The No-Duh File: Real Food Beats Energy Products

Courtesy of Lifehacker, can you believe it? It is better to eat real food, not so-called Recovery products after exercising.

I hope no serious athlete needed to be told this. There is nothing better for your body than the nutrition found in whole foods. Water will beat out Gatorade for hydration any day, except in a few rare occasions. A banana is great post workout snack to replace potassium and get needed fuel.

Technorati Tags: food, exercise

As the Portion Size Increase, So Does the Waistline

We've all talked about it.

Wow! Those portions at the Cheesecake Factory are huge.
If that's a small, I'd hate to see a large. We've all thought about it. . .

How can we possibly maintain or lose weight when all around us portion sizes are getting larger?

This post from Divine Caroline points out that portion sizes have increased, almost double of what they were in the 1970s, so has the population of obese people, up from 15% to 30%. Ouch!

Just take a look at the popcorn picture above. Twenty years ago, the image on the left was the size of a normal serving of popcorn at the movies, 5 cups or 270 calories. Today, we get the "Tub" which is 630 calories. Many would argue that we just shouldn't eat that left over popcorn, but the same post goes on to talk about a 1996 Cornell Study that showed that people who eat from a large container tend to consume more.

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association
found that Americans consume around 10 percent more calories than they
did in the 1970s. Given no change in physical activity, this equates to
around 200 extra calories per day, or 20 pounds a year.

I think we need to get back to basics and common sense here. No one needs a full Tub of popcorn or a 32 oz. soda. We need to reteach ourselves what portions are and we need to teach our children that they don't need the super size and if they are full they don't need to eat everything on their plate.