Health and Fitness and Doing It Pain Free

When it comes to health and exercise maybe you have this image of you just munching through tons of salads, nibbling on raw carrot sticks... and generally eating fairly boring food.

If that's what you're thinking, I have some good news: Eating raw foods does NOT have to be boring. All you need is a little creativity and some special kitchen appliances to create some pretty amazing dishes. Read on...

Blender: If you're drinking whey protein shakes, you may already be using a blender. You can use this blender to make your protein shakes more interesting, such as by adding oatmeal or bananas to the shake. Or you can make fruit smoothies (for breakfast or anytime). For example, make a strawberry-banana smoothie. You can add flax, oatmeal or just about anything else to the smoothie for extra taste, texture and nutrients.

Juicer: If you recall from back in the nutrition lessons, I mentioned that you should avoid any juices that have added sugars or other ingredients. That means you should avoid most juices, because most of them are processed. And sometimes it's hard to find fresh juice.

Here's your solution: Get a juicer. Not only can you make your own fresh orange juice, grapefruit juice and other fruit juices, you can also make vegetable juices (like carrot juice) and seaweed juices. You can even combine different fruits and vegetables. For example, you can use a juicer to create carrot-orange juice or strawberry-grapefruit juice.

Food Processor: Yes, you can do everything with a set of kitchen knives that you can do with a food processor. But the thing is, you can do it much faster with the food processor. In other words, a good food processor can save you a lot of time on cooking day.

Now, obviously, if you're making just one meal, then it doesn't make sense to haul out the food processor. That's because you need to take into consideration the amount of time it takes to clean the machine when you're finished. For a small amount of food (a meal or two), any time savings you create over using a knife is lost in the time it takes to properly clean the machine.

Point is, it's a great time saver... but only if you're using it on those days when you're doing some bulk cooking. Food Dehydrator: While cooking nuts, seeds, fruits and veggies using high heat will rob the food of its beneficial enzymes and some of its nutrients, you can "cook" the food using low heat. In other words, you can dehydrate your food (preferably using a food dehydrator, since your oven probably doesn't have a low enough temperature setting).

Snack idea: You can dehydrate fruits to make fruit chips, like apple chips or banana chips. Then mix your dried fruits with nuts and seeds for a delicious, nutritious snack.

That's it for this time. Next time you'll find out what to do when you want to get more muscle...

Looking forward to talking to you again.