Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins

Pumpkin chocolate chip muffins-Just in time for Fall

INGREDIENTS
• 1 cup white whole wheat flour
• 1/3 cup + 1 tbsp coconut flour
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp sea salt
• 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1 cup granulated sweetener
• 1 cup canned pure pumpkin pureee
• 1/2 cup liquid whites
• 1/4 cup unsweetened applesauce
• 1 whole egg
• 1 tbsp coconut oil, liquid
• 1/3 cup semisweet chocolate chips

PREPARATION
• Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
• Spray a jumbo muffin tin with non-stick cooking spray. Set aside.
• In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, coconut flour, cinnamon, baking powder, soda, salt, nutmeg, and sweetener. Mix until combined.
• In a separate bowl, combine pumpkin, whites, applesauce, egg, and coconut oil. Mix well.
• With a large spatula, mix the wet ingredients into the bowl with the dry ingredients and stir until a batter is formed. Stir in the chocolate chips.
• Evenly divide and pour the batter into each of the muffin cups. Bake for 25 minutes, or until a knife inserted into the center of the muffin comes out clean. Let sit in muffin pan for 5 minutes before moving to a wire cooling rack. Enjoy!
NUTRITION INFO
(Per muffin: recipe makes 6)
250 calories, 7 grams protein, 36 grams carbohydrates (8 grams fiber), 8.5 grams fat

Just what the heck does the word "NATURAL" mean

The Truth about Natural Foods

As people are growing more conscientious about their health, natural foods are becoming increasingly popular. So how are we supposed to know if the word “natural” is actually worth all that extra money?

Unofficially, the term “natural” refers to food that contains no artificial ingredients such as flavoring or colors.

Legally however, the only requirement for using the term “natural” on product labels is that it not be misleading.

This vague guideline set forth by the FDA leaves many of us with a lot of unanswered questions.

The basic requirement fails to address whether or not pesticides may be used, nor does it address how the food was produced or processed.

While it’s clear that consumers are demanding better access to natural options, there’s a lot of work to be done before food labels can be completely trusted.

If natural living is important to you, take food labeling with a grain of salt. The terminology might not mean quite what you think.

Oddessy Healthcare

How Healthy is Your Protein Bar?

On our quest to be healthy, we often find ourselves combating a hectic lifestyle. With work and family commitments, it can be difficult to find time to exercise and eat right.

Protein bars make for convenient alternative to many home cooked meal options. They’re sold just about everywhere so you don’t even need to go out of your way to find them. Their packaging certainly makes them appear nutritious but do you know what you’re really eating?

Protein – This ingredient may seem quite obvious. Protein is actually one of the ingredients you should pay the most attention to. Most protein bars contain about 20 grams of protein, which is about half the recommended daily intake for an inactive woman. Consuming excessive levels of protein can cause all sorts of health problems including weight gain and calcium loss.

Sugar – You already know that consuming too much sugar is unhealthy. After all, that’s why you grabbed a protein bar, not a candy bar right? What you may not know is that many protein bars contain more than 6 teaspoons of sugar. That’s more than the recommended daily added sugar for women and 2/3 the amount recommended for men.

Artificial Sweeteners – Maybe your favorite bar has a low amount of sugar, but don’t let that fool you. Artificial sweeteners are often added to processed foods to make them taste better without adding sugar. These sweeteners have been shown to lead to gastrointestinal problems as well as cause increased junk food cravings.

Chocolate Coating – For the most part, protein bars aren’t actually coated in chocolate. Instead, hydrogenated palm kernel oil is used which creates a coating that, while tasty has a high concentration of saturated fat.

Preservatives – Protein bars are typically packaged months before you get your hands on them. To keep them tasting fresh, must be added to them. Butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) is a common preservative that has been linked to an increased risk of cancer.

Image courtesy of nenetus at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Lowdown on Keto

At some point in just about everybody’s life, some level of dieting becomes a necessity. Whether you find that your health and weight have begun to slip or you simply want to bring yourself to your optimum level, what you put into your body plays a major roll. No amount of exercise is going to get you there if you don’t have a diet to match.

With so many dieting trends out there, the search for the right plan can be a daunting task. How are you supposed to know which one is right for you?

For most people, the main reason they start a diet in the first place is to burn off unwanted fat. While there are a variety of other health reasons to maintain a particular diet, the desire for weight loss can be quite a motivator.

This is where the Ketogenic diet really shines.

Put simply, a Ketogenic diet is designed to put your body into a state of Ketosis, where it begins to burn fat for fuel instead of carbs. Sounds great right? To properly follow this type of diet, you need to eat large amounts of fat, plenty of protein and a very low amount of carbohydrates. Now, this is where the Keto diet begins to sound a bit counterproductive to some people. How could a diet that is high in fat cause you to burn fat?

Like most diets, the Keto diet relies heavily on the restriction of caloric intake. Controlling the amount of calories that you’re ingesting is the basic principle behind any weight loss program.

What makes the Ketogenic diet more successful than most is its ability to control hunger and food cravings?

A lot of people find themselves constantly battling their self-control when dieting. Because of the constant cravings they face, dieting becomes a cycle of temporary healthy living followed by binging on junk food to make up for those missed comforts. The low success rate of these diets can be extremely discouraging and usually causes people to feel that diets don’t make much of a difference.
The real key to the Keto diet is the low carbohydrate consumption. When we eat carbs, it causes our blood-sugar and insulin levels to rise rapidly. The insulin disperses the excess blood sugar, which causes you to feel hungry. This is why people that follow a diet that focuses solely on counting calories often fail. Feeling like you’re starving yourself can leave you unhappy and struggling to maintain control.

By greatly limiting your carbohydrate intake, the Keto diet keeps blood-sugar levels low and much more stable, helping you to avoid feeling hungry all the time.

The reduction in insulin levels is also necessary since insulin causes our bodies to store fat instead of burning it. So it turns out all those calorie counting diets weren’t so effective after all.
The best part about following a Keto diet is just how satisfying it can be. No more eating tiny, non-filling meals better fit for a rodent. Since the majority of your daily calories will come from fats and protein, you’ll find that the meals can be quite filling. Not only that, foods that are high in fats and proteins are almost always delicious.

Try this on for size: 
Bacon and Ricotta Pancakes. 
If you’re anything like me, I had you at bacon.
Now that you’re on board with the Keto diet, there are a few things you should know about how to move forward.

Getting started with a Keto diet can be a little tricky. In general, you want to keep yourself limited to less than 50 grams of carbs each day. When starting out, it’s typically recommended that you limit yourself to 20 grams per day in order to successfully force your body into Ketosis. Being strict with yourself in the beginning will also make your diet much easier to follow later on.

Another thing that can be incredibly helpful in the beginning are test strips that determine the Ketone levels in your urine. The results registered on the strips will tell you if your body has entered Ketosis and how much fat your body is using. It can be helpful to regularly test your Ketone levels because it lets you know that you’re following the diet properly. The strips are also great motivators to keep pushing you along your path toward a healthier lifestyle.

This type of diet can take some adjustment to get it just right. Every individual is different so it may take a bit of trial and error to determine how many carbohydrates you can consume each day and the types of meals that are working for you.

However, once you get the specifics ironed out, you’ll be sailing smoothly toward a much healthier and more satisfying lifestyle.

Source: www.themancancook.com

Breakthrough Technology: Ketone Supplementation with Keto-OS

NEW! Breakthrough Technology: Ketone Supplementation with Keto-OS

Very rarely does a new product come along that is truly revolutionary and has the ability to make a measurable and instant impact on your health, mental clarity, energy and more. That product has arrived, and I am SO excited to share it with you!

About five weeks ago, I partnered with a company called Pruvit. Together, we are very excited to announce the debut of a new product called Keto-OS. Keto-OS is an exogenous ketone (beta-hydroxybutyrate salts) supplement. Basically, this is a highly nutritional drink mix that instantly increases your ketones and induces a state of ketosis within the body.

Five weeks ago, I started drinking these therapeutic ketones. Hands down, this is the most effective and fastest acting supplement I have EVER put in my body. As most of you know,I have suffered with chronic shoulder inflammation, with some days being worse than others. Within a couple of days of taking these my pain is gone, and I can now bench press my body weight, because my shoulder pain does not hold me back from making gains in the weight room. Since taking these, my pain level keeps going down, my energy level is up (no 3pm crash) and my cravings for sweets is basically nonexistent. However, this product is NOT just helpful inflammation.

Third-party research has shown that being in the ketogenic zone can help provide relief from just about any chronic disease, including leaky guy, MS, Parkinson’s, cognitive issues, and muscle and joint pain.

Basically, this is what you can expect when you start taking Keto-OS:

Fast and sustained energy
Reduced brain fog
Increased brainpower
Increased focus
Weight loss
Appetite suppression
Strength gain
Better mood
Less inflammation/stiffness and joint pain
Better digestion and gut health
Clear skin

Pretty much everyone will experience improved health on this product. As you know, I would never promote a product that I don’t 100% believe in myself. I am very excited about sharing Keto-OS, and know that it can help many people find the health they dream of having.

At this time, Keto-OS is in VIP mode and only limited number of people are being invited to join. I want you to be one of those people!! 

If you want a chance to start feeling better asap, send me an email letting me know that you want in on this opportunity today! info@fitnstrong.net

I truly believe that Keto-OS is going to take the health and wellness industry by storm. Come join me as one of the first people to experience the benefits.

~Coach Steph

ps — For those of you research junkies (like me), here are some articles on the benefits of having ketones in the body….

Inflammation: http://news.yale.edu/2015/02/16/anti-inflammatory-mechanism-dieting-and-fasting-revealed

Neurodegenerative Disorders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fLR428gzQ4&feature=youtu.be

Type 2 Diabetes: http://www.healthline.com/health/type-2-diabetes-ketogenic-diet#Overview1

High Blood Pressure, Cholesterol and Metabolic Disorders:http://authoritynutrition.com/10-benefits-of-low-carb-ketogenic-diets/

Metabolism: What It Is & How It Works

Everyone knows what metabolism is right?

There is an overwhelming amount of information floating around the web on metabolism, how it impacts weight loss and how you can improve yours. However, once you start reading, you realize that finding anything useful is more difficult than you imagined it would be. You have to wade through all the websites that only want to sell you something and the scientific information that, let’s face it, can sometimes be pretty tricky to understand.

The truth is that the word metabolism is thrown around a lot in the health and fitness world but most average Joes don’t have a clear understanding of what it is or how it works.

What is Metabolism?

Metabolism is the culmination of physical and chemical processes that take place inside your body that keep you alive. It is how living cells are able to turn food into usable energy in order to perform all of the involuntary actions happening inside you right now.

Metabolism is measured by what is known as your metabolic rate. This is a measurement of the speed at which your body can burn calories and convert them into energy needed to complete basic functions such as breathing and growing.

How Does It Work?

Just like a car needs gas to run, your body needs fuel to survive. In basic terms, when you eat food your body digests it, breaking it down into fuel and waste. You discharge the unusable waste and convert the fuel into usable energy.

A large percentage of the calories that you ingest are used for automatic body functions that keep you alive. Some calories are burned during physical activity and anything left over is stored as fat.

The thyroid gland produces hormones that regulate your metabolism. Those hormones are chemicals that send signals to your body dictating the rate at which to process the fuel that it has consumed and precisely what to do with the energy it provides. For that reason if your thyroid creates too much or too little of these necessary hormones it can cause you to burn calories at a faster or slower rate than normal.

What Factors Influence Your Metabolic Rate?

There are numerous contributing factors that impact the rate at which your particular body burns calories. Some of these things you can influence through your lifestyle choices and others are out of your hands.

Genetics

Not everyone is created equally. Some people have a naturally high metabolism and no matter what they eat they never seem to gain a pound. In some cases this can be a result of an over production of hormones by the thyroid gland referred to as hyperthyroidism. On the other side of the coin, some individuals suffer from hypothyroidism creating less than the average amount of hormones. This can slow your metabolic rate causing you to burn calories slower and making it difficult to lose weight.

Age

In general, your metabolism begins to slow down in your twenties and continues to progressively drop by a few percent every ten years. This means that it is typically more and more difficult to lose weight as you get older.

Diet

You can improve your metabolism by choosing to eat a balanced diet that is high in protein. It takes more energy for your body to process proteins therefore eating foods with a high protein concentration can raise your metabolism.

Some dietary components like caffeine and spicy foods can temporally boost your metabolism when ingested. This is why many diet pills on the market that claim to guarantee dramatic weight loss contain a high volume of caffeine.

Don’t overdo the dieting. Eating too little or waiting too long between meals can actually negatively affect your metabolism and make it harder to lose weight. Evidence suggests that consuming less than 1,200 calories per day can slow your metabolic rate and cause unwanted fat storage.

Exercise

Physical activity or the lack thereof can greatly influence your metabolism. Individuals that exercise on a regular basis often have a lower body fat percentage and higher muscle volume than those who don’t. This is beneficial because in general, more muscle and less body fat equals higher metabolism. For that same reason men tend to have a faster metabolic rate than women because women typically have a higher body fat percentage.

There are several supplements available that claim to improve your metabolism and help you lose weight fast. While some of these products may produce results, they’re not typically the best option. While there are some factors you can’t control, the best way to keep your metabolic rate up is with a healthy diet and regular exercise.

Source: Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at Freedigitalphotos.net

Mediocracy is Not on the Agenda...How Does Your Trainer Train?

How does your Trainer train???  You really want to know.....here is a glimpse 

Simple – sacrifice and consistency, mediocracy is not on the agenda

On a daily basis I consistently sacrifice, because my health, strength, and mobility are ultimately more important to me than the other fluff with which people seem to fill their lives. I’m not saying that other people are wrong (I am really), but I know which I would rather be doing.

I don’t go out in the week for drinks or dinner. Not because I don’t want to, but because my evenings are full with family, food preparation, work preparation, and getting to bed at a reasonable time to have adequate sleep and recovery. This allows my body and mind to recharge, regroup and gets me ready for the day ahead and whatever it may entail.

I sacrifice the junk food, deep fried foods, sweets, and processed crap. Not because I don’t like it (I love it), but because I love myself, my body, and my physical and mental health more. I love the confidence and energy that looking and feeling good gives me. Average is shit, and it’s great to be better than the average.

I don’t miss training sessions. If something comes up and plans change, then the session gets rearranged, caught up, scaled down. It never gets cancelled!! Looking after your body isn’t a quick fix or an appointment, it’s a lifestyle. I never EVER miss the appointment.  Until people realize this, they will continue to miss the mark and fail to live up to their potential.

I disassociate myself from negative people and bad influences. I surround myself with positivity, healthy choices, and strong emotional and professional support structures. I engross myself in environments and situations that will challenge and further me. That is how I grow, gain strength, and continue to learn and make positive steps forward in my life.

The spare money or residual income I have gets reinvested into my family, business, education, or my training. I don’t buy gadgets, or purchase anything that won’t enhance my life or help me progress. Some will see this as strange or say I’m not enjoying life, but trust me I am. 

I haven’t talked about specific strength training, gym programs, or nutrition, and I don’t need to. They are the tiny cogs that form part of a much bigger machine. It’s the big things that count. When you get the big things right, the small things fall into place and you can’t help but progress and make gains in everything you do.

I can picture some people reading this and thinking that I’m denying myself the pleasures they have. I’m not denying myself. I choose not to participate in some things, as I want something more, something greater.

Some will think I’m being big headed and making myself out to be better than everyone else. I’m not; I’m just telling it as it is and sharing what I do. If you feel that way, then there’s probably some guilt at the way you lead your life.

Others will think I’m obsessive over the way I live my life and the choices I make. To those, all I would say is, “Obsessive is a word used by the lazy to describe the dedicated.”