Go with the flow from the city to the farm!
Bringing everyone closer to nature, Flow In The Farm is a one day wellness lifestyle event featuring workshops, activities, products and food that are all natural, wholesome and organic!
Date: September 3, Saturday
Time: 9am-8pm
Venue: The Farm Shed, at Acacia Waldorf School, Sta. Rosa, Laguna (more…)
TBR Clean & Mean Routine is a series of nutrition and wellness tips for people who wish to start the year right by living cleaner, healthier lives. New tips are posted every Monday from Jan. 13 to Feb. 24.
Tip 1: EAT CLEAN FOOD.
This week, from January 13 to 19, focus on eating clean, wholesome, nutritious food. I know, you’ve heard this many times before. Everyone knows that this is the key to losing weight. It really is! But, for most of us, the difficulty comes in applying it. We can eat healthy for a day, or maybe a week, and then we fall off the healthy eating wagon and feel like a complete failure.
The difference now is in your mindset. Change your mind about healthy eating. Do not even think that you’re going to start a new short-term diet today. You’re not. You are starting a new, better way of living. Ready? Game!
WHAT ARE CLEAN FOODS?
What food should you be eating most of this week? Clean food!
Clean foods are foods that are as close to its natural state as possible. They come from nature. These are fruits and vegetables, whole grains, lean meat, fish, and nuts. They rarely come packaged, but, if they do, they have only one or two ingredients in the label.
Choose a banana over a packaged bar.
Choose tilapia and brown rice over spam and white rice.
Choose fresh buko juice over soda.
Choose a handful of nuts over a bag of chips.
CROWDING OUT
By eating more clean food this week, we will fill our bodies with healthy food that make us feel satisfied so that we don’t even have space for junk. This is what we call CROWDING OUT in my nutrition school.
This week, focus on all the clean food you can have and get excited over it. Try a new fresh and healthy recipe. Think of new restaurants that serve awesome grilled salmon and fresh salads. Look forward to eating. Period.
Since we’re just starting out, you may notice that you still want to eat some not so good food. Go ahead. Don’t stress over it. Just do so in moderation and make sure you are eating the clean food that you should be eating. You’ll notice that, as you go along, you’ll be craving less of the junk and filling yourself with clean food without even thinking about it.
WHAT YOU DON’T WANT TO DO
Two things I don’t want you to do this week:
1) DO NOT think about all the food you will scrap from your diet this week. DO NOT tell yourself that, this week, you will not have red meat, rice, dessert and soda. This will leave you feeling angry and deprived. And, if you mess up, you will feel like a complete failure. Focus on the good food you will be eating and how you are nourishing your body.
2) DO NOT be too hard on yourself. I said we want to eat clean MOST of the time, but SOMETIMES we can allow ourselves to indulge and enjoy not-so-healthy food. So, if you want to have a taste of cake or a sip of soda, go ahead! Life is too short to quit eating cake for a whole year (I have friends who’ve done that. Boo to them!) I say, live your life to the fullest!
ARE YOU READY TO COMMIT?
Come and join me and others on our TBR Clean & Mean Routine!
Here’s how to join:
Let me know how this week goes for you! See you next Monday!
I woke up on the first day of 2014 and, guess what, I was unafraid of the numbers on the weighing scale! Yeees!
You may be thinking: “What’s the big deal?”
First thing’s first, remove that scowl off your face. Di na uso ang Scrooge. Start the year with a smile.
Secondly, it’s a big deal for me because, for the first time in my adult life, I didn’t stress over my weight during the Holidays. Truth is, I usually gain 3 to 5 pounds during the Holidays and I spend the first quarter of each year working out to death to melt the fat off my jelly thighs.
But, this time, I was pretty confident that my weight was stable not just through Christmas but all throughout the entire 2013! What did I do differently? I finally made peace with food.
I would say 3 things helped me to maintain my weight and change my eating habits:
1) QUIT DIETING.
All my life I would go on periodic diets in futile attempts to drop a few pounds. I tried the Cabbage Soup diet, Skyflakes and Skim Milk for dinner diet, Nothing after 6pm diet, fasting on bread and water (like a true Catholic school girl LOL), and even diet pills. I would cancel out entire food groups—no carbs, no meat, no dessert—for weeks. I even tried Cheat Day Sundays last 2012, which only taught me to deprive myself all week and binge on weekends so much so that I’d wake up with a migraine on Mondays. I lived many many years in fear of food thinking it was my biggest enemy. Worse, I would lose weight then gain it back…or even more.
In 2013, I didn’t diet AT ALL. But, before you think I could eat everything I wanted, it was more of just adopting a healthy lifestyle so that I didn’t feel like I was dieting. I ate healthy food most of the time, but I allowed myself to eat junk—Cheetos, soda, brownies—once in a while and in moderation. (Hey, life is short and I believe we all should live it fully!) By never feeling deprived, I realized that I rarely even craved for junk and, on the rare occasion that I did, I wouldn’t even devour the entire pack like I used to.
REMEMBER: It’s not about what you eat sometimes, but it’s about what you eat most of the time.
2) EAT CLEAN FOOD.
I had a paradigm shift with food. I stopped thinking about what I shouldn’t eat. I changed my focus on all the good, nutritious, delicious food that I could nourish my body with and those that could help fuel my running and triathlon. This is called “crowding out.” By filling myself with nutritious, wholesome food, I didn’t have much space for the junk.
REMEMBER: Food is fuel.
3) EXERCISE 4 TO 5X A WEEK.
I worked out 6 days a week with Monday as my only rest day. I would run 2-3 times a week, swim twice a week, bike twice a week. Earlier in the year, I would also do Bikram Yoga. After Ironman Cebu 70.3, I enjoyed my workouts immensely as I focused more on fitness rather than a particular race.
Working out isn’t about dropping pounds anymore (unless I overate the night before LOL). It has become a regular activity that is as routine as brushing my teeth and showering.
If you’re too busy to commit to 5x a week, then 3x will do. Just make sure they are efficient workouts so as not to waste your precious time away from work or family. Workouts should also be fun.
REMEMBER: Don’t think about it. Just do it.
So, in case you woke up this morning fearful of the numbers on that scale or fitting into your favorite jeans, don’t stress. You are not alone! That’s exactly why I shared my learnings above for you. Just like you, I’m still a work in progress. I also have a lot of healthy resolutions and goals for the New Year. I’m also taking up a course on Holistic Nutrition and Wellness and I try to practice everything I learn to nourish my own body and mind. I would say what I learned was one of the key factors that helped me adopt a healthier lifestyle…and also the fact that I’m aging haha.
In my next post, I’ll be launching my TBR Clean & Mean Routine for 2014. It’s a plan I initially made on my own for myself. But, I realized I could share it with all of you and invite you to join me on this.
It’s a very simple plan on how to live a healthier, happier life without over complicating matters. (I hate diet plans that have you making baon fruits while everyone is eating normal restaurant fare or those that have you counting calories before you dig into dessert.) I’ll be sharing with you weekly tips on how to eat well and live well and you have to agree to work on the tip for the entire week. I’m hoping by the end of the entire program, you would have at least kept one of those tips and practiced it as a habit. This is a plan that can get you to lose weight and get fit in a simple way without taking too much time or causing inconvenience with the rest of your life.
Are you game? Watch out for it!
Aaah, the life of a woman. They say we shouldn’t try to be perfect; we shouldn’t try to be Superwomen because there’s no such thing; and we should cut ourselves some slack once in a while. I agree…sometimes! Most of the time, I would have to admit that we are in fact perfect multi-taskers who can balance family, career, and caring for ourselves all at one go. Yes, we are Superwomen. And, yes, we manage to look good while we’re juggling all the chaos in our lives.
If you agree with me—fine, even if you don’t—it would be great if you could make it to this talk on Women, Work, and Wellness on November 23, 2011 at Rockwell Tent, Makati. It should be interesting (and fun) to hear women coming together to talk about balancing career, fitness, and everything else in our lives. Host is one of my favorite mommy-athlete celebs Maricel Laxa-Pangilinan and speakers, Miriam Quiambao, Mutya Laxa, and myself.
For inquiries, please contact Kristelle at 687-2614 or 706-4853. See you there!
