Answer Fitness®: Practical Fitness Advice for Everyone

Cottage Cheese | Healthy Food of the Day from Answer Fitness®

Build Lean Mass Without the Fat and Calories with One of the Dairy Group’s Super Foods

It’s 9 pm and you’re getting the those evening snack cravings. You feel like breaking out the nacho chips, but your fitness sense tell you to find something healthy that will carry you through the rest of the evening.

What do you do?

You reach for the cottage cheese.

There’s a good reason that the refrigerators of healthy, fitness conscious-people usually have at least one container of lowfat cottage cheese. It’s one of the most filling “diet” foods you can eat, and it’s loaded with protein and calcium. It’s also extremely versatile, and can serve as a healthy cheese substitute in all kinds of recipes, from dips to enchiladas to lasagna.

But before we talk about all of the uses of cottage cheese, let’s take a look at what it is, how cottage cheese is made, and it’s nutritional profile.

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Wolfgang Puck All-Natural No-Stick Cooking Spray | Healthy Food of the Day

Love the flavor of butter, but not the saturated fat and calories that come along with it? Try these butter-flavored non-stick cooking sprays.

The next time you’re in the baking isle at the grocery store, check out Wolfgang Puck’s Butter-flavored All-Natural No-Stick Cooking Spray.

I always keep at least one can of this around (usually right on top of my range) for those times when I need to add a little butter flavor to a dish or need some healthy fat to make the perfect omelette or frittata.

Why butter-flavored canola oil?

First, canola oil contains heart-healthy Omega 3s, is high in healthy unsaturated fats (93 percent), is free of cholesterol and trans fat, and has the lowest saturated fat (7 percent) of any common cooking oil.

Also, because the oil is in a spray form, you tend to use less of it than when it’s liquid. So a 1/3 second spray (0.25 grams) of non-stick cooking oil, for all practical purposes, has zero calories and zero fat.

Obviously, the longer you spray it, the more calories you add, but even if you sprayed it for 6 seconds (which is quite a bit of time), you’d still only be adding around 46 calories and 4 grams of fat to your dish.

The oil also tastes great and contains natural butter flavor (no artificial flavorings which you may find in other “butter” flavored sprays), so it adds a nice richness to your food.

But you don’t need to limit your use of non-stick cooking sprays to coating your pan when making egg-white omelettes. There are dozens of other interesting uses, including:

• sauteing, stir frying and grilling (spray it right on steaks and salmon filets for a little butter flavor and GREAT grilll marks)
• basting and browning meats, poultry and fish
• use it as a finishing oil on veggies (spray it on just before serving.)
• toast, english muffins, whole-grain bagels and high-fiber muffins (give ‘em a quick spray for tasty butter flavor and add a sprinkling of sea or kosher salt to amp things up)
• eggs - a great finish to “canola” fried eggs
• Popcorn — my personal favorite.  Coat microwave or air-popped popped corn with a couple quick sprays of non-stick cooking spray and salt and pepper – or even better, a little seasoned salt. This makes amazing, tasty, and buttery,  popcorn without the usual fat and calories.

If your grocer doesn’t carry Wolfgang’s no-stick cooking spray, don’t fret. There are a number  of other natural non-stick cooking spray options, including, Mazola Pure Cooking Spray and  All-Natural PAM® Butter Flavored non-stick spray, as well as organic options like Spectrum Naturals Non-Stick Organic Olive Oil Spray.

So the next time your tempted to reach for the butter, consider instead reaching for the butter-flavored non-stick spray. Your waist-line will thank you … and so will your heart.

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The Skinny on Protein, Carbohydrates and Fats | Nutrition 101

The right combination of carbohydrates, protein and healthy fats is critical to reaching your diet and fitness goals. Learn how it all comes together on your plate.

You’ll often hear myself or fitness and nutrition experts discuss the importance of “balanced-meals” to people who are trying to stay fit and in-shape. But what is a balanced diet? And why is it so critical?

A balanced diet simply means that you provide your body with all of the basic nutrients that it needs to provide you with energy each day, as well as to repair and build tissue.

Even if you laid in bed all day, your body still requires around 1200 calories just to fuel basic functions like breathing, digestion, cellular repair and even thinking. The more active you, the more calories you need.

But calories alone are only part of the picture.

Your body also requires amino acids from protein and lipids from dietary fat to maintain, regenerate or repair tissue, whether that’s skeletal muscle, connective tissue, skin, or nervous tissue.

Protein, carbohydrates and fats are often referred to as “macro-nutrients” because your body needs large amounts of them to perform basic cellular functions.

“Micro-nutrients”, on the other hand, are things like vitamins and minerals, which your body uses in smaller amounts to maintain healthy, functioning cells, tissues and organs.

Let’s take a closer look at each macro-nutrient and the role it plays in remaining healthy and fit.
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