Healthy Living India | HealthyLivingIndia.org

What Are Healthy Desserts and How Can You Make Them

Sasha Gusain — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 08:51:31 +0000

If, like me, you have a sweet tooth, but also don’t care to ingest nutrient-depleting sugar heavy desserts, then planning healthy desserts is the best solution. Let’s pause for a moment here and analyse what we really mean by the words ‘healthy desserts.’ Are they cakes that simply replace refined flour with whole wheat; what about the other sugar, butter, and oil content? Are they boring plates of chopped fruits? That would just set me up for failure the second I see a dessert trolley go by. No. A healthy dessert is not a half measure. Allow me to explain…

A healthy dessert is simply a manipulation of healthy ingredients that, together, satisfy cravings for regular desserts. It’s made with natural foods, involves low to no added sugar (and when it does, it’s through natural sweeteners). Healthy desserts also involve clever portion control. Which healthy dessert works for you, depends entirely on your taste preferences. By and large, the common dessert cravings are for:

Chocolate
Ice cream
Sugar (most Indian desserts are different variations of sugar infused natural foods like dairy, carrots, etc, and/or combinations with refined flour and oil.)
Cakes/muffins/cupcakes/cookies/cheesecakes
Nuts and dry fruits

If you’re trying to control your weight, which indirectly means that you are trying to avoid lifestyle diseases, then you must know that you will need to quit regular consumption of certain desserts. These will, typically, be cheesecakes, ice cream, and most Indian desserts.

So what are we left with…?

Here are some healthy dessert ideas that won’t sabotage your weight management plans:

Chopped banana served over an oatmeal and honey cookie. Topped with whipped yogurt, sliced almonds and walnuts. Sprinkled with cinnamon and a dash of honey or chocolate sauce or chocolate chips.
Blended frozen bananas with one spoon peanut butter. This mimics ice cream consistency surprisingly well. You can flavour it with blueberry, strawberry, honey, chocolate etc.
Sliced strawberries with a dash of chocolate sauce and some chopped nuts.
Blended mango with skimmed yogurt, topped with chopped nuts and honey.
Fruit sorbets. Easily made with seasonal fruits. If you don’t have an ice cream freezer, simply freeze for 2-3 hours, remove; whisk till smooth, then freeze for another 3-4 hours.
Oatmeal/almond meal muffins with natural sweeteners like honey and cinnamon. Be warned – these will always have at least 200 calories a piece. Anything less and the taste does get compromised.
A cube of dark chocolate. These aren’t as sinful as they’re made out to be. Simply budget it into your daily diet and eat without guilt.

To make the above desserts possible, make sure that you have the following ingredients at home – always:

Peanut butter
Chocolate sauce or Nutella (be strict about how big that ‘dash’ is)
Bananas
Seasonal fruits
Brown sugar
Powdered cinnamon
Honey
Dark chocolate (remember the one-cube-day thumbrule)
Almonds, walnuts, raisins
Quick cooking oats
Oatmeal cookies
Chocolate chips (again, be strict about how big that ‘sprinkle’ is)
Yogurt – Skimmed, flavoured (if you wish. Nowadays quite a few brands sell some perfectly great flavoured yogurts that are fortified with essential nutrients and aren’t too heavy on the wallet or calorie budget)

That’s the list of favourite daily desserts here in the HealthyLivingIndia kitchen. Remember that the ideal serving size is cubes (1-2), bowls (50-80gms) or quarter plates (cover only half the plate).

Have any healthy dessert ideas to share? Tell us about them!

Meanwhile, here are some of our favourites:
Almond and honey cookies
Oatmeal peanut butter cookies
Banana bread/cake

What Are Healthy Desserts and How Can You Make Them post of Healthy Living India | HealthyLivingIndia.org

Back to Basics: 10 Healthy Habits Our Parents Were Right About

Sasha Gusain — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 08:37:32 +0000

How many times were you told to clean your room as a child? How many times was a plate of carrots put in front of you with the stern warning – Eat this or you can’t play? How many times did your parents tell you to chew your food and eat properly? If you were paying attention as a kid and if you’re paying attention now, you’ll realise that all the habits you’re forming for a healthy lifestyle today, are the same habits your parents tried so hard to teach you as a kid. We begin with…

Wake up on time!

Remember how well the body clock functioned back in school? Think back to when your trysts with indigestion, insomnia, frequent flus and exhaustion began. Was it in college, when your wake up time slipped and slid into the I’ll-wake-up-when-I’m-hungry zone? Giving your body a definite wake up time each day works well for overall energy management and health.

Eat your breakfast!

The more nutritious, regular, well portioned your breakfast is, the healthier you will be. Eating an adequate breakfast that combines protein, fat, and carbs, ensures that you don’t fall prey to hunger pangs by noon, or worse still – early evening.

Go to sleep!

Late nights are tempting and affordable in your 20s, but as you slip into the 30s, you will crave more sleep during the day. Again, sleeping on time every day gives your body time to set up a clock that works well for overall health.

Eat your vegetables!

Include them in every meal. Remember those green leafy vegetables you hated as a child? You’ll learn to love them as you grow older.

Eat your fruits!

At least three servings of fruit a day are considered adequate for a healthy individual. And don’t substitute these with juice either. Especially not the kind that comes in packages. Eat the whole fruit, every time.

Don’t slouch!

Slouching gives you poor posture. Poor posture, in the long run, gives you backaches, neck aches, and all kinds of other joint problems. Slouching also affects digestion and poor internal health. Poor posture carries over to exercise, and leads to frequent workout injuries.

Clean your room!

Sounds like a stretch? Not when you evaluate how healthy it is to complement a great workout routine with overall physical activity. Even without the calorie burn, cleaning your room often, gives you more opportunity to get up from that infernal desk and do something other than type and tweet.

Chew your food properly!

The process of digestion begins with your mouth. Saliva helps break the food down and starts the process of drawing essential nutrients from the food. Chewing well aids better digestion.

Eat carrots!

Carrots are potent sources of carotene (metabolised into Vitamin A), antioxidants, minerals, and dietary fiber. Long before Greek yogurt and green tea became the mainstream flavour of health, carrots have been keeping generations healthy since time immemorial.

Do your homework!

Preparation is a tried and tested way to combat stress and anxiety. This holds true for any scenario. Do your homework for fitness – know what your body needs and do it. Do your homework for work – don’t build a backlog by wasting time. Do your homework for relationships – put in effort and avoid relationship troubles.

These and countless other good habits, passed down from one generation to the next, hold true for health and fitness as well. Do share if you think we missed any…

Back to Basics: 10 Healthy Habits Our Parents Were Right About post of Healthy Living India | HealthyLivingIndia.org

[Series] Cooking Guide for First Timers: What Is a Balanced Diet – Part One

Sasha Gusain — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:41:29 +0000

If you’ve never cooked a meal before, and if the word spatula sounds like a Greek warrior to you, then this is the series you’ve been waiting for – The Cooking Guide for First Timers; or as we like to call it – How Not to Burn Your Food and Eat Well.

Learning how to cook might not seem too difficult. Throw in some oil, chase with onions, add spices, meat, or cereal, or veggies, or bake, steam grill, etc, you get the drift. However, learning how to cook while being mindful about ‘healthy eating’ and how it supports your fitness requirements (read: Workouts and overall daily energy needs) is where the fun begins.

[pullquote]The word ‘diet’ is often misunderstood as a way of eating that is low calorie, low fat and low everything-you- love. This is false. A diet is simply your food intake. It can be healthy or unhealthy. This series will guide you in deciding what is a healthy diet and how best you can maintain it through healthy cooking.[/pullquote]

The human body needs three important macronutrients for daily functioning –

Carbohydrates: These are nothing but sugar chains that, upon consumption, energise you through the day. We’ll discuss carbs in detail in a later post in this series, but for now remember this: Short sugar chains equal simple carbs (good: fruits, bad: processed junk food), and long sugar chains equal complex carbs (vegetables, cereal, etc. All good).

Protein: Protein is what your body absolutely must have to build, grow, maintain, fight infections, repair, LIVE. Exercising without enough protein enzymes in your diet is like walking on the treadmill – you’re making all that effort, but you’re really never going to get anywhere. Again, we’ll get into the details of what makes protein so important, a little later, but for now remember this: If you don’t eat a protein-rich diet, you’re not getting any benefits from exercise.

Fats: High on energy, but also on calories, fats are what we need in controlled measure. Quite often, your cooking ingredients have fat content that more than makes up for daily fat requirements. Therefore, the more you control oil, butter, mayo, yolks in your diet, the better it is. In other words, think before you actively add fat in the diet. We’ll revisit fats when we talk about essential fatty acids later in the series, but remember this – the reason why we need to supplement our diet with omega 3 and 6 foods/supplements is because these are the only fats our bodies can’t produce. Therefore, they must come through diet.

Trans fats must be completely banned from your diet as enough evidence proves that they’re lethal to your health. Also, control your consumption of saturated fats, as beyond a certain limit, these are quite harmful as well.

These three macronutrients are essential to any diet – no matter which school of thought you follow for energy maintenance. To make a diet even healthier, you need certain micronutrients as well. These are the vitamins and minerals that make up the healthy foods you read about in healthy eating and best food articles. In What Is a Balanced Diet – Part Two, we will deal with the what, why and how of these vitamins and minerals. Till then, shoot down any opposition to your quest to eat and cook a healthy diet with these golden words – I might be a first time cook and first time fitness seeker, but I’m going to do it right.

[Series] Cooking Guide for First Timers: What Is a Balanced Diet – Part One post of Healthy Living India | HealthyLivingIndia.org

Do You Know What Weight Loss Means?

Prashant Rajkhowa — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 12:04:07 +0000

And in your head, you’ve said, “Of course I do. What kind of stupid question is that.” Well, the reason why the question “do you know what weight loss means” is inevitably answered incorrectly thanks largely to incorrect information and half truths meddled by the mainstream media and advertisers. What most people go wrong in the answer to “do you know what weight loss means” is that there is a difference between “weight” and “fat” and most people are talking about “fat loss” when they say “weight loss.” And now you’re thinking – semantics – absolutely. Write it off as semantics as long as you are clear on the difference. Because unless you are clear on the difference, your weight loss strategies will do more harm than good.

Fat is Only Part of the Weight

Your weighing scale will tell you the weight of your bones, your muscles and organs and your fat. When you want to lose weight, you actually want to lose fat. Losing muscle will lead to health problems and so will, obviously, losing bones and organs. Therefore, your strategies for weight loss should be those that cut down the fat.

Incorrect Weight Loss Information: If You Eat Less, the Numbers on the Weighing Scale Drops

What the world calls “dieting” actually leads to more fat gain. Your body needs certain nutrients to survive. If you cut out those nutrients, by cutting down on what you eat then your body goes into “emergency storage mode” and stores food – as fat. Therefore, every well-trained health practitioner will always tell you that if you want to live healthy, you have to eat – almost continuously. The difference is of course, you need to eat the right kind of food.

Correct Weight Loss Information: Smart Nutrition

Eliminate foods with no nutritional value – like aerated drinks, candies and chocolate, and processed foods like cakes and sweets. Replace them with fruits and vegetables and complete protein. What you are doing here then is eliminating any possibility of storing extra fat and getting your body into the habit of not needing to store food.

Correct Weight Loss: Get Your Body to Burn Fat

And there’s only one way to do that – a regular exercise programme that includes cardiovascular exercise and strength training to build muscle. The former ensures a large number of calories burned in a session and the latter, more crucially, gets your body to burn fat stores throughout the day – even when you are not exercising.

Correct Weight Loss: Your Clothes Not Your Weighing Scale

Healthy weight loss involves fat burn and muscle building. This gives your body a toned and lean look. And the results are immediate: You have more energy, you are more focused during the day and your clothes fit better. The reason you’ll realise that the weighing scale won’t matter is because you would have built lean muscle to replace the fat. So, if you’re on a weight loss programme or looking to lose weight, first ask yourself: Do you know what weight loss means?

Do You Know What Weight Loss Means? post of Healthy Living India | HealthyLivingIndia.org

Are All Simple Carbohydrates Bad?

Prashant Rajkhowa — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:14:42 +0000

If you asked the question: Are all simple carbohydrates bad then you are a victim of trying to simplify health and fitness advice too much. In other words, you have probably fallen victim to TV health shows and newspaper health sections that try to simplify everything to do with health and fitness into easy-to-remember nuggets of information. What would be more useful instead would be understand the different types of carbohydrates and then you will be able to judge for yourself, which are “bad” and which are “good.” This will ensure that you will answer the question: Are all simple carbohydrates bad by yourself. The result: You will remember the information rather than remember a nonsensical maxim.

What are Simple Carbohydrates

Simple carbohydrates are sugars that break down quickly and therefore rapidly increase the sugar level in your blood i.e. get absorbed quicker. In comparison, complex carbohydrates are sugars that take longer to break up and enter and get absorbed slowly. As a result, you stay fuller longer because it takes time for the food to be completely digested.

What are Sources of Simple Carbohydrates

This is where the core of the answer to the question, are all simple carbohydrates bad, lies. Sources of simple carbohydrates include fruits, honey, fruit juices, cakes, candies, aerated drinks and ready-to-eat cereals.

Now, would you consider an apple to be as nutritious as an aerated soft drink? Would you consider a banana to be as healthy and nutritious as a slice of gooey cake?

And there’s your answer to the question: Are all simple carbohydrates bad? The answer is no – it depends on the source. Naturally occurring sources like fruits are necessary for the body’s healthy functioning. They provide various nutrients that keep the body healthy. Sources that contain a lot of refined sugar i.e. processed foods like aerated drinks and cake spike your body’s sugar levels and yet have no nutritional value.

Eat Fruits Not Cakes

Your body needs fruits for its nutrients and fiber. The simple carbohydrates also make a good pre-workout snack. That is why bananas have become almost synonymous with pre-workout snacks. On the other hand, cakes will never ever get that branding. And there you have it: The answer to :Are all simple carbohydrates are bad lies in their source.

Are All Simple Carbohydrates Bad? post of Healthy Living India | HealthyLivingIndia.org

Healthy Snacks for the Office Day

Prashant Rajkhowa — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 10:11:15 +0000

Most office-going folk face the biggest staying healthy challenge because for an 8 hour chunk of the day, they rarely have easy access to healthy foods. Most office canteens don’t concern themselves with concepts like healthy cooking oils, limited salt content or even balanced meals and neither do delivery places catering to the office crowds. Therefore, packing and carrying healthy snacks for the office day is absolutely essential. Healthy snacks for the office day are not only the easiest way to cut out unhealthy snacks and empty calorie consumption but they are also the best way to stick to your diet, whether you’re looking to lose fat or stay fit.

When Packing and Carrying Healthy Snacks for the Office, Remember:

We’re talking about snacks as opposed to meals i.e. these are small portions to combat sudden hunger pangs and eliminate unhealthy snack temptations. They are particular useful if you follow the minimeal diet plan.
These are nutritious and keep you full longer even though they are not very large – making it convenient to pack and carry from home with you.
Portion control is important. Just because they are healthy doesn’t mean you eat 8 times as much either. All healthy snacks for the office should be portion controlled.

10 Healthy Snacks for the Office Day

1 ripe banana
1 grilled chicken patty – small
Flavoured yoghurt (natural flavours with no artificial sugars or preservatives)
Fruits – if apples, oranges, and pears – eat two
Fresh popped popcorn – most canteens have a popcorn machine.
2 small cubes of paneer
2 roasted chicken drumsticks
Almonds and walnuts
4-5 Marie biscuits
2 tablespoons of peanuts or 1 tbspn of peanut butter

All these healthy snacks for the office day are easy to pack in the morning, light enough to carry with you and will not spoil during the day. The biggest trick though is to ensure that you don’t carry them back home in the evening because you decided that a team pizza order sounds like a much better option.

Healthy Snacks for the Office Day post of Healthy Living India | HealthyLivingIndia.org