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10 Best Foods To Eat | Healthy Eating

What Are the 10 Best Food to Eat? These 10 Nutritional Powerhouses Should Be Part of Every One’s Healthy Eats

Cleaning up your diet and eating healthier is often just a matter of knowing where to start.

Unfortunately, many people think that a healthy diet is only about removing foods, not adding them in.

This list of the 10 Best Foods to Eat focuses on what you should be eating, not on what you shouldn’t eat. 

All of the foods below are nutritionally-dense and are loaded with either antioxidants, lean protein, fiber or  heart-healthy fats.  In some cases, they’ll have all four.

Even better, most of the foods on this list are low in calories compared to their volume, which means you’ll feel fuller and more satisfied after eating them. 

Remember, this list is intended as a starting point — there are tons of other healthy foods out there that could easily have been included.  Share your best healthy food choices with us in the comment section below.

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Chicken Tortilla Soup Recipe | Healthy Recipes and Snacks

This Easy Chicken Tortilla Soup Recipe Has All The Great Flavor of a Traditional Tortilla Soup While Still Managing To Be Good For You!

Mexican food doesn’t have a reputation as a “health food” — but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Take tortilla soup recipes, for example.

While many restaurant tortilla soups are loaded with fat and sodium, it’s possible to make a delicious, authentic tortilla soup recipe at home that will blow the pre-made stuff away and keep you lean and in shape (or help you get there, if you’re just starting out.)

This Chicken Tortilla Soup recipe uses all kinds of whole — but convenient — ingredients to make a bowl of soup that will trigger guilt-free seconds. And if you’re cooking for kids, this Chicken Tortilla Soup recipe will be a real hit, since it duplicates the fuller-fat versions of tortilla soup out there, without actually having all of the fat and sodium. No one will know the difference, trust me.

The best part is you can literally throw this Chicken Tortilla Soup recipe together in about 30 minutes — which makes it uber convenient for harried professionals, busy families who are pressed for time, but still want to eat healthy, and gym rats who want to get in their nightly protein after a great weight training session.

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Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) | Preventing & Treating DOMS

Muscle soreness after exercise can put a real kink in your training. Find out what DOMS is, how to prevent it and what you can do to ease delayed onset muscle soreness if you get it.

Nearly anyone who works out regularly has experienced sore muscles after exercise. Sometimes you’ll feel it later that night, or the next morning … and in some cases, you may actually think you’re out-of-the-woods, only to wake up two days later with stiff, tender muscles that feel as tight as rubber bands.

It’s known as Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (also called “DOMS”), and it’s both loved and reviled by exercise fanatics. Loved, because many people view DOMS as a sign that yesterday’s workout was effective, but hated at the same time because in severe cases, Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness can prevent you from comfortably hitting the gym again.

And in the case of calf muscle soreness — which plagues runners as often as weight lifters — it can literally make going down a flight stairs in the morning a three minute ordeal.

Symptoms of Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness

You probably have a case of Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness if you experience any of the following symptoms:

• Muscle tenderness
• Muscle soreness
• Stiffness
• Swelling
• Pain
• Loss of mobility or reduced range of motion
• Muscle tenderness, including when the muscle belly is pressed with the fingers
• Loss of strength
• Acute muscle twitches or spams

The extent and duration of these symptoms may vary from person-to-person and are largely dependent on the amount of resistance — especially eccentric resistance — placed on the muscles during exercise.

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How To Build A Healthy Pantry … For Busy People! | Healthy Eating

Think you’re just too busy to eat healthy? Use this list of five healthy pantry foods to make sure you always have the right ingredients on hand to eat smart — even when time is scarce.

By Talli van Sunder, DPT, Host of Being Healthy for Busy People 

We’re all busy, so making healthy choices with the many activities that stake claims to our time can be a challenge.

We’re told to exercise, get enough sleep, eat healthy and minimize stress. With all the responsibilities we have, attempting to do all that can be daunting, but it can be done.  The trick to conquering these key areas of health is to focus on one area at a time.  Right now, we’re going to focus on healthy eating — specifically, building a healthy “starter” pantry specifically for people who are busy because of family, career or both.

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Herbs and Spices: The Secret Spice To Clean Eating | Fitness Food

Learn how picking the right herbs and spices can make eating clean go from dull to delicious 

Healthy, whole foods get a bad rap when it comes to flavor.

“Eating clean” often gets associated with eating “bland” — especially among fitness buffs, bodybuilders and athletes who think that a good “training diet” consists of meal-after-repetitive-meal of oatmeal, boiled chicken breast, yams, steamed broccoli and green side salads with some kind of fat-free liquid on top that calls itself “dressing.”

The good news is that there is actually a simple solution to making clean eating not just tolerable, but enjoyable — and it’s as close as your grocer’s baking isle: Herbs and spices.

Herbs and Spices: The Key To Making Clean Eating Enjoyable

Any cook worth their salt knows that a recipe or dish isn’t complete until it’s been seasoned.

“Seasoning” could simply mean adding some salt and ground pepper, but more often than not, it includes the use of all kinds of other herbs or spices to either layer additional flavor on top of a food, enhance or complement an existing flavor, or provide a contrast.

While it’s pretty hard to screw up a dish or recipe by adding the wrong herb or spice, it does pay to know your seasonings ahead of time to avoid some funky combinations that might send that brown rice to your dog’s bowl, versus your plate.

Herbs and Spices: Not Just For Flavor, But Also Healthy 

Herbs and spices also have an additional role in healthy, clean eating beyond simply seasoning foods, recipes or dishes.

Nearly all herbs and spices have very high concentrations of healthy phytochemicals and antioxidants. Scientists believe that these naturally-occurring plant compounds work together in the body to protect tissues and cells from damage and may help prevent diseases like cancer and heart disease. 

When you combine herbs and spices with other antioxidant-rich foods like fruits and vegetables, their protective properties may be enhanced even more, similar to The Portfolio Diet approach to cholesterol-reduction observed by researchers like David Jenkins at the University of Toronto.

Just how much antioxidant punch do certain herbs and spice have? Plenty.  

In fact, oregano, that ubiquitous herb found in nearly every batch of pizza or spaghetti sauce is one of nature’s most concentrated sources of antioxidants, having four times more antioxidants than blueberries. Just one tablespoon of dried oregano has the antioxidant content of a large apple.

Herbs and spices can also have beneficial medicinal uses, in addition to simply making your food taste better.

For instance, ginger aids digestion and can calm nausea and even alleviate motion sickness. Fennel and juniper berries can help with fat digestion, and cinnamon has been shown to help reduce cholesterol and increase insulin sensitivity, helping people better digest sugar. It also may lessen the symptoms of certain inflammatory diseases like arthritis.

So herbs and spices don’t just make your food taste better, they’re good for you as well.

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Muesli Recipes: Make Your Own Homemade Muesli!

Muesli is an inexpensive and flavorful way to get your daily grains. Learn how to make homemade Muesli with these five easy recipes.

Okay, it has a funny sounding name. But if you are looking for a high-energy, whole-grain food that will also help you get your daily dose of healthy fats and soluble fiber, and fuel your training and workouts, you have to try a bowl of Muesli … or two bowls.

Store-bought Muesli can be expensive (a 1 lb, 18-serving bag, for instance, can cost nearly $5 dollars) so it really pays off to make it yourself. Also, making your own Muesli allows you to customize the recipe based on your own particular preferences. 

And making homemade muesli is also easier than making homemade granola, since you don’t have to bake the mixture in the oven. Basically, you take the Meusli recipe ingredients, toss them together in a bowl and bag it. That’s it. It’s really that simple.

But before we actually get to the Meusli recipes, let’s take a look at the history of this cereal, as well as the health benefits that make this a great fitness food.

The Muesli Story

Muesli (pronounced muse-lee) is a breakfast cereal that has been popular in Europe — especially Switzerland — for over 100 years. It’s made from raw, rolled whole grains like oats, barley, rye, triticale, and wheat and typically contains nuts and dried or fresh fruit.

Muesli was developed by the Swiss physician Maximilian Bircher-Benner around 1900 to serve to patients in his hospital in Zurich. The diet that Bircher-Benner prescribed to his patients was heavy on whole-grains and fresh fruits and vegetables, and Bircher-Benner came up with idea of Muesli after being served a similar dish during a hike in the Swiss Alps.

While popular in Switzerland and parts of Europe for decades, it wasn’t until the health food movement of the 1960s that this tasty and uber-nutritious cereal started to gain fans in the United States. Since then, Muesli has become much more widely available not only in health food stores, but also in mainstream markets and grocery stores.

In the late-80s, Kellogg even tried to cash-in on the healthy reputation of Muesli by developing a boxed, cold cereal version of muesli called Mueslix. Unfortunately, the cereal shared very little in common with the traditional Muesli recipe, and instead had more in common with Corn Flakes than with the whole-grain masterpiece from Switzerland. Kellogg still markets Mueslix in the US and Canada, although their version is a pale-imitation of the real deal.

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Three Bean Salad Recipe | Healthy Recipes and Snacks

This Italian version of the classic Three Bean Salad Recipe uses cannellini beans, kidney beans and garbanzo beans to make a high-protein, high-fiber and low-fat cold bean salad with an extra healthy twist.

3-Bean Salad is a staple of American potlucks and picnics. A breeze to assemble, portable and easy to make ahead and keep in the refrigerator for up to a week,  it makes a great cold side dish – especially in the warm summer months.

But did you know that Three Bean Salad is also a nutritional powerhouse?

Loaded with heart-healthy soluble fiber, complex carbohydrates, protein, and some healthy monounsaturated fats, Three Bean Salad is a fantastic whole-food source of energy and fiber — exactly what you need to fuel your workouts and stay lean and healthy.
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