Ready to Get Your Beach Body Back?

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

You may not have started the official count down to summer yet but believe me, it's not all that far away! Why not start planning for a healthy and fit summer right now?

Join our next challenge group
beginning on March 7
and let's all support each other as we work our winter butts off and get our beach bodies back!

This challenge is round 1 of a 2 part SUPER GROUP where you will receive accountability and support to make sure you stay on track with your goals and get you beach body back in plenty of time for summer! Everyone who enrolls in this challenge will also be invited to join the next session at no additional cost.
That's 16 weeks of online fitness and fun for a one-time fee. This challenge will not be easy but it will be worth it.

Not sure if you have the time? You just need 1/2 hour a day - every day. I'm a busy working mom like many of you, and I know how hard it is to make your own health and fitness a priority. But believe me, it's possible and it's important. You can take much better care of you family if you start with yourself.

This challenge group is where the magic happens! We're here to help simplify your busy life. You'll get simple 30 minute workouts, easy meal planning and tons of support. And the best part is that you can do it at home and at your own pace. All you have to do is follow the step-by-step process for 21 days and you will begin to see results.
Membership in this group includes:
• A complete home workout kit with DVDs
• Quick 30 minute workouts anyone can do at home
• 1 month of Shakeology, a super nutritious smoothie perfect for busy moms on-the-go!
• A 30 day customized meal plan with recipes the whole family will love!
• Accountability to help you stay committed and finish the program
• Your very own personal health & fitness coach 24/7
• Access to my private, VIP lifetime support group
• A free T-shirt when you finish and send in your results
• A 30-day money back guarantee so you have nothing to lose!

Let's Get our Beach Bodies Back… together! Joining this group is easy. Start by filling out the form below to tell me a little more about yourself:

Want to learn more about a challenge group?

Want to learn more about Shakeology?

Got some questions for me? email me: brendalajay@gmail.com

Ready to give a challenge group a try and get your beach body back?


Online contact and registration forms from Wufoo.

Brenda

Ginger Soy Flank Steak

Ginger Soy Flank Steak, quick and easy and full of flavor!
Steak night always feels like a special occasion, even when you use a simple recipe like this one. Flavors of ginger, garlic, soy sauce, and honey combine to create an umami sauce that takes lean flank steak to another level of delicious. The marinade takes minutes to make, and about an hour to fully flavor and tenderize the meat, but if you’re in a hurry, you can cook the steak after just 30 minutes.


Ingredients:

2-inch slice fresh ginger, peeled, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 Tbsp. crushed red pepper
2 Tbsp. fresh lime juice
1 Tbsp. raw honey
¼ cup reduced-sodium soy sauce
1 tsp. sesame seed oil
1½ lbs. flank steak (or tenderized round steak)

Preparation:

1. Combine ginger, garlic, red pepper, lime juice, honey, soy sauce, and oil in a small bowl; whisk to blend.
2. Place steak in a shallow dish. Pour ginger mixture over steak; marinate, covered, turning once, for 1 hour in the refrigerator.
3. Preheat grill or broiler on high.
4. Grill or broil steak for 5 to 8 minutes on each side, or until the internal temperature reaches desired temperature on your meat thermometer (rare is 120° F., medium rare is 125° F., medium is 130° F.). Remove from heat; let steak rest, covered with aluminum foil, for 5 to 10 minutes before slicing.
5. Slice steak thinly against the grain.

Brenda

Ready to join a challenge group? Let's get beach ready together!

Join on online fitness & nutrition challenge group and let's get beach ready together!

Signing up is easy...Start by filling out this form


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Chicken Gumbo

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

This Cajun-style stew used chicken breast instead of sausage. It's thickened with arrowroot instead of flour so it's gluten free too.
This Cajun-style stew uses lean chicken breast meat in place of high-fat sausage, and is thickened with arrowroot instead of butter and flour. Aromatic spices combine in a luxuriously rich sauce with okra and other vegetables. If fresh okra is not available in your local market, frozen okra will work just as well.

Ingredients:

1 Tbsp. olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 medium carrots, coarsely chopped
1 medium celery stalk, chopped
1 medium green bell pepper, chopped
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1½ lbs. raw chicken breast, boneless, skinless, cut into 1-inch strips
2 Tbsp. arrowroot (or corn starch)
3 cups low-sodium organic chicken broth
1 bay leaf
½ tsp. dried thyme
½ tsp. ground black pepper
2 tsp. hot pepper sauce (like Tabasco)
8 oz. medium okra, sliced into ½-inch pieces (about 1 cup)
2 cups cooked brown rice

Preparation:

1. Heat oil in large saucepan over medium-high heat.
2. Add onion, carrots, celery, and bell pepper; cook, stirring frequently, for 5 to 6 minutes, or until onion softens.
3. Add garlic and chicken; cook, stirring frequently, for 4 to 5 minutes. Set aside.
4. Add arrowroot to broth; whisk to blend.
5. Slowly whisk broth into chicken mixture; cook, stirring constantly, for 2 minutes, or until mixture thickens slightly. The mixture should not be lumpy.
6. Add bay leaf, thyme, pepper, and hot sauce. Bring to a boil, stirring frequently. Reduce heat to medium; cook for 10 to 15 minutes.
7. Add okra; cook, stirring frequently, for 10 to 15 additional minutes. Remove bay leaf.
8. Serve about ¾ cup over ½ cup of rice.


Tired of yoyo dieting? 

Why not try an online fitness and nutrition challenge group? It's a great way to jump start your health and fitness journey and stay on track with your goals. Our online private support system is there to keep you motivated and to make sure you get results - lasting results!

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Brenda

10 Reasons to Give Up Soda

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Are you addicted to soda? Learn how to kick the can and eliminate excess sugar, calories and toxic substances form your diet. Eat clean and stop drinking soda to fight disease and aging.
by Steve Edwards
If you’re looking for a scapegoat in the obesity epidemic, look no further than soda. It’s the single greatest caloric source in the world, accounting for somewhere between 11 and 19 percent of all the calories consumed worldwide. It’s cheap, addictive, and readily available, which generally means that it will take some willpower to avoid. But don’t despair. Are you addicted to soda? Here are 10 good reasons to kick the habit today.

10. Soda may cause cancer
According to a report in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, consuming two or more soft drinks per week increased the risk of developing pancreatic cancer by nearly twofold compared to individuals who did not consume soft drinks. As reported, the study “followed 60,524 men and women in the Singapore Chinese Health Study for 14 years. During that time, there were 140 pancreatic cancer cases. Those who consumed two or more soft drinks per week (averaging five per week) had an 87 percent increased risk compared with individuals who did not.”

Then why, you’re probably asking yourself, is this number 10 on our list and why is soda even still on the shelf? Not that I’d challenge the ability of such large corporate power to hide such a thing but, in this case, the study slit its own throat. As one of the researchers noted, “soft drink consumption in Singapore was associated with several other adverse health behaviors such as smoking and red meat intake, which we can’t accurately control for,” meaning that we have no way of knowing, for sure, if soda was the culprit. Still, it doesn’t hurt to know that when you drink soda it lumps you into a fairly unhealthy user group.

9. Diet soda can also increase your risk of gaining weight
Calories grab headlines, but recent science is showing that diet soda users are still in the crosshairs. A 2005 study by the University of Texas Health Science Center showed that there’s a 41 percent increased risk of being obese — and a 65 percent increased risk of becoming overweight during the next 7 or 8 years — for every can of diet soda a person consumes in a day. Admittedly, this one should be higher on the list, but I wanted to make sure the article-skimming crowd knew the score up front: that diet sodas are very much a part of the problem.

8. It’s the water…and a lot more
That was a beer slogan, but soda is also made up mainly of water, and when you’re slinging as much of it as they are, and you need to sling it cheap, sometimes you can’t help but run into problems with your supply chain. In India, Coca-Cola found itself in hot water, and not the kind they thought they were purchasing rights to. Two of their factories have been closed, but one bottling plant continued to run amok for years and had been the center of numerous protests. According to a report in The Ecologist published in 2009, “They accuse the company of over-extracting groundwater, lowering the water tables and leaving farmers and the local community unable to dig deep enough to get to vital water supplies. Since the bottling plant was opened in 2000, water levels in the area have dropped six metres, and when a severe drought hit the region earlier this year the crops failed and livelihoods were destroyed.” In 2014, Indian officials ordered the plant to close.

7. BPA: Not just for water bottles anymore
Nalgene and other water bottle companies took the heat when the dangers of bisphenol A (BPA) were made public a couple years back. While these companies went to great lengths to make changes and save their businesses, the soda companies somehow flew under the radar and continue to use it in their products. A recent Canadian study has found that BPA exists “in the vast majority” of the soft drinks tested.

Most of these were under the national limits set for toxicity, but some were not. And remember how much soda the average person consumes, meaning odds are most soda consumers are at some risk. “Out of 72 drinks tested, 69 were found to contain BPA at levels below what Health Canada says is the safe upper limit. However, studies in peer-reviewed science journals have indicated that even at very low doses, BPA can increase breast and ovarian cancer cell growth and the growth of some prostate cancer cells in animals.”

6. Waste of energy
As in the 1950s colloquial: can it. Speaking of the 1950s, those were the happy days when most of our soda was consumed at soda fountains, obesity was a term hardly anyone had heard of, and the most feared epidemic was one of atomically-mutated insects taking over the world. Now, instead of hoofing it down to the corner confectionery for one soda, we fill out trucks with pallets of shrink-wrapped cans or bottles and quaff the stuff by the six-pack. Not to mention how out of balance this ensures our diets will become, it wreaks havoc on the world around us. According to a peer-reviewed report published in Environmental Research Letters, the bottled-water industry (which is mostly owned by the soda industry) uses the energy equivalent of between 32 and 54 million barrels of oil a year, and the aluminum industry uses as much electricity as the entire continent of Africa. Not only that, aluminum mining accounts for a ton of toxic chemicals that are left behind for every ton of the metal produced.

5. Its Frankenfood factor
Whether you consume diet or regular soda, you’re getting all of the genetically modified food you need and more, via high fructose corn syrup or aspartame. Both of these are under plenty of scientific as well as anecdotal scrutiny. Findings aren’t pretty but, so far, this multibillion-dollar industry has kept these sweeteners on the shelves while alternative sweeteners meeting cost requirements are explored.

Since it’s almost impossible to read health headlines without finding one of these ingredients in some type of controversy, here’s one example: “The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition and food safety advocacy group, called on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to review the claims, which stem from research conducted by the European Ramazzini Foundation in Italy. The foundation reported that rats who consumed aspartame in exceedingly large quantities were more likely to develop cancer. CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson considers this an important finding that should not be overlooked.” I know, there I go again with the cancer. But some people need to be shocked in order to take action. For me, seeing the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment was all I needed to swear off the stuff.

4. Diet is just a slogan when it comes to soda
A study at Boston University’s School of Medicine linked diet soda with increased risk factors for heart disease and diabetes. To be more specific, the study “found adults who drink one or more sodas a day had about a 50 percent higher risk of metabolic syndrome,” which is a cluster of risk factors such as excessive fat around the waist, low levels of “good” cholesterol, high blood pressure, and other symptoms that lead to heart disease and/or diabetes. And, for those of you only concerned about how you look in the mirror, “Those who drank one or more soft drinks a day had a 31 percent greater risk of becoming obese.”

3. Soda led to 75,000 cases of diabetes
A study out of the University of California, San Francisco, shows that soda has killed at least 6,000 Americans between 2000 and 2010. ABC News reported on the findings, saying “Using a computer model and data from the Framingham Heart Study, the Nurses Health Study and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, researchers estimated that the escalating consumption between 1990 and 2000 of soda and sugar-sweetened beverages, which they abbreviated as ‘SSBs,’ led to 75,000 new cases of diabetes and 14,000 new cases of coronary heart disease. What’s more, the burden of the diseases translated into a $300 million to $550 million increase in health care costs between 2000 and 2010.”

2. Soda Might Shorten Your Life Span
A handful of lifestyle studies have shown that those who consume soda have shorter lifespans. This takes into account too many factors to point a finger straight at soda, but two recent findings make this seem more than coincidence. In 2014, researchers at The University of California at San Francisco published a finding reporting that frequent soda drinking shortens the length of telomeres within white blood cells. Telomeres are a predictor of human lifespan. In 2010, a study showed that the high levels of phosphorus in darker sodas shortened mice lifespans by about a quarter.


1. It’s the “real thing”…not exactly
There’s nothing in soda that we need. In fact, there’s nothing in soda that comes from the earth except caffeine, and that’s optional. It’s a mixture of altered water (injected with carbon dioxide gas), artificial flavors, artificial color, and phosphoric acid, along with its sole caloric source that is a by-product of genetically modified corn production and offers virtually no nutritional value. It’s about as real as The Thing.

Brenda