EstimatedEst. Read Time: 6 minutes

coconut water weight lossNew here?  Like Athlean-XX for Women on Facebook to stay up to date with new posts, great fitness and nutrition articles, motivations and inspirations, fitness challenges, Q&As, giveaways and more!

Celebrities are all about trends.  Along with each season’s fashion trends, celebs seem to switch up their go-to diet foods, too.  Sometimes it begins with a new piece of scientific research surfacing, or a celebrity guru trainer will start preaching the gospel of a new tropical berry or some other miracle weight loss superfood.  Athletes, on the other hand, are always looking for a performance edge.  At this year’s Olympics there were some new foods everyone seemed to be raving about.

Do these trends hold any nutritional weight?  The answer is….sometimes!  We’re all smart enough to figure out that it’s diet and exercise on the whole that make a difference and that no one food is a magical weight loss solution or miracle performance enhancer.  However, at the very least, changing trends in healthy foods keep things interesting!

Continue reading article →

EstimatedEst. Read Time: 6 minutes

clean eatingNew here?  Like Athlean-XX for Women on Facebook to stay up to date with new posts, great fitness and nutrition articles, motivations and inspirations, fitness challenges, Q&As, giveaways and more!

About a month ago I wrote an article about clean eating entitled “What’s It Really Mean to Eat Clean: The Celebrity Clean Eating Trend,”  to shed some light on this buzzword that so many celebrities, bloggers and health-focused women use to describe their eating habits.  As I continue to read articles where women talk about their ‘clean diets’ I’ve seen that there are many myths about clean eating.  Unfortunately these myths can turn what is really just a set of healthful eating guidelines into a restrictive diet of ‘can’t eat this, can’t eat that.’

Continue reading article →

EstimatedEst. Read Time: 6 minutes

overtraining too much exerciseNew here?  Like Athlean-XX for Women on Facebook to stay up to date with new posts, great fitness and nutrition articles, motivations and inspirations, fitness challenges, Q&As, giveaways and more!

Hey Gym Rats!  Spending long hours at the gym to achieve that weight loss goal or that fit, toned ‘celebrity’ body?  Have you always believed more is better when it comes to exercise?  Do you regularly do back to back cardio classes?  Or do you do heavy strength training AND high impact cardio every single day?  If any of these sound like you, you might be overtraining.  Overtraining can have counterproductive and dangerous consequences for our fitness goals and health.

While we all hear the advice that we need to take enough rest days, get enough sleep and get adequate nutrition for our energy expenditure, for many of us women, it may go in one ear and out the other.  Continue reading article →

EstimatedEst. Read Time: 4 minutes

New here?  Like Athlean-XX for Women on Facebook to stay up to date with new posts, great fitness and nutrition articles, motivations and inspirations, fitness challenges, Q&As, giveaways and more!

We all love protein and granola bars because they’re so convenient!  They can travel with you anywhere and give you the protein and carb boost you need pre or post workout or for any snack.  However, most of the grocery store brands contain more calories or sugar than we might wish.  Some also contain certain chemicals and additives that just don’t have a place in our healthy diet  In fact, a lot of protein and granola bars are more like candy bars than protein bars.

Continue reading article →

EstimatedEst. Read Time: 6 minutes

always hungryNew here?  Like Athlean-XX for Women on Facebook to stay up to date with new posts, great fitness and nutrition articles, motivations and inspirations, fitness challenges, Q&As, giveaways and more!

Do you find that you’re you almost CONSTANTLY hungry?  Does it seem like your stomach begins to feel empty again too soon after your last meal?  This can be extremely frustrating if you’re trying to lose weight.  Because, of course, when we feel hungry our body calls us to respond by filling it with food.  And, the more we try to ‘diet’ the worse it seems to get!  Do you wonder what on earth is going on with your body?  Why can’t you keep satiated for more than an hour or two?

Hunger is a complicated beast, and there are a few hormones at play.  One is the hormone ghrelin, which triggers hunger. The others are appetite suppressing hormones, called leptin and peptide YY.  There are several different factors in our diets and lifestyles that may cause ghrelin to increase and/or leptin and peptide YY to decrease.  Other factors increase blood sugars or cortisol, the stress hormone, which in turn can cause hunger.

Some of your daily habits may be to blame for  causing your stomach to growl.  The good news is that with a few tweaks, you may find that you’ll feel satiated for longer instead of being tortured by hunger throughout the day.

Continue reading article →