Paleo Rainbow Birthday Cake

I made this 6 layer, pretty much paleo cake for my daughter, Liv's, 10th birthday.  it was very tasty!

Click here for the recipe!

Feed yourself fertile!

One of my on-line clients has asked for a load of recipes and food lists that would help with fertility.  In compiling a list of things, it strikes me that lots of folks out there might be interested in how to eat more healthily to improve their chances of falling pregnant.

I am not promising that eating any of this will make you fertile, just that it gives you the best possible chance to have a healthy body that is well-nourished and in the best possible position to nurture a baby, with a mixed and varied diet that is rich in the basic food groups and macronutrients.

While there is plenty of evidence to support the idea that cutting down on sugar, alcohol caffeine and nicotine will improve your chances of conceiving and carrying a baby full term and that a diet rich in macronutrients is better placed to conceive, there are still going to be perfectly healthy, nourished folk for whom it won't happen and I wish better nutrition would change that but that's a promise I just can't make.

Anyway, here are some recipes and ideas that will nourish you along the way, whichever road you're on - even if you are not looking to conceive any time soon, or you're a man!

Fertility salad:

Cucumber

Cherry tomatoes

Lettuce

Fresh flat leaf parsley

Fresh basil leaves

Fennel

Sunflower seeds

Toasted pine nuts

Toasted hazelnuts

Walnuts

(Good for lunch)

Fertility fruit salad:

Blueberries

Dried apricots

Chopped orange

Kiwi

Mango

Blackberries

Raspberries

Strawberries

Sprinkle with toasted sunflower, pumpkin seeds, almonds and coconut.

(Add a dollop of Greek yoghurt to make a good breakfast)

Pink Fertility Fruit Smoothie:

(frozen fruit is fine)

Handful of strawberries

Handful of raspberries

½ banana

Tbsp Greek yoghurt

Tbsp oats

Tbsp ground almonds

Milk to loosen if necessary

(Makes a good breakfast)

Green Fertility Fruit Smoothie:

One kiwi

Handful of kale or spinach

One apple - grated

½ banana

Tbsp Greek yoghurt

Tbsp oats

Tbsp ground flax seeds

Milk to loosen if necessary

(Makes a good breakfast)

Blue Fertility Fruit Smoothie:

 

(frozen fruit is fine)

Handful of blueberries

Handful of blackberries

½ banana

Tbsp Greek yoghurt

Tbsp oats

Tbsp desiccated coconut

Milk to loosen if necessary

(Makes a good breakfast)

Fertility Trail Mix:

Mix up a shed load and keep in an airtight container for on-the-go healthy snack

Toast:

Sunflower seeds

Pumpkin seeds

Chia seeds

Separately toast desiccated coconut

Toast:

Almonds

Hazelnuts

Warm:

Tbsp honey

Tbsp coconut oil (or butter)

Grated rind and juice from large orange

Mix all ingredients together and allow to cool.

Fertility ‘Cous cous’

Either make up some quinoa (a great source of vegetable protein)

or

grind up some raw cauliflower (another great source of vegetable protein)

To this, add diced:

Carrot

Cucumber

Red, yellow and orange pepper

Celery

Apple

as well as:

Chopped black olives

Chopped anchovies

Capers

Chopped walnuts

Chopped cornichons or gherkins

Drizzle over olive oil, add a grind of black pepper and a sprinkle of paprika and mix well, serve with protein of your choice – Good with eggs, fish or Feta.

(Good for lunch)

Fertility veg stir fry accompaniment to protein lunch or dinner:

Green beans

Broccoli

Courgette

Asparagus

Red and yellow pepper

Brussell sprouts (chopped up)

Garlic

(Good for lunch)

Fertility Beef Chili

Ground beef

Onion

Tomatoes

Red peppers

Chopped spinach

A tsp cocoa powder

Black beans

Kidney beans

Fertility Chicken Chili

Chopped chicken or turkey

Onion

Tomatoes

Sweet corn

Yellow pepper

Courgettes

Chickpeas

Chestnut mushrooms

All your normal chili con carne spices

Other great foods:

Meat, liver, fish, shellfish, eggs

Spinach

Greens

Cauliflower

Sesame seeds

Liver

Lentils

Bananas

Add a tsp or tbsp of chia seeds or ground flax seeds to whatever seems appropriate.

Things to avoid:

Cut down to one cup of coffee a day – in the morning, decaf for the rest of the day – keep your caffeine in check, watch your intake of tea and chocolate – avoid diet coke!

Avoid soy products

Avoid alcohol

No smoking

No sugar

Avoid wheat

No time to hit the gym? No worries!

Total Fitness is an holistic thing, involving many different areas.

We're not just talking cardio-vascular fitness or muscular strength and endurance but things like core stability and balance, coordination, agility and speed as well as having a well-nourished body and enough sleep and fresh air.

It may come as no surprise that the clients who come to me more than once a week see quicker and more obvious results than those who come once week.  However, even if you don't have a Personal Trainer or gym membership, it's still possible to tone up those muscles and improve your cv fitness, balance, coordination and strength by being clever about how you train.

So this post is how to use little pockets of time when you can't be doing anything else to maximise that time with quick, clever little workouts that don't involve changing your clothes or trekking to the gym.

Here are some examples of times when you are a captive audience at home:

Waiting for the kettle to boil
Running a bath
Sitting on the toilet
Cooking a meal
Making a phone call
Drying your hair
Brushing your teeth
Washing up
Sitting at your desk
Watching TV

I'm sure you can come up with more.

Have a go at some of these exercises whenever you have spare seconds or minutes:

1     Pressups - against a door, on your knees or full pressups.  As many as you can do in one go, whenever you have a 30 seconds spare.

Good for muscular strength and endurance in your shoulders, abs and arms.  Good for core stability and balance and if they make you out of breath, hot and a perhaps sweaty, good for cardio-vascular fitness.

2     Jump squats - squat as low as you can go, jump up and straight back down into a low squat.

Good for cardio-vascular fitness as well as muscular strength and endurance in your thighs and bum and and good for core stability and balance and coordination.

Burpees

3     Burpees - Jump up and squat down, hands on the floor - jump your feet back behind you so you end up on a straight arm plank position, jump your feet back forwards into a squat position and jump up.  If you add a press up into the move when you get to the straight arm plank position, they become 'bastards'!  Ha ha ha!

Bastards

Excellent for cardio-vascular fitness as well as muscular strength and endurance in your thighs and bum and and good for core stability and balance and coordination.  If you add in a press up, also good for muscular strength and endurance in your shoulders, abs and arms.  Good for core stability and balance and if they make you out of breath, hot and a perhaps sweaty, good for cardio-vascular fitness.

4     Skipping - you don't even need a rope!  Use an imaginary rope, these are actually much better than regular ropes as they don't trip you up, they don't get tangled and they never get lost!  Try double unders for a real hard cardio workout!  Go for a s long as you can or have time for.

Excellent for cardio-vascular fitness as well as muscular strength and endurance in your thighs and bum and and good for core stability and balance and coordination.

5     Air squats - start with feet shoulder width apart, toes slightly pointing out.  As you lower into the squat, keep your chest and head up, lower your bum right into it and make sure you can still see your toes.  Then push back up through your heels.

Good for muscular strength and endurance in your thighs and bum and and good for core stability and balance and coordination and if they make you out of breath, hot and a perhaps sweaty, good for cardio-vascular fitness.

6     Planks -  with your forearms on the floor in front of you and your legs out straight and toes on the floor behind you, tense your core muscles and hold your body off the floor in a straight line for as long as you can.  try to beat your record each time or do 30 seconds a pop.

Good for muscular strength and endurance in your abs and back.  Good for core stability and balance.

7     Lunges - Take a large step forwards and, keeping your back straight, focus on bending your back knee so it almost touches the floor and your front knee so it makes a right angle.

Good for muscular strength and endurance in your thighs and bum and and good for core stability and balance and coordination and if they make you out of breath, hot and a perhaps sweaty, good for cardio-vascular fitness.

8     Triceps Dips - Use a chair or two to help you.  Begin with bent knees, progress onto straight legs and then raised legs and keep your fingers facing forwards on the edge of the chair.  Lower yourself up and down, using your arms to support you.

Good for muscular strength and endurance in your arms and shoulders, specifically triceps - that's bingo wings to us British women!

9     Static squat - Stand against a wall and lower yourself until your legs are at right angles and lean slightly forwards so your back is off the wall.  Hold for as long as you can.

Good for muscular strength and endurance in your thighs and bum and good for core stability and balance.

10   Calf Raises - Stand on a step on your toes and raise yourself up as high as you can go and then lower than the step.  Keep going until you feel the burn.  Do a couple more into the burn but no more as you'll end up needing anti-inflamatories from the docs!

Good for muscular strength and endurance in your calves and good for core stability and balance.

If you get into the habit of doing these whenever you get a minute spare, you need never go to the gym!  The latest research suggests that short, sharp bursts of exercise, like this, are potentially more beneficial than longer bursts.  And definitely more what paleo man would have been doing in his hunting and gathering lifestyle.

If you look at animals in their natural environment this is the kind of thing they do: lots of long, slow movement with quick bursts of intensity.  If you try to get warm and out of breath, this is a great indication that you have raised your heart rate, which is vital for maintaining or improving cardio-vascular health.

Let me know how you go!

Krish x

The Power of a Press Up

Recently, I won a press up competition at my gym.  95 in 4 minutes.  I'd got a bit sluggish after xmas and this was a great way to kick me back into gear and so since then, I've been really pushing my arms and doing a lot more pull ups, chin ups, shoulder raises, shoulder presses etc. than I normally do.  Within a week, I was noticing a difference in my shoulders.

And then couple of weeks ago, my elbow became uncomfortable - I can't quite call it painful as I've given birth three times, ha ha ha but it wasn't nice and it felt like worse was to come.

I'm really lucky at my new gym to have PTs there who are extremely helpful, friendly and approachable and one of them told me I had tendonitis.  He said to rest it completely for two weeks, ice it several times a day and take ibuprofen.  He said it was probably pull ups that did it.

I also went to see the doctor as the thought of not training for two weeks kind of freaked me out!  My doctor said pretty much the same thing but said I didn't need to rest for as long.

Impatient as I am, I stopped the pull ups but continued with deadlifts and all my other leg work and still did shoulder presses as I couldn't bear to stop completely.  Silly, I know.  It started to get better, so I added in some rows and it stopped getting better.  Doh.

I carried on with the ice and the ibuprofen.  And then I decided to have a move around and clear out in my garage gym.

That was foolish.  My arm was proper painful.  Lifting a cushion hurt.

I felt stupid and cross and pissed off!

Then my husband remembered what his physio had told him when he had the same thing - compression exercises!

Press ups.  Do press ups, he said.

So the next day, with a really painful elbow, I did 200 press ups over the course of the day in sets of 10 or so, so as not to push it too much.

By the evening, the pain had gone.  Completely.

The next day I did 350 and today I did another 350.

I'd say my elbow is pretty much completely better.  I'm still going to take it easy but not only is it good to feel it better but it's good to know there are still exercises I can do with tendonitis.

And you don't get much better than a press up!  I can do 102 in 4 minutes now.  

I'm keeping going.

My January health and fitness column from Magnet Magazine.

Since the 70s, the elastification of waistbands has increased in direct correlation with a greater consumption of low-fat, high sugar products! 

So, while cutting down on fat doesn’t appear to be bad advice - fat is highly calorific - it is actually the last thing you want to do in order to successfully lose weight! 

Fat not only makes food taste and smell good, it also makes you feel full!  (I’m talking natural fats, not man-made trans fats – generally, fat that’s mixed with flour is BAD!)  A full-fat, Greek yoghurt, for example, will leave you feeling satisfied in a way that the low-fat alternative will not. 

Here’s why: the low-fat version is crammed full of sugar!  When sugar floods the blood stream, it is mopped up by insulin.  The sugar (blood glucose) is stored in muscles and the liver (the greater your percentage of muscle mass, the greater your potential for storing glucose before it is turned to fat, which is why working out raises your metabolism) and any remaining is converted to fatty acids and stored in fat cells.  However, after high-sugar, low-fat food, insulin can leave you with a blood glucose deficit - a sugar crash – so you search for more calories elsewhere. This results in still more blood glucose in your already full system so it gets converted straight to fat! 

If you seriously want to lose the elasticated trousers, ditch the low-fat products, and cut your sugar intake instead! 

My Health and Fitness column for February's Magnet Magazine

Most diets fail because they are unsustainable, with lists of unrealistic rules and strict limitations that are too complex to stick to or by just being downright unhealthy!

One of the main reasons people find diets hard to stick to is feeling hungry. 

Rather than breakfast, many people instead begin their day with strong willpower and good intentions, not eating until lunchtime, congratulating themselves on sticking to a couple of crackers and some celery, foregoing any further snacks until mid afternoon when they finally cave and devour anything and everything in sight!  Eventually their fuel-starved brain wins and they seek the calories they’ve missed all day.  Sound familiar?

The best way to avoid this is to eat well and eat early.  Start every day with a good breakfast – avoiding, of course, sugary choices.  Then make sure you have a snack between breakfast and lunch of fruit or vegetables or seeds or nuts, try to include protein with your snack as well (meat, fish, eggs, cottage cheese and Greek yoghurt are great sources).  After lunch, which should include vegetables or salad as well as protein and healthy fat (think avocados, olive oil, nuts, full fat Greek yoghurt etc.) you need to make sure you have at least one more snack before dinner – again avoiding processed foods and refined sugar.

If you keep yourself regularly well-fuelled and healthily nourished like this all day, you will find the urge to raid the kitchen cupboards and snack all evening disappears!  So ditch the diets and eat your way to sensible weight loss!

For more tips on healthy breakfasts and sugar-free baking, have a look at the paleo recipe page.

Motivation is everywhere.

You can find inspiration everywhere. Husband is singing. I am telling him how much my squats have improved from upping my core strength. He sings me a motivational song.

Find a picture of Christmas Abbott. Stick it on fridge as reminder of how to trim last bit of body fat. Get a tweet from Christmas Abbot. Smile.

Job done.

 

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