It’s everywhere. Like a drug, yet fed to kids. Don’t be fooled. (Here’s an alternative)

We love getting to know our customers… who they are, what they do and most importantly, how they stay FIT!  Send us an email and let us know a bit about you; what motivates you, your goals and aspirations and how fitness fits into your life!

Work, play and health!I am working as a Payroll Clerk at a phone/cable company.  I have been here since 2009 and I really do love the work.  Being behind a desk all day long really has me self-conscience about being more active.  I try to put fitness into every day.  On the weekends I love to hit the trails and go hiking.  Even if I’ve already done the trail multiple times, you always see something new.

Buddy System
I have a long-time boyfriend of about 3.5 years and we have a wonderful little girl together – Tasha! (An Australian Shephard / Chow mix) ;D  We also have another 4-legged kiddo, a cat named Snapshot, which I found on the roadside about 11 years ago.  We are currently in the beginning stages of building a home together.  We like to stay active (as we met in the gym!), we both ran our first 5K races last year (2011) and have had fun competing with each other.

Fitting Fitness In!
I try to fit in a much workout time as I can into my lunch hour.  I’ve found this works best for my schedule and it doesn’t hinder the rest of my day when I get out of work.  Beginning in January of this year, I said I would start training for a 10K race!  So right now my workout schedule consists of running for distance and endurance on Monday, Wednesday, Friday.  Leaving Friday for my longer run, after work.  Tuesday is typically an Upper Body / Core workout – which I pull from the MGT #2 book!  And Thursday I do a Yoga/Pilates DVD at home in the evenings to help keep my body relaxed and stretched out to lessen the fear of injury.  I also started taking a Yoga Class on Sunday afternoon.  I find the group fitness environment & accountability are very good for me, and who wouldn’t love a relaxing class on a Sunday afternoon!

My 10K race is coming up on March 25th, still got a ways to go on the training… But I know I’ll get there! :^)

Feel free to come cheer me across the finish line!

 

Rock Into Spring at Stone Mountain, GA

 

www.deborahmontgomeryracing.com

 

~ Carrie

 

 

If you’ve got a sweet tooth like us, you’ve probably considered whether there was a “good” sugar option or lesser of evils.  Table sugar, artificial sweeteners or natural sweeteners…which is the best choice?  With sugar being held responsible for obesity and artificial sweeteners questionable in terms of health, is there any sweetener that could be considered okay or even healthy?
Here’s what we’ve found.  See what you think (glycemic index).

 

Off the Plantation and Into Everything
Refined sugar, or sucralose, is table sugar with more than half of the world’s sugar derived from sugar cane and the rest coming from beetroot, because it’s cheaper to manufacture. COOL!  Beets are healthy, right?  Yes but not beet sugar which is virtually chemically identical to cane sugar, where processing strips any nutritive content.  Sugar contains approximately 45 cals/tbsp with a GI of approximately 61 and zero nutritional value.

With Americans consuming 156lbs of sugar per year per person, and with all of it being not only nutritionally naked but also fat-feeding, disease driving calories, it’s important for us to take a look at less refined and healthier natural sweeteners.  But first, do you know the difference between sucrose, fructose, glucose, and maltose?

 

The Woes of the Ose
Essentially sugars are carbohydrates composed of glucose, fructose, sucrose, and maltose. Fructose is known as the fruit sugar because it’s found in fruits, vegetables and honey; glucose is known as grape sugar, blood sugar or corn sugar; and sucrose is known as table sugar. Nutritionally, they are all the same.

 

Choose Light, Medium, Dark…or Not
What makes brown sugar brown?  Molasses.  So darker indicates more molasses, lighter means less.  Oh GOOD!  Molasses has iron and vitamin B, right?!  Finally…a healthy sugar! We wish!  After processing, the residual molasses has been stripped to shreds, with no more than trace amounts of calcium, potassium, iron and magnesium, and the calories and GI are the same as straight sucrose.

 

Not the Golden Child After All
If you thought that the “raw sugar” in brown packets at your local coffee shop was closer to nature…sorry to dash that hope.  Turbinado sugar get’s it’s name from the turbines that “double wash” or “steam” it into that alluring golden color and distinctive flavor, not from an exotic tropical island J.  So basically it’s the same as brown or refined white sugar.  Sigh.

 

Honey Do and Do Not
Honey consists of 1.5g of sucrose and the rest is fructose and glucose with 60 cal/tbsp., and a GI of 58.  Much more than a sweetener, honey has been used for its internal and external healing properties for eons (more on this in a future post).  However, most commercial honey is pasteurized and filtered which means it has been stripped of most of the minerals and vitamins found in raw.  Naturally, raw honey is ­a bit more expensive and may be harder to find but well worth it, so whenever possible go honey in the raw!

 

The Fluff on White
Stripped of all substance and left with the fluff, this sparkly white substance is a virtual drug. Addictive and capable of causing violent mood swings, yet found in ever so many processed foods beyond the obvious and infinite number of alluringly delectable treats, sugar is the devil in disguise.  Granulated sugar is 100% sucrose with a GI value of 61, so not a lot less than honey, but a lot less wholesome.

Your Favorite Tree Sap
The clear, almost tasteless tree nectar tapped from the sap of red, black and sugar maple trees does not resemble the lusciously sweet amber nectar draping your pancakes so enticingly. From tapped to tampered, the processing concentrates the natural single digit sugar content to more than 60% while leaving just a trace of the minerals Manganese and Zinc, and more removed from natural than most consumers realize.  At about 60 cals/tbsp and a GI of 54, you can use less maple for the same degree of sweet as sugar but maybe a tad more nutritional value.

 

Tequila’s Sweet Sister Agave
Extracted from the same Mexican perennial that also produces tequila, agave syrup has been touted as one of the best natural sweeteners because of its low GI of 15-19.   However its calorie count is high at 60 cal/tbsp. and 84% fructose, so agave is NOT as close to nature as you’d expect:

Agave plants are crushed, and the sap collected into tanks. The sap is then heated to   about 140°F for about 36 hours not only to concentrate the liquid into a syrup, but to develop the sweetness. The main carbohydrates in the agave sap are complex forms of fructose called fructosans, one of which is inulin, a straight-chain fructose polymer 8 to 10 fructose sugar units long. In this state, the sap is not very sweet.

When the agave sap is heated, the complex fructosans are hydrolyzed, or broken into their constituent fructose units. The fructose-rich solution is then filtered to obtain the desired products that range from dark syrup with a characteristic vanilla aroma, to a light amber liquid with more neutral characteristics. Excerpt from: FoodProcessing.com  


Brown Rice Peel-off
A nutty-flavored, whole grain food based syrup that sounds healthy, brown rice syrup is also highly refined and concentrated.  Maltose is rice syrup’s sugar name and it has one of the highest GI’s at 85%, so it’s no wonder that it is known to cause spikes in blood sugar and thus is not recommended for diabetics.  Also fattening at approximately 75 cals/tbsp., this may be one sugar substitute to check off your list.

 

From Beer to Barley
Malted barley is more commonly used in the brewing process to produce beer, but it is also made into barley malt syrup.  Both use a similar malting process of soaking and sprouting barley to make malt, then combining it with more barley.  This mixture is cooked down until the starch is converted to a sugar mash, which is then strained and cooked down to syrup. Half as sweet as sugar, barley malt has a rich malty flavor and looks very similar to molasses, with a GI of 42 and 60 cals/tbsp.

 

Dates with Substance
Date sugar is produced by grinding dried dates into a coarse powder that’s very sweet, but which does not dissolve.  So, while you may not want to use it for your coffee, Date sugar can add texture and sweetness in addition to substance and sweetness in some baked foods and snack treats.   Dates contain the minerals iron, magnesium, phosphorus, zinc, copper, manganese and selenium as well as potassium.  We couldn’t find the GI on date sugar but it’s approximately 44 GI for dates and approximately 33 cals/tbsp for date sugar.

 

Sweet Auntie Stevia
The sweetener of the decade ground stevia leaf is turning up everywhere and in all kinds of flavored varieties.  Derived from the stevia bush, this native of Central and South America is considered a non-nutritive sweetener because it contains zero calories.  Once crushed into powder the result is a sweetener 200-300 times that of sugar where 1 cup of sugar is equivalent to 1 teaspoon of stevia powder!  Not only does stevia not raise blood sugar levels with an incredibly low GI of less than 1 (!!!), it’s said to reduce cavities by retarding plaque growth!  Stevia, (rebaudiana Bertoni) may just become your new favorite sweetener.

Purdue University Study

 

 


Responsibility gets a bad rap.  “Who is responsible?”, is often accompanied by the  familiar tune of “Not me.” Corporations already burdened by the responsibility of healthcare find themselves in the role of virtual parent and the thankless task of trying to get employees to do what’s best for their own health: eat well, exercise and get regular checkups.

When it comes to health, we tend to say things like, “I must be getting old” (and thus decrepit, fat, less able…). Some blame “heredity”, or, “bad knees”, neglecting to mention dietary habits or the 50 extra pounds or so contributing to the problem.

That’s what I did in my mid-forties… thought—and said, “I’m gettingold”, because somewhere along the way I bought into the notion that these ills come with age. By this time I was spending hundreds of dollars a month on pain-relieving measures and hours of time in visits to chiropractors and massage therapists just to help relieve what had become chronic back pain. My wakeup call came when I learned that I had osteopenia, the “yellow zone” precursor to the red zone of osteoporosis. That’s when I awoke to realize that it was up to me to turn my health around or it would only get worse, and that began my journey to better heath and fitness now at 52 than when I was 22. Read the full article here.

Have you had a “wake up call?”