Posted on

Wednesday, 19th November

Keri’s Leaner faster stronger

Seasonal and local – day 2

Is out of season food healthy or not?

Unless you live a life like Barbara and Tom from the good life, tending to your fruit and vegetables day in day out, you probably have little knowledge of seasonal food and it’s health benefits.

Since eating within the seasons is the advice given by health professionals these days, it makes you wonder if eating out of season food is in fact healthy or bad for us?

From a health perspective, food that’s not in season has been grown in huge greenhouses or shipped from warmer climates travelling thousands of miles before arriving in our supermarkets. This has many consequences for the consumer. Firstly, they are picked before ripeness so that it can endure the long distance shipping experience. This means that it’s nutrient profile is lower than a local and ripe product. Vitamin C for instance, which is abundant in most fruit and vegetables, is notoriously unstable and so would be lost in transit so to speak, making out of season food less nutritious.

Also transporting produce sometimes requires them to be zapped by a burst of radiation to kill germs. Preservatives such as wax is also added before refrigeration.

Taste wise there is absolutely no comparison. Locally grown food tastes amazing, has great texture and looks appetising. Most local food grown by farmers are also healthier due to having less pesticides and chemicals used for preservation too.

Air miles is another issue for many people. Local food usually travels only a few miles from farm to table ensuring less pollution to the environment.

Another quite interesting argument for eating seasonal is the fact that our bodies actually crave seasonal food due to the weather. Have you noticed how you fancy salads in the summer and crave stews and soups made of root vegetables in winter?

It’s all great saying that local and seasonal is better,tastier and cheaper, however how practical is it to eat like this all the time? If you lived in Italy or California, it wouldn’t be much of a problem, Burry Port however?

Unless you love pigging out on carrots and caulis for the whole winter, you are going to get pretty bored very quickly. Not many fruits are in season in cold and wet Wales in winter.

Our advice would be to try and eat as much seasonal food as you can to get a good amount of natural vitamins and nutrients, as well as getting a tastier and better value product. However supplement with imported fruit and veg as well. We have no intention of giving up bananas anytime soon as they are a great addition to the sports diet.

Seasonal food are in abundance in supermarkets these days, as they do try and cater for popular demand. Many supermarkets buy produce from farmers in Wales and the UK these days, you can usually find the grower written on the label.

Another option for tired and busy workers is frozen fruit and vegetables.

Studies show that these are actually healthier in terms of vitamins and nutrients than many fresh out of season produce, due to the fact they have been picked and frozen within hours, and so have not lost any of their nutrients. It also means you can eat strawberries for instance all year round.

Choosing frozen also means less wastage for the family too. No more shrinking yellowing broccoli lurking in the back of the fridge, which everyone forgot about!

Here is a list of what’s in season in November, helping you to make good seasonal and local choices in the supermarkets and small local shops.

Eat to train,

Nicola.

Twitt
Posted on

Monday, 17th November

Keri’s Leaner faster stronger challenge

Seasonal and local – day 1

What is seasonal food?

For a long time now we have been hearing posh celebrity chefs and health food experts telling us to eat seasonal and local. This can be extremely frustrating since they rarely explain exactly what that means and how you go about it.

We have been brought up in a generation of supermarkets and processed foods that come in a frozen box or plastic bag. The truth is that we have, as humans lost our connection with nature and more importantly with our food and where it comes from. Walk into any supermarket aisle on any given winter’s day and you will see an abundance of every fruit and vegetable from root vegetables, to asparagus to strawberries and cherries.

However what we don’t realise or understand anymore is that most of those produce doesn’t naturally belong there. Have you ever bought a punnet of strawberries around christmas time, only to find the flesh really hard with a strange white cap near the leaves, instead of the all soft red luscious flesh you would get in the height of summer? One taste of the cardboard like flavour leaves you disappointed and unsatisfied at best. Worse of all, you have ended up spending your hard earned cash on a substandard, tasteless product brought in from abroad only to keep the consumer happy all year round, and money in the till for the supermarket.

The reason the strawberries taste so bad? They are not naturally in season in winter.

Fruit and vegetables naturally grow in cycles, and ripen during a specific season each year. When fruit and vegetables are allowed to ripen naturally, they are at their nutritional best and taste fantastic.

Cherries are ripe and juicy in June so cherries are ‘in season’ in June. Asparagus grows and ripens in spring whilst tomatoes and red berries late summer.

Modern technology means we can buy produce such as strawberries and tomatoes all year round, however this is only possible because they are grown in massive greenhouses, or flown from warmer climates such as Spain, Egypt and Israel. In this case, they are picked before they are ripe and have fully developed their flavours, making for bland and nutritionally substandard produce.

Tomorrow – Out of season food – should I eat it or not?

Eat to train,

Nicola.

Twitt
Posted on

Tuesday, 2nd September

Practicing doesn’t make you perfect, but practicing a lot WILL make you attain a peak performance more often than not.

If you look at your habits every day, then you will realise why you are being successful or not by now surely.

What do you practice most in your day and week?

When was life working out best for you, and which habits did you used to practice on a daily basis back then?

What were you doing? Who were you hanging around with back then?

What were you eating? How often were you getting your training sessions in on a a weekly basis?

Who did you learn most from on a daily basis to create new productive habits? Did you have a coach back then and were you in any kind of programme to get the best out of yourself?

So from this you should be able to realise which habits work best for you, what inspired you to get into shape in the first place and isn’t it time you replicated all of those habits again and got into fantastic shape, both mentally and physically?

You know it’s going to take a lot of hard work to be at your best physically and mentally again, but dig out that roadmap again of how you were at your peak once in your life, and you will soon be getting the very best out of yourself once again.

Your daily and weekly habits will determine how successful you are full stop.

Twitt
Posted on

Sunday, 13th July

I always get asked “what happens when I finish the 12 week challenge”?

I have to say it’s going to be very unlikely that you will go back to your old ways when you complete the 12th week, you will definitely be a changed person by then.

You will have a new version of what your everyday life is now.

Your cravings will have gone or mostly gone, you will put exercise near the top of your “must do’s” most days, you will have a new lifestyle, you will have an unbelievable amount of energy, your outlook and ambitions in life will look totally different, and you will tend to be an optimist instead of not being bothered about doing worthwhile things.

Plus you will have a new body with a much improved level of health, both inside and out!

The pain in your body will have long disappeared, because you will be moving so much better now in all ways.

Maybe in the past you used to go in the garden for a couple of hours and couldn’t move for a few days. Everyone has had that feeling. Because of the training we do, you will be used to many of those movements and your body should be ready for anything.

Whenever physical activity you may have done as a one off in the past will have made you feel too old and stiff, those days should now be well and truly over as you now embrace physical effort, and you will be very aware of the benefits you get from it.

I find those who set new goals after finishing their first 12 weeks absolutely fly through the second 12 weeks because of their new ability and most importantly, a newly found self-confidence and a much higher self-esteem.

Overcoming the first 12 weeks was the hard bit, developing healthy habits for the first time in years and finally discarding bad habits that were holding you back, both with your body and mind.

Ending your first 12 weeks is only the beginning and definitely not the end!

Twitt
Posted on

Sunday, 5th July

By the time people come to us, I am used to individuals saying that “nothing is working”, “ I will never get in shape” and “this is my last hope” or “I will never play at that level because I am too slow or not talented enough”!

A proven plan that will make you realise its best to throw away the weighing scales takes some getting used to, after all you have been told for years that the weighing scale is king? Changing people’s minds on this can be difficult to start with, but becomes easy once they see their clothes fitting better and eventually becoming way too big.

“Getting the body you want now” has become sort of a cliché and many times these false promises have led to several blind alleys? I think all of us can relate to those disappointments.

Do u dream of wearing the clothes you love on the hangers in shops, but never imagine that you will be actually wearing them in reality because you permanently avoid tighter fitting clothes because they “show the bumps” more?

This time it’s different.

You are going to be very fit, you will build lean muscle which is vital for your body to work better in all ways, your metabolism will be firing better than it ever has, your energy levels will go through the roof, you will sleep much better than you ever have, you will constantly raise your standards, you will receive compliments on your appearance and how healthy you are looking, and your performance levels will be huge and you’re never too old to turn back the clock.

We are not a short term gym, results take time and you had better be committed for the long term, this is what making a “healthy lifestyle change” is all about after all. You really need to change for life

Our biggest achievers have taken months and years more like to look and perform that good.

They are always on hand to learn off and inspire you, we are all about getting fit and healthy the right way, no over the top pain that lasts for days, no stress on joints, no faddy diets that often uses dangerous advice that can wreck your health, no feeling sick of dizziness during/after sessions and putting together sessions that reflect YOUR ability and nobody else’s!

Twitt