GUILT FREE French toast with strawberries and cream


We train hard and eat healthy to be able to afford the fun stuff. Guess what? The fun stuff doesn’t have to be complete trash! This treat is one the whole family will enjoy!

How?… make bread with almond flour and coconut oil (see zucchini bread). Beat an egg with 1t cinnamon (more or less to taste) and 1/2t vanilla. Dip a slice of bread in the egg mixture and cook on a griddle or frying pan on medium for about 5 minutes, until golden brown.

For the strawberries and cream, just slice some strawberries and mix with whipped cream, which has only fat – no carbs, no sugar. It’s naturally sweet, but you can mix in a little bit of Splenda, stevia, or honey if it works with your macros and if you want a bit more sweetness.  Dollop on top of the French toast. There you go – delicious strawberry and cream !!!! 🙂

Submitted by Norma S.

Substitute Teaching, Part 1

Establishing a new eating pattern is a major lifestyle change, which works best when you discover new and delicious ways to meet your nutritional needs, rather than imitating your old diet. For example, pasta and sandwiches can be replaced with meat, vegetables, and interesting salads. However, food is very central to our cultures and behavior. Certain foods make us happy and remind us of celebrations of the past; hence the popularity of “comfort food,” just like Mom made it.

Therefore, while we recommend recreating your meals instead of substituting the old ones, we will be providing suggestions for delicious substitutes for popular foods, many of which are gluten-laden disasters. We will be starting a “Sub Board” at DNA, where you can write down foods that you want to substitute, and answers will magically show up for all to see and share. Three such examples follow, and for a fourth, see LeeAat’s mini pizzas with cauliflower crusts!

1. Spaghetti

Let’s start easy: spaghetti squash is a GREAT sub for spaghetti. It has 10g of carbs in 1 cup, about 1g of protein, and trace fat. According to Livestrong, it also has Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids.

It’s easy to cook – just cut it in half, lay the halves face down on a cookie sheet, and bake it for about 30 minutes in the oven at 400′. Let it cool a bit, flip it over, and scrape it out with a fork. LOAD with a meat and tomato sauce, or anything else that works with your macros. Nom nom!

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The Crust

Part of embracing whole food and leaving gluten in your past is to change what you eat, not to mimic old favorites. Having said that, I am the queen of “clean” treats – I make a mean banana-coconut-zucchini bread (the banana adds the sweetness, and coconut flour and egg create structure), and can do some pretty amazing things with almond flour.

Some foods are really tough to ditch. While this list varies among people, certain “off limits” foods are more popular than others. For example, most people who ditch added sugars don’t crave soda after a while – it’s just too sickly sweet and tastes of chemicals. (When I get beverage-bored, lemon in water or plain old seltzer do the trick. Wine is another topic entirely, though.) Pizza, on the other hand, is really delicious and can include plenty of healthy veggies…snuggled in between a thick antinutrient-laden dough mattress and a questionable cheese blanket, and often polluted with added sugars and other nasty stuff.

What’s a college student to do?

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Read the Label!

Note to all clients, visitors, stalkers, etc:

Before you eat something that comes in a package, READ THE LABEL.

You may be very surprised at what you see. We all know that processed food is often packed with unwelcome corn syrup, salt, chemicals (preservatives, additives), artificial flavoring and sweeteners, and occasionally downright unappealing additives.

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Getting stuck

20120730-144613.jpgIf you have learned lifting technique at DNA, you have doubtless been encouraged to push your limits and build your strength. One critical point in strength building is that part of a lift where you GET STUCK. Your deadlift is near the top but not quite there, and it doesn’t want to move, or you’re near the top of a pull-up and feel like you just want to drop off the bar and curl up into a little ball on the floor.

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What’s in season? Zucchini!

One of the best ways to get great nutrition is to eat locally-grown produce in season. Food is usually in abundance, and therefore cheaper, in season, and is also fresher, having ripened on its own (without chemicals) and traveled less distance to arrive on your plate.

Believe it or not, Community Gardens of Tucson, Tucson Organic Gardners, and similar organizations have no trouble growing veggies right here in the hot desert. My garden is currently churning out tomatoes, cucumbers, and zucchini. I have a fridge full of huge zucchini, most of which may be unfortunately too hard to eat (vegetables are best when young and tender). I’ve been cooking zucchini at almost every meal, and am still not sick of it. Yet.

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Weird Science


I almost always get wound up when I read articles trumpeting the latest in exercise research, especially from the New York Times Well Blog. They tend to plaster sensational headlines about the latest study to creep into the literature by some doctor or scientist who needs to publish or perish, or perhaps genuinely cares but is so focused on his/her niche that the big picture gets lost.

Translation: articles about health always force my baloney meter into the ON setting.

Why?

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Just Plan It.

The number one barrier to making a real change in your nutrition tends to be…life getting in the way. You see your schedule as a major barrier to clean eating, which takes time for shopping, cooking, and cleaning up, not to mention actually sitting down to eat. When your week is crammed full of work, soccer practices, volunteer activities, dance, karate, book club, and anything else you do in the evening, the thought of adding a REAL meal may be daunting.

However, no other change is more important to your health than fitting clean eating into your life, and you are probably missing only one key step that can bust the schedule barrier for you.

It’s called PLANNING!

Compare these two scenarios:

1. Couple comes home from long day at work, crashes on the couch, turns on the news, gets hungry, and decides to amble off to the kitchen to see what’s there. In the fridge, we find a hunk of three-week-old cheddar cheese, some bacon, half a head of lettuce, an army of condiments, and perhaps a few chicken breasts. Hm. Now what? Chicken takes too long to cook and we are hungry NOW…get the door, it’s Domino’s.

2. Couple comes home from long day at work, checks the recipe board, checks the fridge, and spends the next 10 minutes chopping veggies from the fridge, adding spices to the chicken, and preheating the oven. Once the chicken is safely in the oven, couple crashes on the couch, turns on the news, and waits for the oven to beep 20 minutes later. Yum.

In the second case, the couple had planned and shopped for their meals in advance. Spending 15 minutes each week planning and maybe another hour shopping for ingredients is the best way to enable clean eating. It’s pretty simple, and the internet is there to help with automated meal planning sites – my favorite is Relish! (www.relishrelish.com), which lets you pick from a selection of meals, and spits out a shopping list and recipes. I modify the recipes to remove unwanted sugars or grains, add whatever vegetables happen to be in season, and cook accordingly. Without going into too much detail, I have a schedule that would make most master multitaskers shiver, so I don’t see time as an excuse.

Convenience is a little trickier. If you need to feed the beasts between school and soccer, meals need to be edible on the go and often at high speed. Again, planning will help, but be sure to pick entrees that go. Pre-chop cooked meat for easier eating, avoid red sauces if kids are going to eat in the car, and add plenty of crunchy finger veggies.

Don’t forget to plan your breakfast and lunch selections as well as dinner. The easiest lunch solution is to add a bunch of leafy greens to the shopping list, and cook extra meat at dinner. Chop the leftover meat, add to some greens in a portable container, sprinkle with chopped veggies, nuts, etc. as desired, sprinkle with a little oil and vinegar, and take it to go!

You CAN eat real food with a packed schedule; just devote some time for planning and shopping time each week. We can help you figure it out. You’re worth it!

How to RUN – faster, longer, better!

At some point, in your quest for optimum health and fitness, you assuredly will face RUNNING. Great programs will include things like short and medium sprints, and an occasional long slow endurance run. While the benefits of running are enormous, at some point you  will likely want to  ensure that your technique is improving  in order to improve your performance. Proper technique will not only improve performance, but will significantly decrease your incidence of injuries such as shin splints and joint pains among many others.

So with all the techniques, programs and seminars available, how does one decide which is truly the correct method? While we can certainly turn this into an in depth scientific paper, the studies have already been done. Rather, I’d prefer to make this an easy go-to article to get you quickly moving.

Sled pulls are a great way to increase strength, speed, power and endurance.

The following are a just a few steps to help develop proper technique:

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