Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

The other day, I read this article on Diet Blog:

• How To: Make Nutritious Smoothies

Michael bought a new blender last week, so we have been using it to create a wide variety of smoothies. I had never put cottage cheese in a smoothie, however, so the suggestion from the Diet Blog was surprising to me. I immediately ran into the kitchen to try it out and this is what I created:

Strawberry Cottage Cheese Smoothie

• 1/2 cup cottage cheese
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup frozen strawberries
• 1 TBSP honey
• 1 TBSP ground flaxseed

I was pleased with the different flavor that the cottage cheese added. The nutrition facts are approximate. I used 1% milkfat on the cottage cheese and the milk, so if you use skim or full fat, the nutrition facts will change accordingly.

There are so many variations that you can use for fruit smoothies and they are an easy way to eat your dairy and fruit requirements every day. Try this one and then experiment with your own!

I never thought of this technique for getting my favorite geek to take a walk with me. You can see the joke at Joy of Tech here:

• The Joy of Tech comic – How To Get A Geek To Take A Walk

I am constantly trying to figure out ways to “fool” myself into exercising. Going on errands is one way that I have achieved that. Any grocery errand I like to dole out a little every day so I can take a walk to the store, get a few things and walk home. That way my walk feels like it means something besides just exercise.

How do you fool yourself into exercising?

Today is the day that a lot of schools are starting up again. Will more of the students be driven to school or walk to school?

Well, back in MY day…

I used Google Maps Pedometer to check the mileage I walked to each of the schools I went to as a kid and pre-teen.

• Academy Park Elementary: 0.70 miles
• Hunter Elementary: 0.68 miles
• Kennedy Junior High: 0.30 miles
• Kearns High: 2.03 miles

I was expected to walk to Academy Park, Hunter and Kennedy, but I had a bus to take me to Kearns High. At only two miles, it doesn’t seem like all that much anymore. I only walked it once in the three years that I went to Kearns and it felt like a million miles. Now, I walk two miles every day without even thinking about it. How can I be in better shape now than when I was a teenager and be fatter? It makes no sense to me.

Should kids walk to school? I think most of them are driven to school because parents are scared of child abductions. I have no statistics about the likeliness of a child to be abducted, but I know that a parent who walks their child to school kills two birds with one stone. Your kids arrive at school with a little exercise and safe and you get your workout done.

I never had to walk two miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways. Maybe that’s why I’m overweight as an adult.

If you are one of the many people who have bought a Starling Fitness Yearly Journal, then you know that the quote of the month is about health. You can see the quote here:

As I see it, every day you do one of two things: build health or produce disease in yourself.

Adelle Davis , 1904-1974

Adelle Davis was a nutritionist who proposed that vitamins and minerals are essential to health. before then, science was unsure about macronutrients of food. There had been some inkling to these connections, such as citrus fruits prevented scurvy, but narrowing the search down to Vitamin C was a new science. Adelle Davis brought these concepts to the general public with her books. Her most famous book, Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, was originally published in 1954 and changed the way we look at food.

Next time you eat something because you think it’s good for you, send a tiny burst of good karma out to Adelle Davis who brought that idea down to its most basic level.

If you would like to order your own Starling Fitness Yearly Journal, you can do so here:

• Starling Fitness » Order Your Starling Fitness Yearly Journal

If you order it now, you can choose the month you want it to start and it will last you a year from that date. You won’t have to throw away any unused days from the first of the year. You can start fresh now.