This women's boot camp workout blog will be very helpful in your weight loss journey.  The following are a few health and nutritional nuggets.  Learn it, live it, love it...you will improve the way you feel about yourself and your body image when you become disciplined in nutrition and fitness.

      The food you eat and how and when you eat it determines if you will store fat or burn it.  To change your metabolism is to change your body composition.  To do this, eat something with nutritional value (protein, vegetable, fruit) every 3 hours.  It doesn't have to be a meal.  You just want to stay even keel throughout the day.  When your body runs out of an energy source for fuel, it begins to store fat.

      Fruits and veggies - Eat them all day long.  Have an enormous variety available.  Try something new.  Roasted beets are yummy and amazingly nutritious.  Quarter them, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with sea salt and pepper and roast in a 350-degree oven for about 35-40 minutes.  Butternut squash, acorn squash, yams, and sweet potatoes are other super foods.

      Grains - Eat a lot of them.  Quinoa (keenwa) is a super food, mega proteins and vitamins.  Cook it in an organic vegetable or mushroom stock and add some chopped up zucchini or asparagus or whatever you like. It cooks just like rice.  Make steel-cut oats in a large pot on Sunday.  Pour it into individual-serving Tupperware and have ready to go in the refrigerator.  Add your favorites to it:  cinnamon, vanilla, maple syrup, black strap molasses, raisins, blueberries, cranberries, nuts, whatever.  Brown rice, millet, and barley are also terrific choices.  There are a ton of whole-wheat or whole-grain pastas available now, too.  These whole grain pastas do not hit your gut and get turned into sugar, rather, they are full of proteins and take much more work to digest. 

      Legumes - Beans, beans, the magical fruit...black beans are highly nutritious.  Garbanzo and kidney beans go in anything.  Whole pinto beans make a great side dish with very little salt and pepper added.

      Raw trail mix and any nut, raw or roasted.  It's best if you roast them yourself.  Typically, stores will use an oil and add salt.  If you just sprinkle nuts on a cookie sheet and stick them in a 350-degree oven for 10-15 mins.  They'll be perfect...and your house will smell heavenly!

      Sweeteners - Agave nectar has the consistency of Aunt Jamima Maple Syrup, and is a milder flavor than honey.  Whereas a manufactured maple syrup does damage to your body and teeth, agave actually has fiber and has no significant glycemic effect.  For baking, use organic sucunat.  It's cane syrup that has not been beat down and stripped of it's nutritional value.

      Tea is better than coffee.  All tea has health benefits, black, white, green.  Green tea is known for it's antioxidant properties as well as its ability to break down stubborn stored fat.  Coffee is acidic and not in the same way as fruit is acidic.  The body stores fat around organs to protect them from the type of acid found in coffee.  Yuck!

       ABSOLUTE NOs:  Fast food, soda, sports drinks, processed foods/junk food (the stuff you find in the middle isles of the grocery store), and ice cream.  No liquor during M-Th & Sun, and easy on Fri & Sat...sorry.

      STRESS:  When you are stressed out your body pumps out adrenaline.  Adrenaline causes your fat cells to squirt their fatty acids into your bloodstream to be used as energy.  Back in the day when "flight or fight" was a real possibility, this was great.  Today, though, we just get through whatever the problem is, meanwhile, your adrenal glands are producing another hormone, cortisol, to handle all the newly released fat.  Cortisol is responsible for "belly fat" stores.  So we can manage our midsection by managing our stress.  Being in control of what we eat is one little way to lessen stress.  Exercise and meditation are great, too. 

      Lastly, you must take into consideration genetics.  The lovely, womanly shapes our moms and grandmothers passed down must be accepted with pride.  What we do with those shapes is up to us.  For the most part, it just takes time.  I hope that healthy eating and exercise will become a normal part of your day.  It's like a 401K plan for your healthy future.  Think about the BIG PICTURE.  Nutrition and exercise are a lifestyle, not a temporary fix.

     I came across this article recently, and I believe it hits the nail on the head for important vegetables we should be consuming on a regular basis for heart health, cancer fighting, cholesterol lowering, and making your body less acidic and more alkaline based.  If you were wondering which vegetables you should be eating... read on.   If you would like a copy of the entire article, just email me at www.bestbootcamp.com and I will send it to you.

Spinach- ALL leafy greens should be eaten in abundance but spinach is my absolute favorite because it’s easy to buy, easy to use in recipes and salads and is delicious. Baby spinach or fully grown spinach are nutritional powerhouses and are incredibly alkaline.

As with all green foods, spinach is rich in chlorophyll, a potent alkaliser and blood builder.

It is also super high in vitamin K, vitamin A, manganese, folate, magnesium, iron, vitamin c, vitamin b2, calcium, potassium, vitamin e, and dietary fiber.

Kale- another leafy green beauty that is widely known for its cancer-fighting, cholesterol-lowering, antioxidant-rich, detoxifying goodness. Less popular than spinach, but only because it has a history of being cooked poorly (like cabbage) – when done right it is absolutely delicious (see recipes below, you’ll thank me).

If you eat kale 2-3 times per week you’ll know it. Like spinach it is massively high in vitamin k, vitamin a and vitamin c and being leafy green it also has a huge chlorophyll content.

The reason it is so powerful against the cancer fight is that kale contains at least four glucosinolates. I don’t want to lose you here by using words like glucosinolates – all you need to know is that as soon as you eat and digest kale, these glucosinolates are really easily converted by the body into cancer fighting compounds.  Also quite amazing for lowering cholesterol, it should be noted that steamed kale is more effective for cholesterol lowering than raw.

Cucumber- The beauty of cucumber is it’s water content – 95%. That is phenomenal and you won’t find that anywhere else. It’s the daddy of water-content. This of course makes it an incredibly hydrating food to consume, that ALSO contains superb amounts of antioxidants, including the super-important lignans. These highly beneficial polyphenols have more commonly been associated with the cruciferous vegetables, but their content in other veggies such as cucumbers is gaining more and more attention.

Broccoli- Broccoli is just a must. If you are serious about living with health, energy and vitality you simply have to eat broccoli, if not on a daily basis, then at least 4 times per week. Broccoli has been proven over and over and over again to be incredibly powerful in inhibiting cancers, supporting the digestive system, the cardiovascular system, the detoxification processes in the body and also supporting the skin, metabolism, immune system, being an anti-inflammatory and providing ample antioxidants.

Avocado- These are good fats that will NOT make you gain weight. If anything, due to the high content of oleic acid (making it an omega 9 fat and very similar to olive oil), it can lower total cholesterol level and raise levels of high-density lipoproteins (HDLs) while lowering low-density lipoproteins (LDLs), also known as the “bad” cholesterol. Oleic acid also slows the development of heart disease, and promotes the production of antioxidants. These beneficial omega oils also help speed the metabolism, actually leading to weight loss rather than gain.

So now we’re over the fat issue, avocado also contains a wide range of other nutrients that have serious anti-inflammatory, heart health, cardiovascular health, anti-cancer, and blood sugar benefits.

Celery- like cucumber is a favourite because it’s alkaline AND really high water content, so is used very frequently as a base in juices and soups (not so much smoothies as you have to juice it first…and then you have double the washing up). One of celery’s big benefits is it’s vitamin C level, which has the well known benefits – but two of it’s lesser known nutrients are phthalides which have been shown to lower cholesterol and coumarins which have been shown to inhibit several cancers.

The beauty of vitamin C rich foods are that they help with the most common and most challenging health concerns – they support the immune system, inflammation (so helps with arthritis, osteoporosis, asthma etc), and vitamin C also helps significantly with cardiovascular health.

If you are on a weight loss journey, you’ll also be happy to hear that this alkaline staple contains plenty of potassium and sodium and so is a diuretic – meaning it helps rid the body of excess fluids.

Bell Pepper- have shown up in research relating to decreasing the risk of cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes, macular degeneration, cancer, inflammation and more.
Alongside these lesser known or more complex-named antioxidants, bell pepper is one of, if not the best food source of the more common antioxidants: vitamin C, vitamin A and vitamin E. 
In fact, bell peppers contain twice as much vitamin C as oranges.