Healthification 101

Happy Monday everyone! I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving/Black Friday/weekend! Mine was fabulous :) Seeing all our family is one of my favorite things ever. Rory (the kitten) was beside himself with loneliness from our absence and it seemed he tried to comfort himself with food (all three food bowls were gone after four days, although we'd left enough for about 8...); I swear he's three pounds heavier suddenly! Ahh, even kittens get lonely after being left friendless for a few days. But we're back in action and Rory is prancing around the counter tops again, getting yelled at every time, so all is right in his world. ;)

I was brainstorming what to blog about today and decided I should just touch on a few of the healthification standards I cook by! I also have a few rules I go by when looking at non-homemade products at the store. For ingredients, use the same amount the recipe called for of the original ingredient unless I change it! :)

Cooking ingredient:                                                    Healthier ingredient:

butter                                 unsweetened applesauce (a little extra) or mashed banana                             

sour cream                                                                  plain Greek yogurt!

half and half                                 2% milk. I've seriously never even bought half and half  :)

vegetable oil                               unsweetened applesauce (a little extra) or mashed banana

sugar                                   agave nectar (1/2 the amount of sugar) or honey (3/4 the amount of sugar)
                                                  If you don't have either, I still cut the sugar to either 3/4
                                                                                or 2/3 what the recipe says.

mayo                                                                          plain Greek yogurt!


Those are just a few, but hopefully you find them useful! :)

While grocery shopping, it is important to look at the nutritional facts and the ingredients! So many products sound good in theory, but are chock full of silly, unnecessary ingredients. Here are some things to look for!

"Whole wheat" products: the first ingredient should be whole wheat flour, without the words "enriched", "bleached" or any other kind of flour listed first. If something is truly 100% whole grain, it will have 2 grams of fiber for every 100 calories. For example, if a piece of bread says it has 110 calories and 1 gram of fiber, it isn't actually whole grain!

sugar: cereals, bars, yogurt and pretty much everything is full of sugar! Its best to aim low when it comes to added sugars. Don't mix those up with natural sugars that are high in fruits and milk, which are fine because your body is made to process them. Its the added sugars that aren't found naturally that you want to watch, because those are more easily stored as extra in your body, and we don't want any extra storage happenin' anywhere other than our closets ;) I look for cereal with less than 10 grams per serving (good ones are all types of Chex and Life as well as unsweetened shredded wheat), as well as any types of bars and yogurt. Yogurt will naturally have sugar because it is a dairy product, aka it has lactose, but the added flavors in yogurt usually up the sugar content. One more thing to watch in this category is peanut butter. Surprising, right? But peanut butter should only have 1 gram of sugar if it is truly natural without any added sugar. Many of the "natural" peanut butters list 3 grams, and then the more "edited" the peanut butter, the more sugar it has. Once you de-fat, whip, and flavor a peanut butter, it turns out with WAY more extra things than you need, including sugar. Which brings us to the final thing...

extra ingredients: Do you ever pick up a box of something and stare blankly at the 49-item-long ingredient list? If something seems simple enough (example, bagel), but it lists a bunch of words you can't pronounce but have seen in your fitness magazine under "stay away from", try another brand of that item. It takes a little extra searching, but not every company adds extra fake sugar/flavoring/who knows what to every single thing they sell. Though you might already be thinking it, organic and all-natural products tend to do better in this category of healthy grocery shopping, but even non-organic items can hold their own.

That's all I have for you today! On a sidebar, a friend suggested I start a twitter account to link into Eat.Run.Coffee. Whatchya think?! I'm thinking she might be onto something...would you read healthy recipe/coffee ideas/workout tip tweets?? Let me know your thoughts :) Hope your Monday evening is fantastic!

--KQ