This is one of my favorite easy chicken recipes… In fact, it never lasts long enough to get a picture…

Bacon Apple Crock Pot Chicken Ingredients:

• 4 boneless skinless chicken breasts (can also be done with a whole chicken or thighs)
• 2 apples- peeled, cored and grated
• 1 cup homemade barbecue sauce -or Mitch’s (sugar sweetened)  and Nature’s Hollow (xyitol sweetened) are both decent options if you don’t make your own
• 8 pieces of bacon

How To Make:

1. Wrap each piece of chicken in 2 pieces of bacon and place in bottom of crock pot.
2. Mix grated apple and barbecue sauce and pour over chicken.
3. Cook on low for 7-8 hours until done.
4. We enjoy with homemade cole slaw or sweet potatoes.

This is my latest healthy Italian dish variation. I never really liked Chicken Parmesan until I had it at a friend’s bridesmaid’s luncheon. It was the most grain free item on the menu, and it was wonderful (I later found out it was breaded in some type of potato starch and not flour!).

When I got home, I decided to try to make a truly healthy version, and thus, this recipe was born. I also created a Chicken Parmesan Fingers recipe that the kids loved, so I could make a fun meal for them and a nice dinner for my husband and I in the same night.

If you ever miss Italian foods, this is a good alternative, and even if you were never a pasta person, you might like this one.

Healthy Chicken Parmesan Ingredients:

• 2-3 lbs of boneless, skinless, chicken breasts (or strips for the Chicken Fingers variation)
• 1/2 cup coconut flour (or almond flour)
• 1/3 cup arrowroot (option, can use more flour instead)
• seasonings: garlic powder, basil, salt, etc
• 3-4 eggs
• 1 TBSP heavy cream (optional)
• 1 jar (approx 24 ounces) of pasta sauce (check ingredients if store bought)
• Parmesan cheese (optional)
• Mozzarella cheese (optional)
• Tallow, Lard or Coconut Oil for frying

How To Make Healthy Chicken Parmesan

1. Put 1-2 cups of lard, tallow or coconut oil in a large skillet or fryer and turn on medium high heat.
2. If using chicken breasts, butterfly them and pound slightly with meat hammer or flat side of heavy spoon until about 1/2 inch thick. If using chicken strips, this is not necessary.
3. Beat eggs with heavy cream (if using) in a medium sized bowl.
4. On a large plate or dish, combine coconut flour, arrowroot, and spices and mix well.
5. Dip the chicken into the egg mixture and then into the flour/arrowroot mixture until well coated.
6. Put directly into hot oil and cook, flipping once, until both sides have browned and chicken is cooked (about 4 minutes per side on my stove).
7. While chicken is cooking, heat sauce over medium heat until warmed.
8. If making regular Chicken Parmesan, place chicken in large baking dish once cooked and top with pasta sauce and cheeses (if using). Heat on broil the oven until cheese is melted. For Chicken Parmesan Dippers, put the cooked chicken strips on a plate and serve with pasta sauce for dipping.
9. Serve with salad with homemade dressing of choice.

This recipe can also be modified to make delicious Eggplant Parmesan too!

What’s your favorite Italian dish? Will you try this one?

If you fall in to that category, taking a minimum effective dose (MED) approach to Wellness can help make the adjustment less overwhelming so that you don’t give up simply because you don’t have enough time.

The basic concept here is finding the minimum amount needed to accomplish the greatest change. This applies in both nutrition and fitness, and in many cases, more is not better!

In my experience, nutrition accounts for about 80% of one’s physique, and that in most cases, 20% of effort creates 80% of the results in fitness. (Mark Sisson and Tim Ferriss have both explained various forms of the Pareto Principle as well).

As Ferris explains,  two important MEDs to remember when it comes to fitness and health are:

1. To remove stored fat- do the lest necessary to trigger a fat loss cascade of specific hormones.
2. To add muscle- do the least necessary to trigger local and systemic growth mechanisms.

Put another way: water boils at 212 degrees F. This is the MED needed to boil water. Raising the temperature more will not make the water “more boiled” so it is simply a waste of energy.

For health, this means isolating the most important factors that will create the greatest change. If you are trying to achieve noticeable results quickly, here are a few MED suggestions that I’ve found to be effective with myself or with clients.

Nutrition MEDs:

• Getting rid of all processed white foods (grains, sugar, starches) while limiting fruit and natural sugars and avoiding drinking calories (soda, diet soda, juice, etc)
• Eating protein first thing in the morning. Ferriss suggests 30 within 30 – eating 30 grams of protein (3-4 eggs) within 30 minutes of waking.
• Getting enough fat – 1-2 TBSP of coconut added to the diet does wonders for many people
• Veggies at every meal!
• Eating 1 TBSP almond butter mixed with 1 TBSP coconut oil right before bed
• Fasting once a week
• Optimizing Vitamin D

Fitness:

• Kettlebell MED- 75 consecutive swings with max weight done 3 times a week. Work up to 150 continuous reps.
• All out sprints once a week. Tabata’s are best (20 seconds max effort, 10 seconds rest, repeat 8 times) by running or on stationary bike.

Lifestyle:

• 7.5-9 hrs of sleep, every night! This makes more of an effect on health than most people realize.
• Drinking 32 ounces or more of water immediately after waking up.
• Making goals actionable and concrete (I will deadlift 200 lbs, or I will lose “x” inches) rather than obscure (I want to be healthy and thin)
• Taking a before picture and keeping a food journal if weight loss is the goal

If you are looking to make a health related change and need some accountability, head over to the Wellness Mama Forum and create a Wellness Journal where you can post before pictures, pictures of your food, meal log, questions, etc.

What are your health goals? Have you found any MEDs related to health or fitness? Share below!

A common theme I’ve noticed among many clients is an obsession with the number on the scale. It is so easy to get caught up on the number, rather than the health behind it.

Jason at Everyday Paleo, wrote a great post about this recently, (part II here)explaining that weight is little more than the effect of Gravity on your mass, and should be treated as such. From his post:

Measuring gravity’s affect on your body, and then assuming that measurement to be relevant to your physical attractiveness is insanity.  Stop doing that.  Now!

I will concede that the scale can be a motivational tool in the first few weeks of paleo eating and proper exercise, but after that it quickly becomes worthless.  Please allow me to make a few points and try to play to your sense of reason.

• If a woman or man is attractive, would they also be attractive on Jupiter?  They would weigh a lot more there.  Would they somehow be much hotter on the moon due to weighing much less?
• Can you imagine answering the door when a blind date arrives and having them greet you with, “Wow!  You might actually be hot!  Can you step on this scale so I can know for sure?”

I understand the desire for a tangible, measurable mark of progress, and certainly that is good to have, but if aesthetics or weight are the ONLY goal, making progress can be difficult.

My best compliance with clients is among those who have a serious or life threatening condition and are very motivated to make lifestyle changes. Logically, these clients also lost the most weight, though this isn’t their focus.

On the other hand, clients who focus heavily (no pun intended) on weight, have a difficult time losing it. From a psychological perspective, this makes sense too. If you are constantly thinking about your extra weight, feeling bad about your extra weight and asking yourself “why can’t I lose this extra weight?” … your subconscious is going to try to ease that anxiety and give you mental reasons (excuses) that you can’t lose that weight.

Concentrating solely on weight also shortchanges people from a health perspective, since it encourages eating too little to try to make the number move faster. Contrary to conventional wisdom, since it isn’t just about calories, eating too little can slow progress.

Still not convinced that weight is irrelevant? Jason gave an example in his post of a client who made massive health and fitness improvements, yet her weight before and after was exactly the same!

The Bottom Line..

If you need a concrete benchmark of progress, measure yourself or take before pictures. This will be much more encouraging to see progress in and will help avoid the unhealthy focus on weight.

What do you think? Still prefer the scale or willing to switch to measurements and pictures? Let me know below!

If you eat grain free, you likely eat a lot of eggs for breakfast. I’m always looking for new ways to mix up the breakfast menu, and this is the latest creation (not the best picture.. sorry).

I always used to enjoy Huevos Rancheros, but being grain free, the corn tortilla had to go. This is an easy adaption that tastes great! It’s so easy it hardly deserves a recipe…

Ingredients:

• Chorizo sausage
• 2 eggs (or more) per person
• salsa or enchilada sauce
• guacamole
• sour cream (optional)
• Cheese (optional)

How To Make Them:

One of the most frustrating assumptions of conventional wisdom is that calories in = calories out and that obesity is caused by simply eating too much or exercising too little (AKA Gluttony or Sloth).

Of course, along with this bit of CW is the idea that a low-fat, fiber rich, whole grain diet can increase health and lead to weight loss, and that since fat has more calories per gram, we should eat less of it to lose weight and more of the lower calorie carbohydrates and protein.

The problem… there are so many holes in the logic of these assumptions that they don’t hold water… or bacon.

Points To Ponder

• If a calorie in truly is the same as a calorie out, why does fat matter at all, or sugar for that matter? As long as we are eating fewer calories than we are burning, why would it matter if it comes from fat or protein or carbs?
• If fat is the big culprit, why do we need to avoid sugar laden foods? After all, a 5 lb bag of sugar has no fat!
• If weight is directly correlated to the amount of calories consumed vs. calories burned, than why do some people eat voraciously and not gain weight while many obese people endure semi-starvation diets without losing considerable weight?
• Is it really logical that we get fat because we eat too much, or could it be that we eat too much because an underlying cause is telling our bodies to get fat? As an example… kids eat a lot more during growth spurts.. but they are eating more because they are growing, not growing because they are eating more.
• What if obesity is not caused by eating too much or exercising too little, but what if these are merely symptoms of the same underlying cause that is also causing the obesity?

The Problems

Organizations like Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, etc function on the basis of calorie restriction and overall food consumption. Programs like this do provide a level of accountability and measuring of results, both of which can be very beneficial, but they still function under a flawed set of underlying ideas.

Sure, diets that reduce calories can work for a while, but statistically, most people will eventually fail at these diets and gain the weight back (plus some).

Programs like this (and most gyms) also proclaim that simply exercising more is the key to weight loss and that increasing cardio exercise will burn more calories and thus cause weight loss. Unfortunately, while exercise does use energy, this energy use has the effect of making us hungry, which inclines us to eat more, and the cycle repeats.

Additionally, while proteins, fats and carbohydrates all do contain calories, these substances are used for different purposes in the body. Protein is largely used for cell function and structure, fats for hormone creation and building of cell membrane and carbs for immediate or stored fuel. Any carbohydrates not immediately needed for fuel are graciously escorted, via insulin, into fat cells for later use.

In the end, the idea of calories in vs. calories out doesn’t really tell us anything about the exact cause of obesity. A great analogy that I’ve seen Gary Taubes and Dr. Michael Eades use is that of a crowded restaurant:

Imagine that you are a waiter at a restaurant and the restaurant suddenly becomes very crowded. You turn to a fellow waiter and remark “Wow, I wonder why there are so many people here all of the sudden?” to which the other waiter responds “Obviously because there are more people coming into the restaurant than are leaving.”

The other waiter has made a very obvious assertion, but he is not answering the real question you were trying to ask, which (paraphrased) was “What outside event or activity is causing all these people to come into the restaurant now?”

A 5 year old could observe that more people are entering than leaving, but what causes it? Perhaps a football game nearby or a menu special that night?

The Science

Put very simply, we gain weight for the same reason that growing children, pregnant women, post menopausal women and women on their period do… a delicate interaction between food consumed and a host of hormones.

There are many factors involved in this hormone reaction, from the fats we consume that are needed for hormone creation, to the carbohydrates that raise insulin (and cortisol and leptin and..)… hormones are vital.

So what happens when you deprive the body of the proteins and fats needed for hormone creation and cell structure and replace them with insulin raising carbohydrates… the last couple of decades should give you a good idea.

What if fat-containing diets don’t cause weight gain (or heard disease)?

What if reducing calories and increasing activity aren’t the answer to excess weight?

What if excess consumption of carbohydrates, especially from processed sources, does cause these problems? Would the equation make more sense?

Consider that sumo wrestlers consume a diet that is between 57 and 80% carbohydrate to achieve their large frames, while researchers have yet to be able to get participants to put on weight on an all-meat diet.

In other words, to get young men, who are athletes by some measure, to put on weight, they must be fed a low-fat, high carbohydrate diet… yet this is the same advice we give to middle aged women seeking to LOSE weight?

Consider that carbohydrates cause a rise in insulin levels, and it is insulin that ushers fat into cells for storage. Consider also that obesity and diabetes are strongly correlated, and that these conditions also raise the risk of heart disease.

When we consider that excess carbohydrates, and thus excess insulin could be part of the root cause, not dietary fat, everything starts to seem much more logical. Perhaps bacon is the “good guy” and those low-fat granola bars are the “bad guy” when it comes to weight loss and gain.

Not convinced? Here’s some light reading for the evening…

On Cholesterol and Heart Disease (Eades)

The Lipid Hypothesis Has Officially Failed- Part I (Gnolls)

The Lipid Hypothesis Has Officially Failed- Part II (Gnolls)

Sugar Addiction: Or Why You Are Addicted To Bread

The Context of Calories(MDA)

Why Diets Work, When They Do (Taubes)

What do you think? What has worked for you? “Weight In” below!

This is one of my favorite fast summer dinner ideas. The kids love it, my husband loves it, and I love that it only takes one pan to cook

Sausage and Squash Stir Fry Ingredients:

• One 16 ounce package of link sausage (nitrite free if possible) I used nitrate free smoked beef sausage
• 3-4 medium to large summer squash or zucchini (or the equivalent)
• 2 onions
• 1 TBSP butter
• spices to taste: salt, pepper, garlic, basil, etc

How To Make It:

1. Slice sausage into thin slices, about 1/4 inch.
2. Brown them in a large skillet or wok until well cooked and browned
3. Remove sausage
4. Slice onion into thin slices and saute in the same pan until soft
5. While cooking, peel and slice summer squash and add to onions when almost done
6. Add spices to taste and additional butter if needed to prevent sticking
7. Cook for an additional 5 minutes or until squash is soft
8. Enjoy!

What’s your favorite “one-pan” meal? Tell me in the comments below!

I present to you my favorite salad ever! While our garden is (somehow) still producing strawberries, I’ve been eating this salad as much as I can! I’ve even eaten this for breakfast with eggs on the side. Sometimes, I add grilled chicken and it is an entire meal.

Ingredients:

• Spinach (or other greens)
• feta cheese
• strawberries
• cashews
• cucumber slices
• olive oil

How To Make It

1. Put vegetables on plate.
2. Top with Feta, strawberries and cashews
3. drizzle with olive oil
4. Enjoy
5. Repeat!

Since my husband is Italian, I’m always looking for healthy versions of Italian dishes that he likes. We had a lot of eggplant recently in the garden and CSA, and since all I’ve ever known to do with eggplant is make Eggplant Parmesan… I did.

This recipe turned out really well, and the kids, who have never been huge fans of eggplant, really liked it. I figured that some of you might be missing Italian foods now that you are grain free, so this is a healthy alternative.

Grain Free Eggplant Parmesan Ingredients

• 2-3 medium sized eggplants
• salt
• about 1/2 cup coconut flour (or almond flour)
• 1/3 cup arrowroot powder (can use more coconut if you don’t have this)
• garlic, salt, pepper and basil leaf
• 3-4 eggs
• 1 TBSP heavy cream (optional)
• 1 jar (24 ounces) of pasta sauce (check ingredients!)
• Parmesan cheese
• Mozzarella cheese
• tallow, lard or coconut oil

How to Make Healthy Eggplant Parmesan

1. About an hour before preparing, peel eggplant and slice into 1/4 to 1/2 inch slices. Place eggplant in strainer and sprinkle heavily with salt. Let sit for 45 mins to 1 hour. This sweats the eggplant and makes it much less bitter. Rinse well with water and pat dry
2. Put lard, tallow or coconut oil (about 1-2 cups) in a large skillet and turn on medium heat.
3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
4. Mix coconut flour, arrowroot, 2 T parmesan and spices in large bowl or on a large plate
5. Beat eggs with heavy cream, if using
6. Dip eggplant in egg mixture, then in coconut flour mixture and place in hot oil in skillet
7. Cook approximately 4 minutes per side until browned
8. As eggplant is finished, place in a 13×9 baking dish
9. Pour pasta sauce over the eggplant and then top with parmesan and mozzarella, if desired
10. Heat in oven until cheese is melted and sauce is heated.

Day Four of the Wellness Challenge and it’s time for another giveaway!

If you are new to the Wellness Lifestyle, you’ve probably noticed that it can be hard to meal plan when all your old go-to meals contain foods you aren’t eating anymore. Planning makes the switch easier, and helps you stick to it better, especially in the difficult first couple of weeks.

Sarah Fragoso, of Everyday Paleo (great blog! check it out if you aren’t already a daily reader like I am!) has graciously offered a signed copy of her amazing book Everyday Paleo to the winner of this challenge. Sarah is a busy mom who manages to make healthy and delicious meals for her family, and she makes it look easy!

Everyday Paleo has some wonderful recipe ideas and has helped me with my own meal planning many times!

How To Enter

Since Sarah has helped so many people eat healthier with her blog and book, it seems appropriate that the winner of this contest gets a copy!

• To enter the contest, simply post a weekly dinner meal plan in the comments below. It can be as simple as listing the day and what you are cooking, though you can include links if you’d like.
• You don’t have to include breakfast and lunch, but you can post them as separate entries if you plan those also.
• You can enter as many times as you want, but each entry must be a separate week of meal plans (I’ve only planned the next four weeks… can you beat me?)
• If you are using a recipe from somewhere online, feel free to link to it, though this is not necessary
• Check out Everyday Paleo for some great ideas if you are stuck!
• Open to anyone, though prize can only be shipped to readers living in the U.S. If the winner lives outside the U.S., a substitute prize will be sent.
• Contest ends at 11:59 pm Central time on August 7th (Sunday). That’s not much time… so get planning!
• By entering, you are giving me permission to feature your meal plan on Wellness Mama … if you blog and want me to link to it or to specific recipes, just include them!
• Winner will be randomly selected via Random.org.