Healthy Eating Tips From The First Lady of Fitness, Fashion, and Fun

Advice from The First Lady of Fitness, Fashion, and Fun and Pittsburgh Certified Personal Trainer (CPT), Independent Beachbody Coach, TurboKick Instructor, and life coach, Jackie Omotalade:

(1)Replace refined breads and pastas made from white flour w/ ones made from whole grains.

(2) If you are an omnivore buy meat that comes from grass-fed cattle and eggs from pasture-raised chicken.

(3) Eliminate corn oil and soda from your pantry – both are heavily processed and your body doesn’t NEED them.

(4) Eat only until you are 80%  full. Avoid overeating, by eating only until you are satisfied.

(5) Get enough sleep.  Your body can’t function properly if it is not well rested.  If you don’t get enough sleep, you will find that the pounds stay on your body.

(6) Do workouts that you enjoy.  There is no point in doing work outs that you don’t like, you won’t stick with them.  Remember, fitness is a journey which you must commit to long-term.  COMMIT TO WORKOUTS YOU ENJOY!

(7) Wear workout clothes that make you feel confident. . Just because you are working out doesn’t mean you have to look a mess!

(8) Eat raw fruits and vegetables with every meal.  Start every meal with some sort of raw fruit and/or vegetable. . .your waistline will thank you.

(9) Smile and laugh more often.  Smiles and laughter are powerful and you should attempt to laugh and smile as many times as possible throughout the day.

(10) Start each day by looking in the mirror and saying a positive affirmation.  Mine for this week is: I choose love, joy and freedom, open my heart and allow wonderful things to flow into my life.

Metabolic Syndrome Treatment: Walking Fights Metabolic Syndrome

Health and Fitness advice from the First Lady of Fitness, Fashion, and Fun, Jackie Omotalade, a Pittsburgh personal trainer, lifestyle coach, and Independent Beachbody Coach:

Have you been diagnosed with metabolic syndrome? Metabolic syndrome is a group of disorders linked to heart disease, stroke, and some cancers. Some of the symptoms included abdominal obesity, blood fat disorders — high triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol and high LDL cholesterol — that foster plaque buildups in artery walls, blood clotting problems, inflammation, elevated blood pressure, and insulin resistance.

The American Heart Association and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute recommend that the metabolic syndrome be identified as the presence of three or more of these components:

* Elevated waist circumference:
Men — Equal to or greater than 40 inches (102 cm)
Women — Equal to or greater than 35 inches (88 cm)
* Elevated triglycerides:
Equal to or greater than 150 mg/dL
* Reduced HDL (“good”) cholesterol:
Men — Less than 40 mg/dL
Women — Less than 50 mg/dL
* Elevated blood pressure:
Equal to or greater than 130/85 mm Hg
* Elevated fasting glucose:
Equal to or greater than 100 mg/dL

A study conducted by Duke University and published in the American Journal of Cardiology found that walking 30 minutes 6 times per week for 8 months caused a reduction in symptoms of metabolic syndrome in middle aged men and women without changing their diets.

The study involved groups who either ran, jogged, or walked 12 miles per week and a group which did no exercise (control). The study found that people who participated in moderate exercise gained the most benefit from physical activity.

So what are you waiting on? Start walking today!

Trans Fat – Do You Know What Foods Not To Eat?

Advice from Pittsburgh personal trainer and life coach, Jackie Omotalade, The First Lady of Fitness, Fashion, and Fun:

Did you know that according to a recent report, 92 percent of Americans know they should avoid trans fat, but only 21 percent can name three sources?

Trans fat is the common name for a type of unsaturated fat with trans-isomer fatty acid(s). Trans fats may be monounsaturated or polyunsaturated.

In a nutshell, trans fat is made when a manufacturer adds hydrogen to vegetable oil–a process called hydrogenation. Hydrogenation increases the shelf life and flavor stability of foods containing these fats.

Trans fat can be found in vegetable shortenings, some margarines, crackers, cookies, snack foods, and other foods made with or fried in partially hydrogenated oils. Unlike other fats, the majority of trans fat is formed when food manufacturers turn liquid oils into solid fats like shortening and hard margarine. A small amount of trans fat is found naturally, primarily in some animal-based foods.

Trans fat, like saturated fat and dietary cholesterol, raises the LDL cholesterol (Low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, is known as “bad” cholesterol) that increases your risk for coronary heart disease (CHD). Americans consume on average 4 to 5 times as much saturated fat as trans fat in their diets.

Although saturated fat is the main dietary culprit that raises LDL, trans fat and dietary cholesterol also contribute significantly.

Major Food Sources of Trans Fat for American Adults

(Average Daily Trans Fat Intake is 5.8 Grams or 2.6 Percent of Calories)
40%

cakes, cookies, crackers, pies, bread, etc.
21%

animal products
17%

margarine
8%

fried potatoes
5%

potato chips, corn chips, popcorn
4%

household shortening
3%

salad dressing
1%

breakfast cereal
1%

candy

Data based on FDA’s economic analysis for the final trans fatty acid labeling rule, “Trans Fatty Acids in Nutrition Labeling, Nutrient Content Claims, and Health Claims” (July 11, 2003)

Combat Morning Sickness and Motion Sickness

Advice from The First Lady of Fitness, Fashion, and Fun and Pittsburgh personal trainer, Independent Beachbody Coach, and life coach, Jackie Omotalade:

Fifty to 80 percent of women end up with morning sickness during pregnancy. Are you looking for a morning sickness cure? Or a cure for nausea? Does the thought of getting into a car make you cringe? Are you looking for a motion sickness bracelet or motion sickness bands?

No one knows for sure what causes nausea during pregnancy, but it’s probably some combination of the many physical changes taking place in the body.

Some say that morning sickness can be caused by a vitamin B deficiency. Taking a vitamin B6 supplement does seem to help ease nausea in some pregnant women, but this doesn’t mean they have a vitamin deficiency. In fact, at least one study has shown no significant differences in the levels of B6 in women with morning sickness and those without.

Are you looking for a morning sickness cure? Or a cure for nausea? Does the thought of getting into a car make you cringe? Are you looking for a motion sickness bracelet or motion sickness bands?

A large body of research suggests that you can reduce the nausea and vomiting associated with motion sickness, morning sickness, surgery, and chemotherapy by applying pressure to points on the wrist. It may not be a morning sickness cure, but it does reduce the symptoms! PsiBand – for Motion Sickness, Pregnancy, Anesthesia & Chemotherapy Wrist Bands For Adult – 1 Pair (cherry blossom design) capitalize on accupressure concept. The bands were created by two morning sick moms in search of a more attractive solution to the typical sweatband-style motion sickness bracelets and bands. They are adjustable, waterproof, and available in five different patterns.

morning sickness cure

An Indoor Hydroponic Garden Can Help You Stay Healthy

Fitness and Health tips from Pittsburgh personal trainer, life coach, and Independent Beachbody Coach, Jackie Omotalade, The First Lady of Fitness, Fashion, and Fun:

Indoor gardens are crucial to keeping you and your family healthy! A growing body of research shows that fruits and vegetables are critical to promoting good health. Fruits and vegetables contain essential vitamins, minerals, and fiber that may help protect you from chronic diseases. Substituting fruits and vegetables for higher-calorie foods can be part of a weight loss strategy. However, fruits and vegetables can be expensive and many of us do not have the time nor the space to grow our own fruits and vegetables. Also, many of us do not live in climates suitable for growing year-round!

Imagine having fresh vegetable EVERY day at a fraction of the cost!

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How To Increase (HDL) Good Cholesterol Levels

Advice from Pittsburgh personal trainer, life coach, and Independent Beachbody Coach, Jackie Omotalade, The First Lady of Fitness, Fashion, and Fun:

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Vitamins for Children?

Advice from The First Lady of Fitness, Fashion, and Fun and Pittsburgh personal trainer and lifestyle coach, Jackie Omotalade:

When it comes to your kids and vitamin supplements, you should know that most children do not need extra or supplemental vitamins or minerals. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, if you base your children’s diet on the food guide pyramid, you shouldn’t need to give your child vitamin supplements. However, it is important to know that amongst all age groups, children can be the one that is the hardest to regulate diet. Children don’t understand what it means when something is essential for their bodies, and they are much more prone to be picky eaters or to have poor diets. If you child is eating a special diet, they might need more vitamins or minerals. These can include vegetarians, children with allergies, or children that have religions which state certain foods cannot be eaten.

As a parent, it is of the utmost importance that you make sure that your child has a healthy diet by ensuring that they are getting the proper amounts of the right kinds of vitamins and minerals. If this isn’t happening because of what they are eating, you either need to change what they are eating, or make sure that they are getting the vitamins in another way. Vitamin supplements can be purchased in kid-friendly shapes and flavors, so it shouldn’t be a problem to have your child take them.

There are several vitamins and minerals that are going to be important for your child to have enough of. These include, especially, iron, which is needed in children to prevent anemia. This usually happens if children aren’t given enough extra iron after they are six months old, which happens often if a baby drinks cow or goat milk instead of formula. Young and adolescent girls are also at a risk of having an iron deficiency.

Another important thing that children need is calcium. This is something that is completely necessary for healthy bones and teeth. If children are drinking milk and eating dairy products, they are probably getting enough calcium, but if they aren’t, you might need to supplement this in their diets.

It is also important that children are getting fluoride. This helps to build healthy teeth. However, it is important that they only get enough fluoride, and not too much, so don’t add to their intake unless your dentist or doctor thinks that you should.

If you don’t think that your child is getting enough vitamins or minerals, you should consult with your doctor to make sure that you can find a good balance and a good children ’s multivitamin for them to be taking.

I am a huge fan of

Eating Healthy for your Heart

Eating Healthy for your Heart

Advice from Pittsburgh personal trainer and life coach, Jackie Omotalade, “The First Lady of Fitness, Fashion, and Fun:

Your heart is one of the most important organs in the body, and the foods you put into your mouth effect how your heart operates. If you want your heart to be strong and able to pump blood effectively and efficiently all over your body, it is important for you to eat a healthy diet. Heart-healthy foods are readily available in the supermarket, so choose some that work for your personal likes and you should be able to help prevent heart disease in your own body.

Heart disease is the number 1 killer and stroke is the number 3 killer of American women and men.

In the main type of heart disease, a fatty substance called plaque builds up in the arteries that bring oxygen-rich blood to the heart. Over time, this buildup causes the arteries to narrow and harden. When this happens, the heart does not get all the blood it needs to work properly, which can result in chest pain or a heart attack.

Cholesterol is the most important thing when it comes to eating heart-healthy foods, there are both good cholesterols and bad cholesterols. Good cholesterols are called HDL, and their job in the body is to take excess bad cholesterol (LDL) to the liver, where it can be broken down and then will leave the body. LDL is actually not needed by your body at all from foods. Our bodies make enough of this kind of cholesterol on its own. It is the LDL cholesterol that hurts our hearts, not the HDL cholesterol, which actually helps our hearts be reducing the amount of LDL cholesterol in the body.

LDL stands for low-density lipoproteins. Because this substance has a low density, it does not flow through the blood stream as readily as it should. The red blood cells easily release the LDL cholesterol and it sticks to the walls of your blood vessels, especially in the arteries leading to your heart. This is bad for a number of reasons.

First, when the LDL cholesterol builds up on your arteries, it reduces the amount of blood that can fit through at a time, since the artery becomes smaller. That means your heart has to pump harder and faster in order to allow the same amount of blood to flow through your body. Over time, this makes your heart tired and not as strong. In the worst-case scenario, the blood vessel becomes so built up with LDL cholesterol that your artery could close completely. When this happens, your heart essentially panics because it is not getting the blood it needs and it starts beating rapidly to try to pump the blood. This causes a heart attack.

You can also have a heart attack from LDL cholesterol build up if a piece of the build-up, called plaque, breaks off and floats down the blood stream. When it reaches a smaller part of the blood vessel, it will get stuck and block the blood, which again causes a heart attack. If the piece of plaque travels to the brain instead of the heart, it will cause a blockage in this area of the body, which in turn causes a stroke. Therefore, it is simply important to cut out of your diet the foods high in cholesterol so that you can prevent heart disease and other problems in the body.

If you want to have a healthy heart, you have to learn how to eat a healthy heart diet. All of the food you eat effects the health of your heart. You should reduce the saturated and trans fats in your diet by limiting the amount of solid fats like butter, margarine and shortening you add to food when cooking and serving. Your diet should consist mainly of the following:

* fruits and vegetables
* grains (at least half of your grains should be whole grains, such as whole wheat, whole oats, oatmeal, whole-grain corn, brown rice, wild rice, whole rye, whole-grain barley, buckwheat, bulgur, millet, quinoa, and sorghum)
* fat-free or low-fat versions of milk, cheese, yogurt, and other milk products
* fish, skinless poultry, lean meats, dry beans, eggs, and nuts
* polyunsaturated (pol-ee-uhn-SACH-uh-ray-tid) and monounsaturated (mon-oh-uhn-SACH-uh-ray-tid) fats (found in fish, nuts, and vegetable oils)

The American Heart Association offers these guidelines for how much fat and cholesterol to include in a heart-healthy diet:

Type of fat Recommendation

Saturated fat Less than 7 percent of your total daily calories
Trans fat Less than 1 percent of your total daily calories
Cholesterol Less than 300 milligrams a day for healthy adults; less than 200 milligrams a day for adults with high levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad,” cholesterol or those who are taking cholesterol-lowering medication

If you’re not sure which fats or oils to use when cooking or baking, use this guide:

Choose

* Olive oil
* Canola oil
* Margarine labeled “trans fat-free”
* Cholesterol-lowering margarine, such as Benecol, Promise activ or Smart Balance

Avoid

* Butter
* Lard
* Bacon
* Gravy
* Cream sauce
* Nondairy creamers
* Hydrogenated margarine and shortening
* Cocoa butter, found in chocolate
* Coconut, palm, cottonseed and palm-kernel oils

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

Advice from The First Lady of Fitness, Fashion, and Fun and Pittsburgh fitness trainer and life coach, Jackie Omotalade:

You are what you eat! Have you ever heard this saying? In some sense, this is true, because if you eat unhealthy foods you are prone to be an unhealthy person. The foods we ingest are extremely important to our ability to grow, maintain function, and prevent illness. Eating healthy foods is one of the greatest ways you can live healthy and combat developing a disease. Some diseases are genetic and there’s not much you can do about that. But others like Diabetes 2, Lung Cancer, and Heart Disease and may be prevented with the proper diet.

Healthy eating is important from the day we are born. As a child, we grow quite rapidly and this is due in part to the foods we eat. Foods all contain nutrients that provide us not only with fuel to live our daily lives, but also with the very substances that build our bones, muscles, and organ tissues. Not getting enough of one nutrient or another can cause a variety of problems, including stunting our growth. For mothers who are nursing, nutrition is important because breast milk contains the nutrients a child needs to grow and develop properly. As we grow older, these nutrients are then found in food, but don’t think that healthy eating isn’t important for growth after you’ve gone through puberty. Cells continuous break down and rebuild, so healthy eating for growth continues to be important until the day we die.

We need a healthy diet to function. In out daily lives, we use energy to think, walk, talk, breathe, and perform any other action. The energy it takes our body to do these things comes from two places: fat reserves in the body or our daily food intake. If you don’t eat healthy foods, you will find that you are storing more fat that necessary or that you aren’t getting enough and you feel sluggish or weak. Along with energy-providing nutrients, like fats and carbohydrates, we also need the right nutrients to allow our organs to do their jobs. Hormones and other substances in the body make sure that everything is working properly. If you don’t eat the right nutrients, your body cannot produce these hormones and, as a result, cannot function properly.

Lastly, healthy eating is important in order to prevent illness. When we do not get the right nutrients, or body’s natural defense system against diseases weakens, allowing viruses and bacteria to attack the body. It’s like a well-trained army—if the army doesn’t have enough to eat, it will not do well in battle. Without healthy foods and plenty of water, our bodies simply could not operate on a day-to-day basis. Learning how to eat healthy foods is therefore and important lesson, and one which we should begin learning as children.

EAT RIGHT

Advice from The First Lady of Fitness, Fashion, and Fun and Pittsburgh fitness trainer and life coach, Jackie Omotalade:

Healthy eating requires you to eat a number of nutrients every day. Nutrients are any substance that can be metabolized by an human/animal to give energy and build tissue. There are 40 different nutrients your body needs to ingest in order to stay healthy.

40 may seem like a lot of nutrients to know about, but luckily, you can break down all of these nutrients into smaller categories in order to keep them organized in your mind and make sure you get all of the foods you need.

First and foremost, everyone needs water in order to live a healthy life. Without water, we become dehydrated, and eventually die. You lose water when you sweat and through daily bodily functions, so water must be replenished. Drinking about 8 glasses a day is recommended. Of course, water is found in food as well as in drinks. Most foods have some amount of water in them. You can easily get about 20% of your daily fluid need from the foods you eat. Fruits, like watermelon tend to have more water and something dry like toast would have much less. The other 80% of fluid you need comes from the beverages you drink.

Of course, we need much more than water every day to survive. Another group of nutrients we can’t do without is proteins. Unlike fats or carbohydrates, which can be good for you or bad for you based on their natural biochemistry, all dietary proteins are about equal. The quality of a protein for the most part depends on how the food source is prepared or what fats naturally accompany the protein.

It may help to understand a little protein biochemistry first. Proteins are made up of different combinations of 20 tiny building blocks called amino acids. Of those 20 amino acids, your body manufactures 11 of them. The other nine amino acids need to come directly from your diet, so they are called essential amino acids.

When you eat, your digestive system breaks down the proteins into the individual amino acids, absorbs, them and your body uses them to make new proteins that you need for muscles, organs and components of your immune system. Proteins are found in foods such as meat, eggs, and soy products. They provide the amino acids needed to build muscle tissue as well as help make some of the hormones in our bodies. Red blood cells and hair is also made from protein.

Along with proteins, a body also needs adequate amounts of fats and carbohydrates in order for us to have enough energy during the day. Fats are primarily used for energy during intense activity, like exercising, while carbohydrates are primarily used for energy during less intense activities, like standing, sitting, and other movements. The American Heart Association recommends that you get less than 30% of your total calories from fat.

A good carbohydrate is (complex carbohydrate with lots of fiber) verses a bad carbohydrate (table sugar or high fructose corn syrup). And bad fats (saturated fats and trans fats) verses good fats (monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats). Fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds and grains are healthier choices for carbohydrates than candy, sodas and pastries. Both the fats and the carbohydrates that we eat in a day can be stored for later use as fat, so it is important to eat enough for energy, but also important to regulate intake in order to stay slim and healthy. In the event that you are not eating enough fats and carbohydrates, your body can also provide itself with fuel from proteins.

Vitamins and minerals are also important nutrients for our daily lives. We get these from fruits, vegetables, milk, and most natural sources of food. Some of our foods, such as bread products, can even be enriched so that we get more vitamins and minerals in our bodies. There are dozens that you need to ingest regularly, such as iron, thiamine, vitamin C, and vitamin D. If you are eating a healthy diet, you can most likely get enough vitamins and minerals from your foods, but you can also take vitamin supplements to make sure that you are getting the right amounts you need to maintain body function. Supplements may also be available to help with other nutrients as well, so if you are worried, talk to your doctor about how you can be sure to be eating a healthy amount of nutrients.

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