Swap Buttons!

If you have a exercise/fitness or healthy food blog I'd love to swap buttons with you! Even if you just post regularly on your own personal fitness journey I'd love to swap with you!

Just send me an email and I'll get your button added a.s.a.p! I will keep your button up for at least three months, maybe longer if there are plenty of open spaces. Three months for sure though!

Button size will be 100x100. I will resize your button if needed!

My email:

mrshelenstafford {at} yahoo {dot} com

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Mixing Up Your Salad

Hey guys I'm back for a short post. As you may have noticed, this blog has been very inactive lately. If anyone is interested in writing a health post on food, diet, exercise, fitness, etc. please send me an email with the topic you'd like to write about! I would love to have some posts written by you readers!

Anyway, back to the subject at hand: Salads!!!

How many of you actually enjoy salads? I have to be honest and say that I only enjoy them on occasion. They have to be a good salad too, not some crappy lettuce and dressing salad. I like it fixed up with a few other toppings such as almonds, spinach, raisins, tomatoes, croutons, cucumbers, sharp cheddar cheese, shredded chicken... and I could go on (not all in the same salad of course!).

I thought I'd share with you some different photos of salads I've enjoyed over the last few months. Get ready for your mouth's to start watering!

This salad has a nice mix of almond slices, raisins, dried cranberries, spinach, iceberg lettuce, and ranch dressing. It is probably one of my favorites to make, although I usually don't add almonds to it except for on occasion.

This salad is mostly spinach with raisins, sharp cheddar cheese, croutons and ranch dressing.

A more classic salad which consists of a nice mixture of green lettuces, beautiful cherry tomatoes, and sharp cheddar cheese with ranch (my favorite dressing if you haven't noticed lol).

Adding shredded chicken to a salad gives you some protein with your veggies. As you can see this salad has the dark green lettuce, spinach, shredded chicken, a few dried cranberries and of course, ranch dressing.

If you're looking to make a salad into a meal try Taco Salad. I usually make it up with ground beef, frito chips, lettuce, shredded cheese, salsa, black olives, red onion, kidney beans, ranch dressing, and occasionally I add spinach too. I have the Taco Salad recipe on my main blog which you should totally check out if you think most or all of those things sound good!

So there are some ideas for mixing up your regular salad to make it more tasty and enjoyable!

What are extra toppings you like to add to your salads?

Your Skin In Colder Weather

{photo via Key To Nutrition}

Hello all! I know it's been a month too many since I've posted anything here and I'm terribly sorry about that...today's little post is more just a sharing of another great post I found via a favorite health related blog of mine: Key To Nutrition!

Brish is the beautiful author behind this blog which was formerly titled "Get A Taste Of Nutrition". I wrote a featured post on her blog last November which you can check out here. Today's post, which I'm sharing with you from her blog, is all about foods to eat to help keep your skin moisturized instead of cracked, dry, and flaky. I love how she shares lots of foods for each vitamin necessary to keep healthy skin throughout the fall/winter seasons while the weather is cooler and then just plain cold! So stop reading here and go check out her post Autumn Glow!

What is your BMI?

One of the reason I started my healthy journey was an iPhone app that told me what my BMI (Body Mass Index) was.  That night  I was in shock and sick to my stomach.  Not only was I obese, but severely obese.  This realization propelled me into the journey that I am on today.

Use the chart below to find your BMI:

Now that you know your BMI, it is important for these reasons:

If your BMI is high, you may have an increased risk of developing certain diseases

including:

-high blood pressure

-heart disease

-high cholesterol and blood lipids (LDL)

-Type 2 Diabetes

-sleep apnea

-osteoarthritis

-female infertility

-gastroesophageal reflux (GERD) 

If our BMI is not where it should be, we have to choose to make some healthy changes.  The best way to lower your BMI is weight loss.  When you lower it to normal range, you have a better chance of not getting the conditions above. 

I also know that health insurance uses this chart to determine if you are in a healthy range.  With the changes, you could be paying double or even triple the price of your insurance if you are not in the normal range. {article}  This is going to be our future, so it is important that we make healthy choices for ourselves.  

But most importantly, do it for youself.....your children.....your grand children.  If we will choose to lose.....we will be on our way to a healthier lifestyle and a longer life!

Do some push-ups, Ladies!!!

Ladies,

I am going to tell you something that some of you may have never heard before!! Although if you lift weights, you are probably aware that there are some exercises that everyone should be doing! Yep! Even women!! We need to pick up the weights and lift and push!! Why? Lifting weights creates that resistance training which assists in building stronger muscles and bones and creates endurance and strength. Aside from the fact that muscle mass looks better than fat.

Surprisingly the exercise that I am talking about is push-ups!! Aside from bench presses, dead-lifts, and squats. All women should do push-ups!! Push-ups assist in building strength on your arms, chest, shoulders and even your core. Push-ups are great for the development of the pectoral muscles because they create the illusion of cleavage and help to lift your breasts.

I am a huge advocate of doing push-ups and even fit them in between cardio sessions or on chest and triceps days!! Start slow and don't overdo it, do a couple against a sturdy surface while standing.  Don't get on your knees until you have figured out the proper form and your arms are strong to hold you for the few seconds that they last.

Once you have figured out the right form, you could work toward the kneeling push-ups.  Please take a look at the following steps and try it!! With consistency and effort, you will eventually get to master your technique!! Best of luck!!

Step 1: Kneel on a mat on all fours with your knees hip-width apart. Your hands should be slightly wider than shoulder-width apart and your fingers and wrists pointing forward.

Step 2: Feather your breathing as you lower your chest toward the floor with a through count of 10 seconds. Descend to your maximum tension point, and hold for 2 seconds. 

Step 3: Push your body back to starting position with a through count of 10 seconds, keeping your elbows slightly bent at the top of the move.

Step 4: Repeat three times without resting

New Header for the blog!

Ever since I did the makeover on Exercise Encouragement GROUP Blog I was never really happy with how the header looked. I thought it was too cluttery, but couldn't ever figure out exactly what I wanted to do with it. Well, as you will see when comparing the two photos below, I basically took the wording off the busy background and left it on plain white. I think this looks MUCH cleaner and probably more professional as well. Which header do you like better? The old or the new? Obviously, I like the new one! lol.

THE OLD HEADER

THE NEW HEADER

Also, notice the emphasis on GROUP? I wanted to change that part up a bit because this is a GROUP blog with multiple contributors and I think it's important that people who visit the blog will *hopefully* realize that fairly quickly and want to take part! :)

That's all for now. Happy 4th of July everyone!

Healthy Eating During Pregnancy

In my last post I announced my being pregnant (read that post here) and since then I've been busy with life in general, and then laptop issues have taken up the rest of the past few weeks. (I had to send it off to be repaired and that took about three weeks, and then I was locked out of my email account for almost a full week once I got my laptop back.) ANYWAY... I'm just popping in to share a few more healthy food ideas that I've shared over on my main blog, but thought you readers here may enjoy as well.

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A healthy snack: Nutella on Rice Cakes. This is something I sort-of accidently discovered one day when I was looking for something sweet to snack on but didn't want to take the time to bake anything. Of course there are all kinds of rice cakes you can use. The one in the photo (from my main blog) is just a plain and regular white rice cake. I'm sure this would be healthier with a brown rice cake, but I didn't have any of those.

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A good breakfast: Whole Wheat Blueberry Oatmeal Muffins. Since being pregnant I've discovered that my used-to-be massive sweet tooth has almost completely disappeared. I walk down the candy isle in WalMart now and nothing really looks or sounds good, where as before I wanted most everything on the shelves! Anyway, this recipe is one I created and is really tasty...and as you can see, quite full of blueberries too!

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Snacking: Freezing Bananas. We have an ALDI store around here and I LOVE going in and looking for good deals. Quite often I can find bananas for 0.29 cents a lb. and when I do I usually pick up a few bunches of them to have on hand. Not only are bananas great for eating fresh, but you can also freeze them while they're fresh to use in smoothies later on. OR if you wait too long and they start to turn brown they are perfect for making banana bread! Lots of great, healthy ideas here!

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Filling Snacks/Breakfast: Healthy Granola Fruit Yogurt Snack. I don't know about you but yogurt and granola are two of my favorite things to snack on...add fruit and it's 10 times better! This is a regular snack or dinner for me. I like to make my own granola too because you can put whatever you want in it and it can be either mostly healthy, or completely healthy {granola recipe here}.

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A breakfast idea: Blueberry Oatmeal Muffins. In case you didn't notice, I REALLY like Blueberry Muffins! lol. This recipe is a little different from the one listed above...and with the original ingredients is not near as healthy, but if you make the suggested ingredient changes from the notes (on the recipe page) they actually are quite healthy for you!

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Another breakfast idea: Healthy Applesauce Muffins. This recipe is nice if you like something that has a hint of sweetness, but is mostly very plain and basic. I'm sure you could easily add fruit to this recipe if you'd like.

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Homemade Food: Almond Butter. This is a recipe/my first experience in making almond butter. I thought the experience was wonderful. It is for sure something I'd like to do again when I end up buying some nuts. You could probably make any kind of nut butter that you'd like. I've only tried to make it out of almonds so far but it was a good experience over all.

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Homemade Food: Crockpot Apple Sauce. Now this is a recipe that I'd suggest using later on this fall if you can find a neighbor who has an apple tree full of apples they don't plan to use (that's what I did last year and it was wonderful!). Making apple sauce really isn't that hard. Especially if you use the crockpot like I did for this recipe. The hardest part is peeling and removing the core of the apple, everything else is a breeze!

I could go on sharing with you, but I'm sure this gives you enough to have found at least one thing you want to try! :) I am working on publishing more posts over on BEBBlog with healthy eating ideas and foods, but those are somewhat slow in coming since I'd MUCH rather bake or cook unhealthy things! lol. They are slowly building up though and that's a good thing.

What are some healthy foods/snacks you have been enjoying lately?

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