Becoming a Lean, Mean Eating Machine - Part 3

Last blog we explored how to take the first step towards eating foods that help keep us strong, lean, and resilient by substituting heavily processed foods made with poor ingredients with more carefully processed foods containing more nutritious ingredients. Remember the goal is to recondition our taste buds and end up craving healthier food choices.

What we eat is life or death (our choice) by a thousand cuts. It's not so much the one time a month that we might eat a sugar rich desert or prime rib marbled with saturated fat that undermine our fitness, but the day in day out food ingested over and over again.

The next step is to substitute individual foods that are high in bad fats or simple carbs with foods rich in good fats and complex carbs. Try to substitute something new every week. Time goes by fast. In a matter of weeks, you'll start to see and feel changes.

Start with some of these substitutions (from >> to):

Whole dairy products >> low or no fat dairy products
Red meat >> fish, grilled skinless chicken or turkey
Tuna packed in oil >> tuna packed in water
Boxed cereals >> oatmeal (rolled or steel cut)
White rice >> brown rice
Desert with sugar >> fruit
Potato chips/tortilla chips >> raw carrots or celery, or a handful of almonds
Ice cream with sugar >> plain yogurt with fruit
White potato >> sweet potato or yam

You'll notice some common themes hinted at in this list. The first is a move away from protein sources that are high in saturated fats, especially corn fed red meat. The other is that the carbs of choice are vegetables and fruit, not carbs heavy in high fructose corn syrup and white sugar.

A couple of good references to look at with more ideas is Tom Venuto's (he's a body builder, but don't be put off by that -- knows his stuff) ebook "Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle" or Paul Goldberg and Matt Fitzgerald's "The Lean Look."

Another good way to adopt the substitution strategy is just to watch the space on your plate. More and more of the space should be taken up by vegetables and fruit. It's that simple.

What's your reward? Speed, endurance, clear thinking, strength, energy. A TOJ's pot at the end of the rainbow.


Spicy Oven Baked Sweet Potato Fries

3 to 4 Sweet Potatoes
3 TBs melted coconut oil
1/4 to 1/2 tsp. Chipotle Chili Powder or cayenne
salt to taste

To prepare the sweet potatoes wash and scrub them thoroughly. Cut in half and then into strips. For thinner fries cut those strips into halves again. Toss in melted coconut oil and sprinkle on chili power and salt.

Bake in preheated oven at 450 degrees. Turn with a spatula after 20 minutes and bake until crispy, about 30 to 45 minutes depending on the thickness of the potatoes.








Now we'll take a look at how to

The Centers for Disease Control just announced an alarming study that, if current trends continue, by 2050 as many as 1 of 3 Americans will have diabetes.