Hey everyone! Coach Jimmy back again with another installment of the best health and fitness articles from last week. For those of you who aren’t “in the know”, I pick out the five best articles that pass through my inbox each week so you don’t have to worry about which blogs you need to follow while you’re on your weight loss journey. That’s what I’m here for.
This week, we cover cooking the recipes you want even if you don’t have the right utensils, fighting off Restless Leg Syndrome, what to do if you end up cheating on your diet, how fitness can heal your spirit as well as your body, and what it means to have a “Beachbody”.
Best Articles From Last Week
How to Cook Almost Any Recipe…Even If You Have a Bare Bones Kitchen
If you’re working with very limited supplies, you can still cook most recipes. Like with any job, the right tools help make the process more efficient, but here’s how to get by without them.
Have you ever found a recipe that you’ve really wanted to try, spent the afternoon rounding up the ingredients, and when you get halfway through cooking it, you realize that you don’t actually own a sifter? I hate it when that happens. Let’s face it though, most of us don’t own half the bits we need to actually cook the food we want to eat. Heck, some of us might only have a microwave, but before you dump your half-prepped meal in the garbage, there are some quick ways to MacGuyer your recipe without having to run to the store again.
Restless Legs? You Might Need More Magnesium
Do your muscles keep twitching long after your workouts? Well, it shouldn’t and if it does, you might have a Magnesium deficiency. Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS) is a condition where your body twitches, spasms, throbs, or itches involuntarily and isn’t restricted to your get away sticks (read: legs). Most of these symptoms worsen as the night goes on and it can happen after a workout, but it should lessen rather quickly after your cooldown.
Exercise, stress, sweating, and drinking caffeine / booze depletes your body of its much needed magnesium which can be difficult to replace if you’re on a calorie deficient diet. By adding magnesium-rich foods like nuts, leafy greens, chicken breasts, bananas, oatmeal, etc. to your meal plan, this extended trembling should subside more rapidly if not dissipate entirely. However, if changing up your diet doesn’t help, chat with a doctor about it.
“Calcium tenses muscles and magnesium helps relax muscles,” explains Denis Faye, Beachbody’s Director of Nutrition Content. “Most people get enough calcium in their diets, but that’s not always the case with magnesium.”
Ask the Expert: What Should You Do If You Cheat On Your Diet?
Soooooo…you cheated on your diet. You’re probably feeling guilty, a bit stressed, and possibly worried about what the scale is going to show you in the morning. Here’s the deal, it’s okay. Stop freaking out. Did you mess up? Sure. That’s why it’s called cheating. It’s not a great thing to do, BUT you have to eat a boatload for your scale to swing multiple pounds.
To gain one pound of fat you have to ingest 3,500 additional calories on top of your daily caloric intake. That’s effectively doubling the amount of food you normally eat in a day. While it’s not impossible to do, that slice of deep dish pizza you snagged on your 15 minute lunch instead of a salad does not equal out to 3,500 calories. Don’t sweat it. That bit of pizza is going to hang around temporarily and then fall off because you stopped worrying about it, got back on your meal plan, and crushed your workouts to make up for the misstep.
In the extremely unlikely event that you binged so massively over the weekend that you actually gained body fat, there’s nothing you can do about it now, so quit being neurotic and Googling articles like this one—instead, get on with the business of reversing the damage.
Fitspiration Friday: Picking Back Up After Losing My Brother
For many people, the descent into an unhealthy lifestyle or gaining weight is initiated by a traumatic event like losing a loved one. The things that once mattered to you aren’t important anymore, you stop caring about your health, and your emotions are in shambles because anything can remind you of that person at a moment’s notice and some people turn to food as a catharsis. Something similar happened to Kathy when her younger brother Andrew was killed in a hit and run shortly after he graduated college.
After his death, I became a shell of a person. I walked around lifeless. It felt like my heart had been ripped from my chest, stepped on, and thrown off a mountain. How do you keep on living when your best friend in the entire world is no longer by your side?
Before his death, Kathy and Andrew would do INSANITY together and motivate each other in the way that only siblings can. Kathy picked it back up to still feel connected with her little brother and it helped her turn her grief around.
What Does It Really Mean to Have a Beachbody?
Beachbody’s workout programs have taken the world over by storm in the last decade and the tide doesn’t seem to be shifting any time soon. From P90X to INSANITY and 21 DAY FIX, millions of Americans have given them a shot at transforming not only their bodies, but their lives as well and the results don’t lie. Beachbody produces results and Beachbody co-founder Jon Congdon details what it truly means to have a “Beachbody” and how they’ve become a breakaway hit.
“It’s not a literal meaning. It’s more of a state of mind. It’s not about having a hard body. It’s about being happy with who [you] are.”