in Alcohol Chart

How to Decide Which Slimming Diet is Right for You

It seems almost every month, an exciting new diet that promises miracle results appears in the news and on the TV talk shows. Over time, it’s hard to know which diet you should try. After all, there’s so many to choose from.

There are liquid slimming diets, high protein diets, low-carb diets, cookie diets, blood type diets, vegetarian diets and even diets claiming to shrink your belly. Generally speaking most of these diets all have a few things in common:

• They demand that you dramatically decrease the amount of food you eat

• You must shop for specific products and only eat those items on a consistent basis

• They may require you to make time-consuming meals

• You’ll often be stuck making one meal for the family while you eat something entirely different

 

• You’ll almost always be hungry to some extent

At first, you may be excited to try one of these slimming diets. But after a few days or even a week of being a diet Spartan, chances are, that dieting zeal will turn into discouragement. So it’s important to understand, that if you want results, then you’ve got to take the right actions to achieve those results.

And despite what the marketing hype says, you will not peel off six or more pounds of weight weekly. If you do lose several pounds a week then the diet may not be healthy. Healthy weight loss is a slow process that if followed over many weeks will help you realise your weight loss goal. So what’s my point in telling you this?

When exploring diet options, you want to go with a diet that fits your personality, your palate and your schedule. Let me give you a few examples:

• If you’re a busy person, then a slimming diet that requires constant trips to the shop and meals that take too long to prepare will fail you.

• Suppose you can’t handle eating too much meat all the time, following a high protein meat based diet will end up failing you too.

• Likewise, a vegetarian style diet may not work for you if you tend to feel run down easily.

• And some foods on these diet plans may give you headaches or just not agree with you.

Here’s another issue to think about.

  Some slimming diets are extremely limited in what you can eat. So if you’re the type of personality that needs lots of variety, and you get bored easily then you need to find a diet that offers you lots of options and a variety of foods to choose from, otherwise you’ll just give up in a few weeks. The bottom line is this, you need to really shop around and really evaluate what’ll work best for you.

Don’t get caught up in the marketing hype. 

It’s easy to feel compelled to follow a certain diet that may be showcased on certain TV talk shows. Remember those diets might work great for those people but not so well for you. Find the diet that’s right for you.

After all, before you buy a new car, or any other significant purchase, you tend to spend time looking at prices and options. Well you have only one body and one life to live. And how you feel affects every area of your life so doesn’t it make sense to carefully evaluate slimming diets based upon your daily schedule, your needs, your body’s reaction to certain foods and other criteria

 

 

 

How to Stop Yo-Yo Dieting for Good

Along with the temporary weight loss, you also run across the many dangers of yo-yo dieting. This repetitious battle of losing and gaining weight comes with many physical and psychological perils. Our bodies are deprived as we lose the weight, and then our self-esteem plummets as we put the weight back on. If yo-yo dieting is controlling your weight, take advantage of the following recommended tips to break the cycle:

Remove the word “diet” from your vocabulary. Diets are temporary and we only see results when we are dieting. But what about after you’ve reached your goal weight? You need to think of getting control of your health as a lifestyle change which you can continue throughout the rest of your life. Diets don’t work in the long term.

DO NOT completely eliminate your favorite goodies and snacks. Limited self control is part of how we end up overweight in the first place. Are we really going to have enough self control to keep away from these foods forever? It’s highly unlikely. And when we don’t satiate our cravings, we end up cranky and unhappy. Don’t make your lifestyle change an unhappy experience by banning foods.

Set reasonable goals for yourself. It’s completely unhealthy and counterproductive to aim for high weight loss each week. During the first week most will lose quite a few pounds, which is mostly water weight, and think this will be the continued rate of weight loss. Don’t fall into this trap or you’ll be setting yourself up for disappointment. Set your goal at 2 to 4 lbs a week, and no more. At a minimum this is more than 20 lbs in the first three months.

Create a balanced meal plan with a caloric intake of around 1,200 to 1,400 (for women) per day. You can easily stay within these limits and still feel full if you pick the right foods. Remember to keep fiber content high and fat content low. Knowing the facts about fat will help you choose better foods. Add in fresh fruits and veggies and you’ve got a great, healthy start to your new lifestyle change.

Control your portions. Fill your plate two-thirds full at mealtimes or use a smaller plate to get better control of your portions. If your snack is a single serving of low-fat snack crackers, buy those in single servings or buy a bigger box and put single servings in plastic baggies for easy grabbing. Sitting at your desk with the whole box will only tempt you to eat way more than you should. Also, try eating 5-6 smaller meals per day rather than 3 large one’s. This will help you burn calories more efficiently by boosting your metabolism.

Get active. Start walking, join an aerobics class, get involved in a sports league, design an exercise routine – whichever you choose it needs to be tailored to fit your life and something you will continue. The key is finding slimming exercises you enjoy! Sometimes having a workout buddy helps keep your mind off the actual exercise and it turns into more of a group activity. This also helps with being held accountable to stick with the program.

Stay busy. If you keep busy and limit your idle time, you’ll have less time to think about food. Instead of eating junk food in front of the TV you could be getting involved in any number of hobbies or out socialising with friends.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been yo-yo dieting for years, or even decades, you can still break the chain and ease your way into lifestyle changes to help you lose weight and get into shape. If you follow the steps above you’re headed in the right direction for a slimmer, trimmer and healthier you!

The Dangers of Yo-Yo Dieting

You’ve no doubt heard of the phrase, “Yo-yo dieting”. And chances are if you’ve struggled with your weight for a long time, you may have done it. What exactly is yo-yo dieting?

The yo-yo diet is a term defined by Krause’s Food, Nutrition and Diet Therapy as “the process of losing and gaining weight several times throughout a lifetime.” Here’s what yo-yo dieting usually looks like in a person’s life.

You hear about this fantastic diet on TV and it just seems too good to pass up on. You stock up on special foods this diet requires and totally change your eating habits. Then you have a stressful day or your schedule gets messed up where you don’t have the special diet foods you need or just don’t have time to prepare a meal that’s based upon the requirements of your diet. Then the overwhelming temptation to break the diet out of convenience happens.

You end up giving in to temptation and break your diet. Then another bad or stressful day occurs and chocolate ice cream sure sounds like a good idea and you give in – to satiate your cravings and emotions.

Before you know it, you find yourself cheating on your diet several times a week and it can easily turn into binge eating, making it difficult to get back on track with the diet. Eventually you quit the diet and give up for awhile, until at a later date you decide to try a drastic diet, which fails also, and then you repeat the process. Does any of this sound familiar?

If so, then you’re in danger of yo-yo dieting. Losing weight then regaining weight and losing it again and regaining it is no laughing matter, that’s because it can put you at risk for some serious health problems, including:

7 Ways You can Beat Food Cravings

Most overweight people suffer from food cravings on occasion. Typically this food craving is for a particular type of food. What’s interesting to note is that it’s not really an issue of hunger but of something deeper. Looking deeper you’ll see that when a person is dealing with food cravings, there are usually two biological factors in action that drive you to desire certain foods.

The two types of foods people tend to get an insatiable craving for are foods loaded with sugar or salt. When there is a dip in your Serotonin levels or Adrenal Fatigue that can trigger food cravings. But what’s important to you is the question, “How do I beat food cravings?” The following is a list of seven tips that are tested and proven to work … and they work even if the urge to binge seems unstoppable. Why not give these tips a try?

Beat Food Cravings Tip #1

 The next time you feel a food craving coming immediately change the place you’re in and/or what you’re doing. Now why would you want to do this? It’s because your surroundings may be sending off signals to trigger your mind to suddenly desire a certain food. Sights, and especially smells can trigger memories that remind you of food.

Beat Food Cravings Tip #2

 You can also beat food cravings by going for a short run or jog. This too will refocus your mind elsewhere so you forget about your food craving.

Beat Food Cravings Tip #3

 You can “distract” your taste buds so that you don’t end up eating calorie packed fattening foods. For example, let’s say you’re craving something salty, instead of indulging on a bag of salty chips you can eat something spicy and low calorie. Or let’s say you’re craving something sugary, instead of eating a chocolate bar; eat something sour that has few calories such as a sour apple or a pickle.

Beat Food Cravings Tip #4

 Another thing you can do to wean yourself from food cravings is to give yourself some kind of desirable reward for avoiding the craving. You could rent a movie, buy yourself a gift or go out. The logic behind this is that you refocus the reward of satisfying your cravings for something else.

Beat Food Cravings Tip #5

 You never want to starve yourself. Usually when you starve yourself for a pro-longed period of time you’re just setting yourself up for trouble because the lower your blood sugar drops the weaker your will becomes and you’ll likely end up bingeing on the food you crave.

Beat Food Cravings Tip #6

 Try to avoid sugar. Sure it makes foods taste wonderful, but if you’re trying to drop pounds and inches, you’ve got to make serious steps to wean yourself off sugar. You might be surprised to know that some dieticians feel that sugar can be as addictive as the drug heroin. The problem with sugar-loaded foods is that they’re loaded with empty calories and often after you eat them, you will feel hungry again in a few hours.

Beat Food Cravings Tip #7

 

 Eat plenty of foods rich in calcium. Why is this important? It’s important because sometimes food cravings can be traced back to a deficiency in calcium. The result is that your body initiates various food cravings to fill the calcium deficiency. So what you need to do is to make sure your daily diet consists of plenty of low calorie foods loaded with calcium. Good examples of those foods would be many leafy green vegetables.