Clean Eating: 5 Reasons to Clean Up Your Diet…Like Weight Loss
Guest Writer: Wendy Battles
I think clean eating is the way to go if you’re serious about losing weight and keeping it off. This isn’t rocket science and the “less is more” theory applies here — less food of a higher quality can help you lose weight.
What do I mean by clean eating? It’s a way to approach and embrace food as a lifestyle not a diet. Clean eating focuses on whole foods — fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean cuts of meat like chicken, turkey and fish. Even more, it’s all about ditching processed foods full of sugar, sodium, and artificial ingredients, which, while convenient, do a number on our bodies, sabotaging weight loss efforts. Clean eating also includes buying locally grown food, limiting the impact on the environment and drinking copious amounts of water. Continue reading…
Visit Wendy’s website at www.DontWorryGetHealthy.com to learn more about clean eating. She offers great tips and recipes. I enjoy reading her articles and following her on Twitter.
P90X Peak Performance Wildberry Protein Bars
I think it’s important to write about nutrition every once in a while. Today, I tried the P90X Peak Performance Wildberry Protein Bar. It tastes like blueberries dipped in chocolate except that it’s chewy if you can imagine that. I was concerned about how the bar would taste when I first opened it up because it looked like it would taste like the early generation soy protein bars that were chewy and had little taste. I was pleasantly surprised to bite into a blueberry that didn’t taste like those early bars at all.
This bar is packed with 270 calories and 18 grams of protein. In my book, that makes it a meal replacement bar unless you’re doing a high intensity program like P90X, ChaLEAN Xtreme or Insanity where you need to increase your caloric intake to reach your goals. As an alternative, I’ve often cut a protein bar in half to make it more supportive as a mid-morning snack or after workout snack to replenish energy. If the bar is cut in half, it would have 9 grams of protein and 135 calories. That’s a very acceptable healthy snack with any exercise program.
Each bar has 6 grams of fat with 3 grams of saturated fat and zero trans fats. There’s an added bonus of 4 grams of fiber which you don’t usually see in a tasty bar. This is not a low carbohydrate protein bar though. The carbs weigh in at 37 grams, but that’s important if you’re supplementing a high intensity program or you’re using the bar (i.e. half bar as a snack) to refuel after a long workout.
