Breast Cancer Treatment: Surviving Chemotherapy
 by: Melissa Buhmeyer

Chemotherapy is a word that strikes fear into most of our hearts. We’ve seen the movies and heard such horrible stories about undergoing this difficult treatment for a disease that could very well kill us. I underwent chemo for breast cancer and know that, in some cases, the cancer isn’t hard Continue reading burrito – Breast Cancer Treatment: Surviving Chemotherapy – free article courtesy of ArticleCity.com →

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How to Wean Your Kid from the Junk Food Joneses
 by: Phil Goglia

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “Keeping up with the Joneses.” It used to mean creating a life-style that had quality, pizzazz, and followed the “trends.” But what if you live in a culture where “the Joneses” our kids see every day on TV commercials and media ads are endorsing low-nutrition, heavily processed fast foods and soft drinks?

Getting the whole family to eat healthy meals in a culture where some kids think that a potato chip is a vegetable can be a real challenge. But there are realistic, easy-to-implement strategies that can help you to gradually wean your children away from poor nutritional choices and toward delicious more wholesome foods.

Just Because You’ve Seen the Light….

It’s highly unlikely that your children are suddenly going to wake up one morning and stop eating junk food just because you’ve seen the light about healthy nutrition, or just because you want them to. Our children are bombarded by the fast-food culture from the day they enter this world, and they know the names of the fast-food chains even before they know their colors.

It isn’t by chance that there is an entire market of convenient processed foods positioned just for kids. These foods are very savory and appealing, usually salty, sweet, or easy to chew. Microwave pizza, macaroni and cheese, soup in a cup, and canned spaghetti are all examples of the kind of foods that are highly addictive to children’s taste buds.

Unfortunately, these foods provide very little nutritional value. They can cause your children’s health to decay and can make them overweight. Even worse, your kids become addicted to the flavor and short-term energy rush that junk food provides them.

The challenge is to learn how to create healthy family meals that are not only user-friendly for adults, but realistic options for the kids. The following strategies will help you create meals and snacks that are not only nourishing, but also fun for the whole family.

Get Your Kids Out of the Junk Food Ghetto

To start with, don’t let your kids live in a junk food ghetto. How many times have you and your children sat down to meals that were separate and nutritionally unequal? Adults eat chicken, steak, fish, salad, baked potato, and vegetables while kids eat hotdogs on white buns with a side of potato chips, macaroni and cheese, and/or pizza. Just because these foods taste good doesn’t mean they are healthy for your kids. You have to wean your kids away from “kid’s food.”

Another version of the junk food ghetto are the microwavable kids’ meals aimed at busy working parents who have to face a roomful of cranky, hungry children at the end of the day. While these frozen taquitos, pizzas, and breaded chicken nuggets will temporarily satisfy your children, ultimately, they are filled with bad carbohydrates, saturated fats, sugars, and chemicals, which give them their good flavor. The end result is not a nutritious meal that will help your child to grow and develop in a healthy manner, but high-fat, high-sugar foods that may contribute to hyperactivity, poor cognitive ability, mood swings, and poor sleeping patterns.

And, don’t think you are immune just because you are an adult. If you eat these junk foods yourself, you will have the same problems. In some instances even Mom or Dad can be the junk food Jones. One client at my nutritional clinic told me recently that she knew her son had become overweight because he was eating “just like his father.” Dad ate nothing but junk, and was none too healthy himself.

Creating “Bridge Foods” for Your Kids

Once children get used to eating processed foods, they become addicted to the flavor and the short-term energy rush. So, how do you wean your kids off these unhealthy foods and introduce them to healthier eating patterns?

To rescue your child from the “junk food Joneses,” you need to slowly wean them away from the foods they are used to by introducing healthier versions. I call these “bridge foods,” nutritious foods that you can slip into unhealthy meals. Here are some suggestions.

If your child’s favorite meal is instant macaroni and cheese, start by serving them a plate that is ½ the old food and ½ a new healthier version, made from whole wheat or organic noodles and organic or low-fat cheese. You can then increase the percentage of healthier food until your child is used to eating something better. You could even mix in turkey meatballs with their mac and cheese to give them a higher percentage of lean and nourishing protein.

You can do the same thing with fast-food burgers. Start by giving them half of a fast-food burger, and half of a lower fat burger that you have made at home. You can gradually wean their taste away from the high fat meat by buying leaner and leaner ground beef, eventually mixing it with ground turkey, serving it on a whole wheat bun, and melting organic cheese on top.

To wean your child from cheese quesadillas to baked chicken, you could start by slipping some chicken into the quesadilla. Or, instead of pepperoni pizza, try pizza with chicken and vegetables. If your kids want a sandwich, instead of using bread, wrap their turkey or tuna fish in whole wheat pita bread or lavash—or make the sandwich a burrito wrap and add in some vegetables and black beans.

If your child wants a sweet snack, instead of candy bars, cookies, or cake, give them an apple or a frozen banana with some kind of natural (without added sugar) nut butter, or yogurt with fruit and raw almonds, or even jelly and peanut butter on pita bread. Another great bridge treat is an energy bar (Clif Bar, PowerBar, etc.) with nut butter.

Creating Lifetime Habits of Good Nutrition

A lot of times parents who are trying to improve their children’s eating patterns at home feel powerless about what their kids might be eating away from the house. Because many schools have experienced budget cuts in recent years, school lunches certainly aren’t what they used to be nutritionally. Many times these meals are high in starchy foods and low in lean protein and fresh vegetables. But unfortunately even grade schoolers don’t feel that it’s cool to brown bag it—even when that would mean getting healthier fare.

And—let’s face it—the temptation to enjoy after-school fast-food snacks at the homes of peers can be well nigh irresistible.

What should you do? My answer is this: don’t sweat the stuff that you can’t control. As long as your child gets good nutritious meals at home, he or she will be able to develop lifetime habits of good nutrition.

Try these strategies and see how well they work with your whole family.

About The Author

Philip Goglia is a Los Angeles-based nutritionist, trainer, and author. Goglia has just released SmartJourney, a metabolic food program that is personally tailored for each individual. “There is no one-size-fits-all diet,” says Goglia. “We realize that everyone has their own unique metabolic type, and we design a program just for you.” For more information about children’s nutrition please visit his website www.SmartJourney.com.

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I know you are making these fat loss mistakes because I did too! Based on my experience from losing over 80 pounds and finally keeping it off, here are some tips for avoiding these common dieting mistakes.

YOU ARE TRYING TO DO TOO MUCH TOO SOON

Trying to go from Sedentary Slob to Super Dieter on a Monday morning? Not so smart. It is a great way to ensure you will be back to the couch by mid-day Wednesday. You can’t expect to undo years worth of damage overnight.

If you typically eat three meals per day, start slowly by adding a snack – either before or after lunch, then ease your way to six smaller meals every 2-3 hours. This approach to fat loss is called kaizen, a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. Making a small change once a day or once a week leads to a constant state of improvement.

YOU ARE LOOKING FOR THE QUICK FIX

I was convinced I had a Loch Ness Monster in my colon and that was making me fat! But the colon cleanser I purchased only left me with a very sore butt, some leafy-looking things in the toilet and not a single pound lost.

Now I was convinced that I needed a deluxe fat burner – one that would melt away the fat while I sat on my butt doing nothing!

After thousands of dollars and lots of false hope, I realized that the only way I was going to achieve the lean body that I desired was to come up with a solid nutrition and exercise plan, and to add supplements that were backed by solid science.

YOU ARE LETTING OTHERS KNOCK YOU OFF-TRACK

My family is full of enablers – they mean well, but they were not sensitive to the fact that I was trying to stay on track with my fat loss efforts. “C’mon a little bit won’t hurt” or “you can diet tomorrow” was all it took to convince me to eat. Within 30 minutes I had eaten myself stupid and undone all of the positive progress that I had spent the past week achieving.

Let those around you know how important it is for you to lose weight and what it means to both you, and them, if you do not achieve your goals.

YOU ARE NOT GETTING BACK “ON THE WAGON” IMMEDIATELY AFTER FALLING OFF

I would usually fall off my diet toward the end of any given week. It was at that point that I rationalized that, since I was “off the wagon” I would wait until Monday to get started again!

This probably won’t come as a big shock, but science now has proven that weekends can wreak havoc on your waistline. That was the conclusion of Washington University researchers, who found that even people on strict diet and exercise programs lose weight more slowly than expected because they eat more on weekends.

The verdict: People do not need a holiday as an excuse to eat more; they tend to do it every weekend because human lifestyle patterns can be very different.

There were two key takeaways for me from this:

1. The best time to get back “on the wagon” was at your next meal – do not wait until you’ve done more damage.

2. Do not let the weekends be different than any other day – stick with your plan whether it is a Saturday or a Wednesday

YOU ARE TRYING TO BE PERFECT EVERY DAY

Life is not perfect – and your diet plan shouldn’t be either. You can’t expect yourself to follow your program to the letter every second of every day until you reach your goal. If you do, you will ultimately fail. That is why you need to apply the 90/10 rule to your nutrition and exercise.

The 90/10 rule is very simple – if you are on your program 90% of the time, then you will not be hurt by the 10% of the time you are not. Your weight loss diet should include a minimum of 5 meals per day, with 6 meals being ideal. Following the 90/10 rule with 6 meals a day (or 42 meals a week) means that you have 4 meals a week where you can go off your program without halting progress, as long as those meals are reasonable.

Same rules apply to exercise. Let’s say your schedule permits you to work out 4 days per week. In a month, you would have 16 workouts – and following the 90/10 rule, you can miss 1 or 2 workouts without derailing yourself. However, you should save your “skips” for times when you really need to skip – like a poor night’s sleep, illness, or hectic travel schedule.

YOU ARE NOT SETTING REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS

It took you your entire life to get to this point, and you expect to reverse all of the damage in 3 weeks? That is what a lot of diet products would like you to believe.

You absolutely MUST set goals, but they MUST be realistic. What is realistic? one to two pounds of fat per week is a reasonable goal. The more you have to lose, the higher you can set your weekly expectations. But if you are approaching double-digits with your expectations, you will ultimately fail.

About The Author

Matt is a fat loss authority and author of The Burrito Diet, the diet plan that helped him lose 80 pounds in only 8 months and maintain his low body fat level for over 3 years. Matt conquered his life-long struggle with his weight by harnessing the power of the burrito – find out more about his amazing story at http://burritodiet.com

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5 Surefire Home Remedies For A Colicky Baby

A colicky baby is not a happy baby. And a parent of a colicky baby is not a happy parent. It’s so tuff to see your little one in pain. You are desperate to relieve the pain and stop the crying as soon as possible. What to do? Try one of these surefire home remedies for colic.

One of the possible reasons for colic could Continue reading burrito – 5 Surefire Home Remedies For A Colicky Baby →

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Ratin’ Fast Food
 by: Ed Williams

Sometimes I get the strangest emails. A couple of days ago, I had a woman write and ask me if I’d consider writing some restaurant reviews. She said she felt that most restaurant critics are highbrow types, and that it’d be a nice change if “a regular person” wrote some reviews. She then went on to suggest that Continue reading burrito – Ratin’ Fast Food – free article courtesy of ArticleCity.com →

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Diabetes – Provide Nutritious Food To The Body

When it comes to dealing with diabetes, you need to understand that diet plays an important role. Most people simply like to eat out and indulging restaurant food occasionally.

It is a sin for the diabetics to indulge in restaurant food once in a while. However, we must take special care about certain types of Continue reading burrito – Diabetes – Provide Nutritious Food To The Body →

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Ok so 3 more posts today that I’ve dug up – I’m an information JUNKIE on this stuff lately. Give em a browse and let me know what ya reckon. They’re just from a few different sites I’ve been surfing lately that are generally good for information like this…

Recipes to Keep: Bean Burritos

Serve warm immediately, with salsa and sour cream if desired — or, to freeze for Continue reading burrito – Latest burrito news – Recipes to Keep: Bean Burritos →

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If you’ve been keeping up with my blog posts lately you’ll know I’ve come to adding a few news posts from around the web on this subject. I’ve got a couple more today that are new and updated, so let me know what you think of em…

Bobby Flay Can Eat A Big Fat Burrito « Mission Mission

The SF Mission burrito is the savory zenith of Americanized Mexican food. Papalote Continue reading burrito – Latest burrito news – Bobby Flay Can Eat A Big Fat Burrito « Mission Mission →

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Breast Cancer Treatment: Surviving Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is a word that strikes fear into most of our hearts. We’ve seen the movies and heard such horrible stories about undergoing this difficult treatment for a disease that could very well kill us. I underwent chemo for breast cancer and know that, in some cases, the cancer isn’t hard … it isn’t painful Continue reading burrito – Breast Cancer Treatment: Surviving Chemotherapy →

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