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Showing posts from February, 2017

4 Recipes on Repeat + Last Week’s Workouts

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Good morning! Happy March 1st and National Nutrition Month ! Speaking of which, please check out our first post over on the Designed to Fit Nutrition blog: Why You Need a Nutrition Coach ! Ok, so I’m totally one of those people who goes through phases with food. For instance, I’ll be super into hot sauce and put it on everything for two weeks straight. Then, I get bored with it and then I’m onto nutritional yeast or pizza seasoning or something. Right now (if you haven’t noticed), I’m really into buffalo sauce , and I just can’t get enough of it. It actually inspired this post because I’ve eaten the same lunch/dinner like 4 or 5 times in the past week or so. I just love it so much, so I wanted to share that recipe as well as some other recent favorites. And since I’m in the meal planning business and all, I also wanted to share my tips for quick prep, which makes healthy eating that much easier! Buffalo Chicken + Ranch Bowl Ingredients: 4 ounces ground chicken (or turkey) 1

8 Primal Food Challenges You Can Take

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Humans are competitive animals. We like a challenge because it compels us to rise to the occasion, prove ourselves, get better at something, or become a bigger version of ourselves. For people, challenges are like hormetic stressors—they often cause suffering and require hard, unpleasant work but provoke a beneficial response that makes us stronger than we were before the challenge. How does that apply to the challenges I’ve laid out in today’s post, which are all about food, diets, and cooking? Each one unlocks a tangible benefit (eating more vegetables helps you obtain more nutrients, stopping the meal before you’re too full lowers energy intake), but there are also less obvious benefits to meeting a challenge. Let’s get right to it: Stop when you’re 80% full. In Japan, they say “hara hachi bu,” which translates to “eat until 80% full.” It’s the inverse of Louis CK’s philosophy of “eat until you hate yourself.” Don’t eat food just because it’s on your plate. Don’t cram in every

Q&A with Blogger Laura Wright, Author of The First Mess

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With more people choosing a healthy lifestyle — and caring about where their food comes from and how it makes them feel — home cooks are flocking to Saveur  award-winning blogger Laura Wright of The First Mess  for both accessible seasonal vegan recipes and her captivating storytelling. Why start a food blog? Laura Wright: I was honestly just bored when I started my blog. I had been working in restaurants for a while and was getting called off shifts at a not-so-busy spot. So my friend suggested I take all of these things I had learned about plant-based cooking and apply it to an online project. How did you learn to cook plant-based foods? LW: I attended a nutritional culinary program that had me learning meat, fish, dairy, egg and produce preparations. Just learning the basics of classic cookery helped me when I applied it to my plant-based preferences. For my internship portion of college, I went to a strictly vegan restaurant, which was interesting in a lot of ways, but quite edu

KERF Through The Ages, or It’s Hip To Be Square

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This post is sponsored by  Squarespace It’s hard for me to believe I’ve been blogging for nearly a decade. That’s 10 years of my life devoted to this space and sharing my life with you guys. So much has changed since my first few posts! I was one of the pioneer healthy living bloggers, and when I started blogging I had no idea what it would become. I’ve been wanting to write down a bit of my history, as so many of you are new and probably didn’t know Kath Eats when I had a blurry photo of raspberries as my header : ) (KERF Version 1.0) I started my blog as a free site on Blogger, then moved to a free site at WordPress.com, and now I am self hosted on server #5 (I think?). KERF’s database is huge because in the early days I didn’t know how to resize my photos, so each move takes for.ev.er. I hope to never move again, but I am sure I will! Squarespace is now on my radar for possible moves in the future. (KERF 2.0. – I guess I really liked close up photos of fruit in the early days

Episode 357 – Dr. Bill Schindler – Food Foraging, and Evolution of The Human Diet

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Dr. Bill Schindler is an associate professor at the department of anthropology at Washington College, and is also the Co-star of the National Geographic show The Great Human Race. Listen in as we talk about foraging for food locally and in the wild, the evolution of the human diet, and much more! Download Episode Here (MP3) Guest: Dr. Bill Schindler Websites: Eastern Shore Food Lab (work in progress) Ancestral Insight         30 Day Guide to the Paleo Diet Want some extra help? Have you been trying Paleo for a while but have questions or aren’t sure what the right exercise program is for you? Or maybe you just want a 30-day meal plan and shopping list to make things easier? We’ve created a getting started guide to help you through your first 30 days. Buy the book   Don’t forget, Wired to Eat is available for pre-order now! Amazon , Barnes & Noble , IndieBound , iBooks from The Paleo Diet http://ift.tt/2m6ufIH

Macro-Balanced Monday In Meals

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Good morning! I mentioned yesterday that Mal and I decided to start a Designed to Fit meal plan together this week. We always a rough meal plan to follow every week, but not one custom to our macronutrient needs, so I’m excited to get back on track and have my hubby to help keep me motivated. (Below is a screenshot of Mal’s meal plan on his phone.) And here’s my Monday In Meals ! Breakfast : Scrambled eggs with roasted sweet potatoes + iced coffee mixed with Dandy Blend , coconut creamer, and collagen Snack : Apple chunks (nuked in microwave) with cinnamon Post-workout: SFH protein shake Lunch : Buffalo Chicken & Ranch Bowl (ground chicken breast mixed with broccoli, spinach, buffalo sauce , and ranch dressing) + a Beauty Burst (fruity collagen chew) Snack : Half of a  Chocolate Sea Salt RXBAR Dinner : Easy Chicken Fajitas over cauliflower rice mixed with white rice Dessert : Banana sautéed in coconut oil with chocolate chips + a mug of eggnog tea  + a few bites of

Dear Mark: Fasting Followup

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For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering questions from the comment section of last week’s fasting post . You guys brought up some great points, and I’ll be addressing some of them. First up, do you need to follow a vegan diet to maintain the health benefits of long fasts? Second, I give a tip or two for appetite suppression during the fast. Then I discuss my definition of a long fast, the potential effect of fasting on  gut bacteria (and whether we should consume prebiotics and probiotics while fasting), the reason why fasting makes some people have short fuses, and whether green tea k0mbucha breaks the fast. Let’s go: Mark–For the autoimmune case reports, you failed to mention that the patients preceded and followed the fast with a vegan diet, and that the authors conclude the paper by saying a vegan diet appears to be necessary to sustain the results. Good catch, Margaret. I saw that, knew someone would mention it, and decided to address the inevitable query in a Dear

What Goes Up Must Come Down

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And I am down with the flu. Or something. I got a flu shot, but I guess it’s a strong one this year. I’ve heard that most of Cville is sick right now! But before I was attacked by this virus, we had a great little weekend. The power toast craving is strong these days! We had wonderful 75 degree weather on Friday, and Mazen and I spent the whole afternoon outside. We played with our neighbors and went on scooter rides, drank smoothies, and jumped on the trampoline across the road. Do you like Mazen’s new shirt?! It’s from Indy Rose Co  owned by KERF reader Katy. If you don’t watch Game Of Thrones you might not get the joke, but wildlings  are the free folk who live beyond the wall in the show. Kady sent Thomas and me grown-up versions and I’ll show you my shirt soon! Kady is also offering any of you 10% off anything in her store with the code KATHEATS10 : ) This is his best wildling face: We teamed up with our neighbors for a cookout on Friday night. I made a big salad, and

How To Blanch Almonds

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What are blanched almonds? Blanched almonds are almonds that have had a short cooking period in hot water which loosens their skins so the skins can be easily removed. Basically, they are just… Read more → from The Gracious Pantry http://ift.tt/2l2DauZ

High Low High 18

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Good morning and a very happy, happier, HAPPIEST Monday to you! We had quite the awesome weekend over here. Mal was on school vacation last week, so we finished it off with a family fun Friday, which continued on right through the end of the weekend. It was truly a wonderful three days with my boys. I really didn’t want the fun to end! But, of course, life always has some ups and downs, so here’s a recap via  High Low High  where I share both the high and low points from the weekend. HIGH : Completing Open WOD 17.1 under the time cap! LOW : Barely surviving Open WOD 17.1. Oy. It was rough and definitely not my best performance. I hit the wall (hard) toward the end of the workout, and the set of 50 dumbbell snatches totally crushed me. At one point, I was doing sets of three. Ugh, I was donezo. I’m honestly happy that I finished under 20 minutes. Related: I’m typically not one of those people who rolls around all dramatic after finishing a hard workout, but this workout was a d