How do you like your eggs in the morning?

I have never been a breakfast person. Heck, I have never been a morning person at all. In fact, it's fair to say, that since turning 18 and leaving the rigour of sixth form there are probably very few mornings I have actually seen. The concept that there might be more than one ten o clocks in a day was alien to me!

Of course, when you're not leaving your bed before midday, skipping breakfast is not a particular issue. However, this changed very quickly upon finishing my degree (still a heartbreaking sentence to write!) and entering the world of work. When you're awake, or even starting work, at seven am waiting until one or two for your first meal of the day suddenly becomes a huge issue!

Now unfortunately for me, as I think I have made clear in previous posts, I am an avid lover of sleep. I would even venture that I am sleep's biggest fan. There is nothing that can come between me and my bed. Therefore, although I quickly learnt that I needed to eat in the morning, my first instinct on sourcing out breakfast was to find something that I could eat on the go. Something which would provide a fast energy source. Something which would be just enough to tide me over until my actual first meal of the day. For me, this, came in the form of Milky Way bars. Yummy, chocolatey, light Milky Ways. At only 192 calories for both bars in a Milky Way duo, and with a sugary rush to power me through those hours I had previously slept through, I was sure I was on to a winner.

However, despite my love for both chocolate and sleep, I pretty quickly had to admit to myself that eating a Milky Way on the way to work is not the most healthy of diets. There's very little goodness at all in it, and despite the initial sugar rush I soon found I was crashing a couple of hours before lunch and craving more sugar to regain that energy boost. Something had to be done. 

Since leaving my student home and moving into my own little flat (such a scary, grown up thing to be able to say!) I have developed a new love for breakfast. I might even consider it my favourite meal of the day now! The sudden silence that accompanied nights in the flat meant that an early night, previously a luxury in a busy, social, student house, was now the norm. If you get a good nights sleep, and wake up rested, it's far easier to get out of bed and think about making a nutritious breakfast rather than blearily downing a coffee and running out of the door. 

There is the old cliché that breakfast is the most important meal of the day; it genuinely is. Breakfast is about ending the intermittent fast that we take over night, every night. If you haven't eaten since dinner at seven o clock the night before, and it's now one in the afternoon, you haven't eaten for a massive 18 hours! Not only will this make you feel run down, it will actually reduce your productivity and ability to concentrate at work. In essence, eat breakfast and you will perform better. Breakfast is also  important to kick start your metabolism in the morning. Not only that, research has demonstrated that people who skip breakfast in the morning are more likely to overeat later in the day. Indeed, people who regularly eat breakfast are far more likely than those who skip it to maintain a healthy BMI and the American Heart Association found that breakfast eaters were significantly less likely to be obese! Therefore, if you're trying to lose weight, breakfast really is essential! 

But of course, it's not just about eating breakfast but about eating the right breakfast. My milky way bar was clearly not the right breakfast to kick start my day. Sugary cereals are also not the best option, nor would a full English every day be particularly beneficial to maintaining a healthy weight! So what do I recommend?

My current favourite breakfast is:

Cornflakes: 

Topped with strawberries:

And half a banana:

Finished off with a couple of spoons of 0% fat greek yoghurt:

And normally accompanied with the good old British staple- a mug of tea:

So there you go, a nutritious breakfast which will energise you through the morning. The high fibre cereal helps keep you fuller for longer, healthy bacteria in the greek yoghurt helps maintain a healthy gut (but make sure you choose the low fat option), and the fruit thrown in contributes to your five a day whilst providing plenty of vitamins. Not only is it healthy but it tastes amazing.  Feel free to experiment with the fruit topping combinations. I'm also a big fan of cherries and banana (Cherries work out a cheaper option as well), however, I just could not resist those beautiful British strawberries in Tesco last time I went shopping. 

Have a tasty healthy breakfast of your own? Please let me know!

Nutritional Information

15g Cornflakes: 54 calories

Half a banana: 60 calories (approx)

100g Strawberries: 30 calories

Onken Fat Free Natural Yoghurt (75g approx): 34 calories

Total: 178 calories

Fat: >1g

Carbohydrates: 37g

of which Sugars: 11g

Fibre: 2g

Protein: 6g

Sources

http://sru.avifoodweb.com/nutrilearn_09_breakfast.pdf

http://health.usnews.com/health-news/blogs/eat-run/2014/05/05/the-health-benefits-of-greek-yogurt

Is your lunchtime salad hurting your health?

It has almost become common knowledge that the salads in McDonalds can contain as much, if not more, fat than their burgers. A crispy chicken and bacon salad, with a low fat Caesar dressing, contains 21g of fat! This is almost double the 12g of fat in the cheeseburger! Even adding chips to your cheese burger meal would not equal the amount of fat in the salad.

But whilst the public has become reasonably educated in the health dangers of McDonalds salad, there is a general assumption that any other salad is a healthy option. This leads people to grab their prepacked supermarket salads without checking the nutritional information meaning that the high levels of fat often contained within goes unnoticed!

One Prawn salad sold at Morrisons, as well as other supermarkets, contains 66.3g of fat, almost 6 times as much fat as in that McDonalds cheeseburger! In fact, if you were to eat a Big Mac, a large portion of chips and a chocolate brownie McFlurry, you would still be eating less fat than in this one salad at a grand total of 61g. Moreover, the average woman is recommended to eat no more than 70g of fat a day so this 'healthy' prawn salad contains almost 100% of the daily fat intake! An M & S Pasta with Tomato & Basil Chicken salad or even a Tesco Tuna Layered Salad would set a person back the same amount of fat as if they were to eat 6 creme eggs or nearly 14 Domino's cookies!



Unfortunately it is not just the fat content in these pre-packed salads that we need to be aware of but also the levels of salt! One study found that one in ten salads contained more salt than a Big Mac and that the majority of salads had more salt in than a packet of crisps!

However, fat is not entirely a negative thing and our bodies need a certain amount of it in order to be healthy. Indeed the World Health Organisation recommends that we eat 32g of healthy fats as a minimum. Fat aids our bodies in the absorption of the nutrients in vegetables and thus is highly important to the diets. Not all fats are created equal and so we should not just be avoiding all fats with a blanket ban but become slightly more discerning about which fat is in our food. Salad dressing is not therefore a sinful creation to be avoided at all costs, we just need to ensure that it is not saturated fats which it is high in. Indeed many of these salad dressings, can be high in polyunsaturated fats, fats which help to lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease.

So what's the answer? Don't abandon that salad as a lost cause but instead pick out ones with lots of greenery and vegetables as well as foods high in the good fats such as avocado, eggs, nuts and fish. Pay close attention to levels of trans and saturated fat to make sure that the fat you are eating at lunch is the healthy kind, the NHS recommends a woman has no more than 20g of saturated fat a day.



Sources

http://www.mcdonalds.co.uk/content/ukhome/meal_builder.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-299653/McDonalds-salad-fatty-burger.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-1306536/Is-lunchtime-salad-healthy-Big-Mac-Mars-Bar.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/shop-salads-have-more-fat-than-a-big-mac-1718050.html
http://www.helpguide.org/life/healthy_diet_fats.htm

Cardio vs Weight training: how to spend your time in the gym!

 A huge proportion of girls avoid weights at the gym at all costs for fear of getting over muscly and butch. Or there's those of us who avoid them purely because of the macho guys continuously loitering around the machines making any girl who wonders into their territory feel slightly out of place! The big question for female fitness fanatics is cardio or weight training? In the battle of fat burning workouts which comes out as top dog?

On a minute by minute basis, cardio burns more calories than weight training making it the fast track to weight loss. However, a huge benefit of weight training over cardio is that it builds muscle. This makes you slimmer and leaner then you would be at the same weight if your exercise routine had been 100% cardio. One study found that a group of dieters lost 21lbs irregardless of whether they performed cardio exercise or strength training. Unfortunately for the cardio group, around 6lbs of this came from muscle whereas those doing weight training lost almost pure fat (Fetters 2013)! A combination of cardio and weight lifting then would ensure that a high number of calories were burnt but equally, that it is fat not muscle which is lost! Weight training will help you look and feel better in those crop tops and high waisted shorts than if you take the cardio only route.

Furthermore, simply having muscle in your body increases your metabolism consequently burning more calories. This effect isn't only present when exercising but continues after exercise has finished so even activities such as standing or sitting in front of the tv will burn more calories with muscle than fat! This is great news for anyone trying to lose weight as it means that your BMR will increase and the calories you eat are more likely to be used for energy as opposed to stored as fatty tissue in your body. One study found that 1kg of muscle burns 50 extra calories a day in comparison with 1kg of fat which only burnt 3 (Hawkey as cited in Harris)! Cardio, whilst effective for burning calories, doesn't have this same benefit on the metabolism. Moreover, it's unlikely to make a huge change to your overall body shape or leanness unless combined with some weight training!

Scarily, fat isn't just external but can grow around your internal organs and even in your bones. This can be hugely detrimental to health. In other words, you may look skinny after weight loss but that doesn't mean there isn't still visceral fat circulating inside your body damaging your liver and other vital organs! Even more scary is the fact that it is visceral fat, not the fat we can see, which increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, liver damage, heart disease and high blood pressure among other things! It is therefore a health threat which cannot be ignored!One study in the UK found that more than half of those studied with a normal BMI had excessive deposits of far around their heart and liver as well as streaked through their muscles! Consequently, fitness shouldn't just be about weight loss but lowering your body fat percentage. Weight training certainly trumps cardio here as it specifically burns fat whilst maintaining muscle; it will not just make you lose weight but help to reduce that dangerous visceral fat which puts your health at risk! The solution, make sure to include weight training in every work out you do in order to ensure you are not just losing weight but losing fat!

Cardio is still incredibly important to not just weight loss but health in general. Getting active and getting fit is not just about weight loss but about that overall fitness factor. Cardio exercise enables your lungs to process more oxygen with less effort, improves the rate the heart pumps blood at and increases supply of blood to the muscle. It thus reduces the risk of heart disease and vastly improves our respiratory systems. Furthermore, cardio exercise has been linked to a reduced risk of stress, anxiety and depression and an improved immune system putting you less at risk of physical illnesses such as colds and flu as well! For anyone looking to make a healthy, permanent lifestyle change, rather than just a diet then, cardio must be incorporated into the workout routine. The best benefits to fitness will come with a combination of cardio and weight training on a daily basis.

Don't worry girls, you don't have enough testosterone in your body to get butch without taking steroids or other supplements! The health benefits of weight training however, cannot be ignored! We therefore, need to ensure that we brave that masculine arena to venture into the weight machines to truly reap the awards of our fitness efforts!

(Credit to my lovely friend Emma Dean for these photos of me at the gym! Visit her beauty blog: http://dinosbeautydiary.blogspot.co.uk/ )


Sources

Much credit to my personal trainer Danny for giving me the foundation of this knowledge: http://ddsfitness.co.uk/
http://www.webmd.boots.com/fitness-exercise/guide/cardio-vs-strength?page=2
http://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/diet-fitness/exercise/cardio-vs-weight-training.htm
http://www.womenshealthmag.com/weight-loss/cardio-vs-weight-training
http://lowfatcooking.about.com/od/healthandfitness/a/bodyfat.htm