Fruits and Vegetables and Juice Plus+

So I've always been a believer in getting proper nutrition from whole foods instead of supplements. This is mainly because in whole foods there are many nutrients that work synergistically together and often if you isolate certain compounds they're no longer something the body recognizes. Research is piling up in favor of whole foods versus supplements and new recommendations are being made to accommodate for what we're learning. Mainly this means we're being asked to eat many more whole fruits and vegetables in our diet and it's being proven over and over again that doing so will improve your health in every single way.

Current recommendations are that you should eat about 7-13 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. What does a serving of fruit or vegetable look like? You can check out this link:
http://www.fruitsandveggiesmatter.gov/
to calculate your needs and see what that actually translates to or use the following guidelines:

Fruits

• one banana
• six strawberries
• two plums
• fifteen grapes
• one apple
• one peach
• one-half cup of orange or other fruit juice

Vegetables

• five broccoli florets
• ten baby carrots
• one Roma tomato
• 3/4 cup tomato juice
• 3/4 cup vegetable juice
• half of a baked sweet potato
• one ear of corn
• four slices of an onion

For many people though this is a huge challenge, not only dietarily but monetarily. Seventeen years ago a product was developed that helps us meet the challenge, called Juice Plus. Juice Plus is so revolutionary because it is a whole food supplement, not a vitamin or mineral supplement. Juice Plus is 25 fruits, vegetables, and grains (gluten free) that have been dehyrdated down to the very essence of each fruit and vegetable, powdered, portioned out, and put into capsules, gummies, or a complete nutrition powder. So minus much of the fiber, water, and sugars, you are getting portions of 25 synergistic foods that provide your body with a host of phytonutrients that help your body achieve and maintain an optimal state.

What does this mean for you if you take Juice Plus? Well, for about $1.50 a day you can:
-Slow the aging process
-Prevent damage to your DNA
-Enhance your immune system
-Promotes cardiovascular health
-Promotes healthy skin and gums
-Improves circulation
-Reduces inflammation in the body, the origin of most diseases
-So much more!

Many people report never, if rarely, becoming sick after taking Juice Plus for several months, improvements in chronic disesases (asthma, seizures, ADHD, etc), and feeling better than ever among so many other improvements.

Please, do yourself and your family a favor and go to the Juice Plus website: www.CWyzikJuicePlus.com to view the research behind this amazing line of products and consider what it could do for you and those you love. 

Juice Plus will allow you to sponsor a child, age 4-college aged FREE for three years with purchase of a regular order.  Children who take Juice Plus generally become more health conscious, do better in school, have fewer health issues, and perform better in every way.  There are many very compelling studies comparing the use of Juice Plus during pregnancy as opposed to a prenatal vitamin.

For a wellness presentation on Juice Plus, click HERE

For information on Juice Plus and pregnancy, click HERE and HERE

Please contact me if you are interested in purchasing Juice Plus. I use it for myself and son faithfully and believe 100% in the products and as a result, have become a Juice Plus distributor so I can bring it to you.

Live life plus!
Cassandra Wyzik
B.S. - ACSM Certified Personal Trainer
Juice Plus+ Distributor
www.FitToYouBrevard.com

Bingo!

I was doing research for my Fit Kids class (as usual lately) and came across a cool idea not only for that, but for anyone looking for a fun way to motivate themselves into being healthier: Fitness bingo!

In the class I'll simply assign different boxes a different exercise and select the number/letter combinations at random while the kids complete the exercises trying to get a bingo. I found out that the YMCA did this for adults last year for a variety of health promoting activities and provided prizes for bingos or for blackouts (all boxes filled in). You can find the YMCA bingo card HERE.

I thought I'd share this with the rest of you guys as yet another fun tool to help keep the motivation alive! You could make your own bingo card if you want and alot prizes to yourself for achieving all the B column goals and so forth. A little creativity can go a long way in staying motivated!

Enjoy!
Cassanda Wyzik
ACSM Certified Personal Trainer
Satellite Beach, Brevard County, FL
www.FitToYouBrevard.com

Form Follows Function

I understand the urge to look a certain way and lose weight and I also understand how frustrating it can be to not be where you want to be. The frustration and stress generated by a negative focus ("I'm not where I want to be") don't help your progress and can serve to sabotage your efforts. That's why I'm going to ask you to stop worrying about it and shift your focus to something  more positive. By improving the areas of health and skill related fitness (cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, power, speed, agility, flexibility, reaction time, balance), this is the function part of our equation, then the form, the where you want to be, will follow!

If you concentrate on getting stronger, faster, more flexible, etc than you are now, you will lose weight, feel wonderful, have fun, and you'll get where you want to be. Constantly focusing on how you're not there yet will lead to you never getting there at all. It's frustrating for me to see how some people literally only care about the aesthetics of their body and not with how functional or healthy it is (or isn't). You can be as skinny and hot as you want, but a heart attack will kill you just the same. You can be as skinny and hot as you want, but when it comes time to move your furniture around and there's no one to help you it will do you absolutely no good. Osteoporosis doesn't care if you're aesthetically pleasing, nor does cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, the list goes on.

Please think about what being active and eating a healthy diet do for your living longer, living healthier, living happier, being more functional, and warding off diseases instead of what size jeans you think will make you perfect (even if you have to cram into them dammit!). Form will follow function.

Being fit and healthy will do more for you than you ever imagined. Have you ever been in a car accident? Were you hurt? If so, would you give anything to not be hurt? You may know that in March 2011 I was in a very serious car accident. I was stopped in a line of traffic in my Honda Civic and got rear ended at about 40 miles per hour by an International truck into another International truck. Everyone who saw the wreckage assumed I was dead because no one could have survived it. Including the guy at the impound lot when I went to get my stuff out my car the next day. Yes, I walked in there the next day to get my stuff out of my car after that. I was sore for a couple weeks, but I walked away from this:



 with whiplash that subsided within a couple weeks and a minor bulging disc in my lumbar. That's it. If you know anything about these kinds of accidents, if you do survive them you generally have major back injuries, shoulder injuries, hand injuries, brain injuries, and who knows what else.  I basically walked away unharmed. Why? My doctors and myself credit my muscular strength and flexibility. I saw the truck about to hit me the moment before it happened and covered my head with my arms and tensed my entire body to it's limit (involuntarily, believe me). My muscles were strong enough that they shielded every joint in my body. My flexibility level allowed my muscles, tendons, and ligaments to stretch with the forces of the impact to keep them from tearing.

The functionality of my body saved my life and gave me the ability to get through that accident without putting me in a wheel chair for the rest of my life (or worse). Personally I only focus on function and I think form has followed quite well, but it wasn't my size 3 (or whatever) pants that saved me that day. Something to think about.

Live well and the rest will follow,
Cassandra Wyzik
ACSM Certified Personal Trainer
Satellite Beach, Brevard County
www.FitToYouBrevard.com

More Ovaltine Please!

Ok, so I don't generally endorse supplementation because it's much better to get all your nutrients from whole foods (track your diet with My Fitness Pal and you'll know you're always on target!), but if you have a child like mine who doesn't eat much (and certainly not always the right things) then sometimes you don't have much of an option.

Enter Ovaltine. There's a bunch of vitamins and minerals in it with very few calories and it's CHOCOLATE! I put it in a cup full of whole milk for my son and let him go at it, he loves it. Sometimes I put it in coffee for myself and holy moly is it good.

Check out the nutrient breakdown:

So there's not exactly your whole daily requirement of anything in here, but I think that's also a plus. You don't want to get TOO much of any one thing and this is pretty balanced and again, very few calories. If you have a chocolate monkey on your back, this could be your saving grace!

Enjoy!

Cassandra Wyzik

www.FitToYouBrevard.com

Insulin

Oy, it's been a minute since I blogged. I'm going to try to make up for lost time today and do a blogging spree! First order of the day is to discuss the roll insulin plays in our body and how it pertains to weight loss and gain.

I really don't think I can sum it up better than this article, so I'm going to copy and paste here:

Insulin and Weight Loss

• The master weight loss hormone is insulin
• Insulin removes sugar from your blood
• Insulin resistance occurs when your cells don't use insulin properly

EVERTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT INSULIN AND WEIGHT LOSS
The master weight loss hormone is insulin. Master insulin control and you will master your weight. Understand how insulin works and you will understand all the keys to weight loss
What Insulin Does

• Lowers blood sugar

• Stores energy in the liver as glycogen

• Moves sugar (glucose) from the blood to the cells

Think of insulin as a traffic light. Insulin basically functions as a signalling molecule. Special enzyme receptors made from tyrosine are embedded in the cell membrane. These receptors are activated when insulin is present in your blood. The action of insulin on these tyrosine enzyme receptors signals a "green light" to move sugar from your blood into the cells where it can be converted to energy.
When insulin is not present this acts as a "red light". Sugar does not move from the blood to your cells without a signal from insulin.


The actual work of transporting sugar into the cells is reserved for special proteins in the cell wall called Glut 4 proteins, but without the signal from insulin on specialized receptors, these proteins can't do their work.


The Problem of Insulin Resistance

1. Too much insulin damages cells

2. Insulin resistance makes you fat

3. insulin resistance has a snowball effect on your weight

Continuing on with the traffic light analogy, if you were color blind and could not tell red from green, you would not know when to move from a stop light. This is a very loose analogy, but it helps us to understand how insulin resistance works. When the tyrosine receptors in the cell wall stop responding to the signal given from the presence of insulin, the become 'resistant' to insulin.
How insulin Resistance Damages Cells
The problem with insulin resistance is that when cells become resistant to insulin, your body starts to make more and more insulin to solve the problem. This makes the problem of insulin resistance worse. Your body has a special class of proteins, called Heat Shock Proteins. Heat Shock Proteins serve to reduce inflammation brought on by overheating. Insulin resistance disrupts the action of heat shock proteins, which leads to damage to cells. Additionally, too much insulin damages the delicate balance cells require to function. For example, insulin acts as an important signal for calcium and magnesium influx into the cell. This becomes compromised by insulin resistance.
How insulin Resistance Makes You Fat

When your cells become insulin resistant, your body has no choice but to store the sugar in your blood as fat. When you eat foods that quickly raise blood sugar, or require a lot of insulin such as a lot of processed carbohydrates at once (like a glass of orange juice) the excess blood sugar gets stored as fat.

How insulin Resistance Promotes belly fat
The key thing to understand about insulin resistance is that it affects different types of cells differently. What this means is that insulin resistance can often be localized to certain areas and types of cells!
Fat cells in the midsection are often a prime culprit with insulin resistance. These cells become damaged. New research shows these cells suffer from hypoxia (lack of oxygen) resulting from inflammation and restricted blood flow. The fat cells in this region become insulin resistant and tend to store fat more readily. People who struggle with belly fat in reality struggle with damaged fat cells in the stomach region.

END ARTICLE

Right so what this all means, if you were having any trouble, is that when you eat something with lots of sugar in it, it causes a spike in insulin levels in your blood to remove it from your blood stream. When this happens too often or lots more sugar is ingested than can be removed from your blood stream by insulin, you store it as fat, usually belly fat. It can also lead to insulin resistance which, as stated above, has a cascading effect and makes everything worse and worse.

What can we do? Stick to slow digesting carbohydrates, ones that digest  more slowly and do not cause such spikes in your insulin levels. Stay away from simple carbs that spike your insulin levels over and over and over again. Here is a list to help you out!
SLOW DIGESTING CARBS

• Oatmeal - I have oatmeal (high fiber) for breakfast every morning. Love it with some fruit in it.
• Steel Cut Oats
• Fruit - All fruits are great but some are better than others for different reasons. Blueberries are at the top of the list for antioxidants and bananas are great for post-workout carbs. The majority of them digest faster than complex carbs so they are best used in the AM or pre and post workout.
• Vegetables - You really can't go wrong when you eat veggies. Veggies are a great source of fiber. Try to have some in every meal.
• Sweet Potatoes/Yams (without gobs of brown sugar on them!)
• Brown Rice
• White Rice - Faster digesting carb, not as good as brown rice.
• Whole Wheat Bread
• Seeds/Nuts (just don't go too crazy with these as they are high in calories, but VERY healthy!)

FAST DIGESTING CARBS

Cereal - Most cereals are loaded with sugar. Oatmeal is a much better option.

Candy

Chips

Ice Cream

Soda

Most Juices (read your labels!)

High Fructose Corn Syrup (eek! do not eat!)

Until next time!
Cassandra Wyzik
ACSM Certified Personal Trainer
www.FitToYouBrevard.com

23 1/2 hours

Amazing video! Do yourself a favor and watch it!



He has an amazing point. I know it doesn't usually feel like there is enough time in the day, but that's when we need to step back, plan, prioritize, and consider the message from this comic:





It seems to me like some of the things we do with the 16 or so hours we're awake every day do not serve to improve our lives. Stress, worrying over money, dealing with drama, being stuck in a job you hate, whatever is dragging you down is actively shortening your life and reducing the quality of that life at the same time. It's important to pick battles and decide what is important enough to invest energy in and what is best left alone. As Dr. Evans says, exercise is the most important thing you could add to make a big difference in your life compared to your investment in it. It's like choosing to eat a Larabar over a doughnut. You're trading in something that hurts you for something that helps you. So instead of worrying about 1000 things you can't change, use that time to get some exercise and your stress with be reduced along with all the other benefits exercise gives you!

Current research is now suggesting that it isn't only a factor of how many hours per week you're exercising that affects your health, but also the amount of time you spend sitting. So of two people who exercise 5 hours a week, one sits the rest of the time and the other sits only 4 hours a day. We're learning that the person sitting less throughout the day, even though they both exercise the same amount of time, is much healthier. So see how many hours you can not be sitting today (or tomorrow, etc) and try to beat your record!

"Health is the greatest wealth"
Cassandra Wyzik
B.S. - ACSM Certified Personal Trainer
www.FitToYouBrevard.com

Photoshop

I think that so many of our self esteem issues come from the unrealistic image of what we're "supposed" to look like put forth by the media. Most of these women aren't as flawless as they appear and even the ones who are close have trainers, nutritionists, stylists, and all the money they need to buy any product available that will help them look the way they do. And they have nannies and mannies to take care of the kids so they can work out 3 hours a day and spend an hour with their makeup artist in the morning or whatever else they do to look they way they do. I mean, what mortal woman in the working world (god forbid with kids) can compete?

It's really just as bad for men too. The message to them is chiseled abs, perfect amount of facial hair just here and there, no body hair, etc is the male ideal. But the same holds true for the men of Hollywood et all as for the women. They get paid to look the way they do, do you? Do you have a nanny for your kids so you can go workout every day? Do you have housekeepers and a chef so you don't have to worry about lifting a finger? I highly doubt anyone reading this has said yes to any of the above, because IT'S NOT NORMAL! We get bombarded with the images of an elite few all day and are expected to keep up? Well screw that! I happened across this video today that I think is amazing:



I think the most important thing to note is that the women in the fake commercial before Photoshop look pretty normal, despite the nannies and chefs and trainers and whatever products they use to take the years off. So for all my fellow normal people out there, look in the mirror, love what you see, focus on being healthy above all else, be a good person, and the beauty happens all it's own!

There's a difference between being alive and living!
Cassandra Wyzik
B.S. - ACSM Certified Personal Trainer
www.FitToYouBrevard.com