Hello everyone and welcome back to another round of the best articles in health & fitness! If this is your first time here, I pull together five of the best articles that have crossed my path over the last week to help you have one less thing to worry about on your weight loss journey. This week we cover healthy apple recipes, delicious fruits and vegetables to work into your holiday dishes, protein rich pumpkin pancakes, how to cut your workout time in half, and how PEDs have been around as long as there have been sports.
Best Health & Fitness Articles From Last Week
10 Healthy Apple Recipes for Fall
Fall is here and that means two things, yoga pants and apple recipes. I’m an absolute sucker for anything with apples in them and I’m going to have to restrain myself or I’ll end up paying for it come the New Year. Working apples into your meal plan this fall is an excellent way to avoid falling into that annual habit of eating too much unhealthy food and adding an extra inch or two to your waistline. Check out these awesome recipes!
18 Delicious Fall Fruits and Vegetables
If the scent of pumpkin spice in the air wasn’t a big enough clue, fall is here which means that the holidays are right around the corner. This is a dangerous time of year for those of us on a weight loss journey or looking to maintain the progress we’ve made and no matter where you turn, sweet delicious temptation is going to be everywhere. This time of year is responsible for broken diets and hastily made resolutions as penance for falling off the wagon.
Fall — it’s the season for comfort food. Thanksgiving’s decadent dishes are right around the corner and everything in eyesight seems to be laced with pumpkin spice flavoring.
Look, it happens to all of us and I’ve had to do an extra cycle or two of P90X or INSANITY to shed my holiday weight, but you can still indulge in tasty holiday dishes without feeling guilty or having to worry about what’s going to happen to your waistline with these 18 uber healthy fruits and vegetables. Work these recipes into your holiday meal plan so you can use your New Year’s Resolution for something new this year!
Pumpkin Protein Pancakes
If you’re craving something pumpkin-flavored for breakfast, forget about a sugary pumpkin spiced latte and go for these wholesome pumpkin protein pancakes instead.
Start your morning off right with these protein packed pumpkin pancakes. You’ll sate that daily craving for something pumpkin-y and you’ll have plenty of fuel for that morning workout. This quick and easy recipe will net you 2 servings of pancakes in just 25 minutes and you can always triple up the ingredients to have your breakfast ready to go for the rest of the week too!
Cut Your Workout Time in Half
A new report in the journal Circulation reveals that the AHA’s guidelines fall way short of the actual amount of exercise required to reap those benefits. The new recommendation: One to two hours a day.
That’s right folks, the new gold standard is 2 hours of exercise each day if you want to cut your risk for heart failure by 30%. This latest study of the American Heart Association’s (AHA) guidelines and those who adhered to them showed that those who doubled up the old recommendation had a 35% lower risk of heart disease, which is stunning to say the least. So how do you cut your workout time in half? Do you need to buy some supplement with ingredients you can’t pronounce? Nope. Do you need to do some off the wall gimmick like jogging while breathing through a snorkel or hydrating exclusively with Moroccan yak milk? Absolutely not.
So how then? Work harder. That’s it! Just crank up the intensity of your workout by a couple of notches and you’re good to go. One minute of fast-paced, exercise (running, pick-up basketball, etc.) easily counts as two minutes of low to medium impact exercises (walking, mowing the lawn, etc.) and will make it so you can still lower your chances of catastrophic heart failure without having to spend an extra hour exercising.
Sports Doping: Ancient and Deadly
When 1990 Olympic athletes were asked, “If you were given a performance enhancing substance, and guaranteed that you would win and not be caught, would you take it?” More than 98% said “Yes.”
Here’s the bottom line, people like to be winners. We want to be the best at something. We want to prove that we are better than other people and, inherently, this competitive streak isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Competition leads to innovation and motivation to push ourselves well beyond our limits to earn our victory. However, there are many who are willing to bend the rules to guarantee that gold medal while their competition has to settle for silver and bronze because they didn’t take the same shortcut.
It doesn’t matter how far back into history you look, someone’s always looking to get an edge on the competition and even dates back to Scandinavian mythology with their Berzerkers that drank a beverage made from a specific mushroom which caused them to fall into an uncontrollable, trance-like rage that increased their strength and made them unaffected by fire and iron. Though it’s mythology and the drink sounds like PCP or crack, the point still stands. The Greeks were no different either with ancient Olympians searching far and wide for a performance edge by eating lizard meat, raw animal testicles, eating hallucinogens, and drinking potions. As long as there’s been sport, there have been those looking for a competitive advantage.