27 January 2012
As a thank you to you all for sticking with me through the name change, I wanted to give away some sweet prizes!
Three people will win one of these awesome prizes:
- $50 Amazon gift card
- Trader Joe’s care package filled with all my favorite goodies (worth about $50) and samples* from DAHlicious Lassi, an amazing smoothie drink that has minimal ingredients, isn’t too sweet, and is great for on-the-go breakfasts. Find them on Facebook here!
- 30-minute nutrition/fitness phone consult with me
*DAHlicious is providing samples of their drinks.
Since I had to change my name on all the social channels as well, all you have to do to be entered to win one of the prizes is like Your Healthista on Facebook (I had to totally delete the old page since Facebook doesn’t allow username changes) and follow @healthista on Twitter.
Leave a comment on this post OR reblog it and let me know you did those two things, and you’re in! Last day to enter is Monday, January 31, at 11:59 PM EST. I’ll pick a random winner from the comments/reblogs on Tuesday.
ETA: The FB link should work now! Sorry, guys.
26 January 2012
Despite my ambiguous feelings toward Giada, her meatballs are really something special. I first discovered them when I made Giada’s Italian Wedding Soup. I had some leftover meatball meat (is that the right word?), so I decided to cook some up and eat them on their own. Best idea ever. They were delicious and totally carried themselves without the rest of the soup. (Side note: I’m SO behind on Season of Soup! I’m going to try to catch up, but I don’t know if I can. I think I finally got sick of soup! I can’t believe I’m saying that!).
I tweaked Giada’s recipe slightly, but it’s pretty close to the original. Here’s my version:
You’ll need (makes 10-12 large meatballs):
For the meatballs:
- 1 medium onion, grated
- 1 cup fresh Italian parsley
- 3 large eggs
- 1 tsp minced garlic
- 1 tsp salt (or to taste)
- 1/2 cup almond meal (you could also use bread crumbs)
- 2/3 cup grated Parmesan
- 16 ounces ground beef (I used organic grass-fed beef from TJs)
- 16 ounces ground pork (I used organic local stuff ground pork from Door to Door)
- freshly ground black pepper to taste
- 2-3 Tbsp olive oil
For the sauce:
- 1 28-oz. can diced tomatoes (with basil if possible)
- Italian seasoning to taste (basil, oregano, etc.)
- 1/2 cup cream
- salt and pepper to taste
- 1 bay leaf
Make it:
Combine all ingredients except olive oil in a large mixing bowl. Mix well with your hands. Really get in there and mush stuff around!
Form large (palm-sized) balls and roll them in your hands before putting them aside on a plate or cutting board.
Heat the olive oil in a pan over medium heat and add the balls (make sure to leave a little space between them for turning).
You’ll need to cook them on each side for about 5-7 minutes. When one side gets brown, turn it. The balls should cook for around 25-30 minutes total, but remember to keep turning so nothing burns!
While the meatballs are cooking, start the sauce. Pour tomatoes into a large sauce pan, add seasonings and bay leaf, and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Once the meatballs are done, take the sauce off the heat and let it rest of a few minutes. Then, add cream and remove the bay leaf.
Ladle the sauce over your scrumptious meatballs and add Parmesan for garnish if you want. I served my balls with some roasted kale.
Ugh, so good. The tomato-cream sauce is so ridiculously easy, but it tastes genius. I think adding a bit of cream to a really acidic sauce is the way to go. A little goes a long way and it makes your sauce taste so much more rich and complex.
Giada, maybe you’re not so bad after all.
25 January 2012
Recently, Mary presented me with three common happy hour options and asked a simple question: Which is healthier? I’ve written about how to have a healthy happy hour before, but this seemed like a fun and challenging happy hour dilemma to tackle. Here are the choices Mary gave me:
- Glass of wine and a bread basket with olive oil at an Italian restaurant
- Sliders and light beer at a sports bar
- Skinny margarita with chips and salsa at a Mexican Restaurant
First let’s establish portion size. I went with 3 5-oz. glasses of red wine and 3 smaller pieces of crusty white bread with 1/2 tbsp olive oil for the Italian restaurant, 4 small sliders and 3 12-oz. light beers for the sports bar, and 25 chips + 6 tablespoons salsa and 3 skinny margaritas for the Mexican restaurant.
The first thing most people would probably be tempted to do is look at the calorie count for each of these options. You might be surprised to know that the approximate calorie counts for each happy hour pick are pretty similar: around 850 for the Italian restaurant, 745 for the sports bar, and 745 for the Mexican restaurant. Yes, you could save around 100 calories by avoiding the Italian option, but calorie count isn’t telling us much here.
So let’s go beyond calories, since I don’t think they tell the full health story anyway. The Italian happy hour choice not only has the most calories, but it also has the most carbs by far — around 95g compared to 50g for the sliders and beer and only 35g for the Mexican meal. But that low carb count in the Mexican happy hour might be due to some artificial sweetener in the margaritas — and I definitely don’t think artificial sweetener is healthy. But if you don’t want your blood sugar to spike, stay away from the Italian happy hour with all that bread! White bread has pretty much no redeeming nutritional qualities anyway.
Looking at protein, the sports bar meal packs the most punch, with 30g compared to 16g in the Italian meal and 11g in the Mexican meal. The sports bar meal also has the most fat (presumably from the burgers), which you all know I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing. No, the beef in those sliders is probably not very high quality, but the fat will still be more filling.
If I had to give a final verdict, my vote goes to the sliders and beer. It will be far more filling than either of the other options because of the protein and fat. If you want to kick the health factor up a notch, eat your sliders open-face and cut back to two beers. That brings the calorie count down to around 545 and the carb count down to 20g.
If you can mix and match, go with 1-2 glasses of red wine (a healthier option than beer) with 2-3 open-faced sliders. That’s around 400 calories, 15g carbs, and 15g protein. It would also be pretty satisfying because of the protein/fat, and keep you from walking away feeling bloated. Not a bad option!
24 January 2012
- If you think you’re hungry, you’re probably just thirsty. Drink more water! Your body needs 8 glasses of water a day! (Nope.)
- Try to choose low-fat foods as much as possible. Fat in food = fat on your body! (Ugh, so sick of this “tip.”)
- Check your BMI. That will help you figure out a healthy weight for your height. (This actually a really dangerous “tip.”)
- Look for foods that say on the label how great they are for you! (Then you’d just end up with crap like this. I’m sure the “B vitamins” in that artificial sweetener are super good for you….)
- If it tastes good, it’s probably bad for you. (This one just annoys me because it’s so blatantly untrue).
- Low-cal imitations of higher-calorie foods are great substitutions! (Usually, they’re full of questionable ingredients and just leave you unsatisfied.)
- The more calories you burn during your workout, the better! Keep running! (When I was burning the most calories during my workouts, I also weighed the most. Take it or leave it.)
- Non-starchy vegetables are always the answer. Eat more of them always! (They’re great, but not always what you need).
- Egg whites are a perfect source of protein. (It makes me SO sad when people skip the nutrient-dense yolk.)
- There’s a definitive answer to every health/food/nutrition/fitness question — you just have to find it! (Sorry to say, there’s so much conflicting research, you just have to do what works — and makes sense — for you.)
23 January 2012
As you may have noticed (and if you didn’t notice, I told you), this blog has a new name: Your Healthista. The name change wasn’t an easy one for me, since I’ve been blogging as Your Nutritionista for almost three years. It had become a part of my identity — I was the Nutritionista. Your Nutritionista.
But around Thanksgiving, I got an email from someone who claimed to own the trademark for “Nutritionista.” After I looked into it a bit, I discovered this person had started her website back in 2008 and secured the trademark in 2009 (after I started blogging, but she had started the trademark acquisition process before I created Your Nutritionista).
I consulted every lawyer I knew (including Tumblr’s very own Meg, who, as a law student, was ridiculously helpful), but it seemed like there was no way around it — I couldn’t keep blogging or consulting as Nutritionista. Letting go of that name was harder than I thought it would be. I mean, this is just a blog. But like I said, Nutritionista had become part of my identity. I pretty seriously considered quitting the blog altogether, since changing the name just seemed totally unfathomable.
Luckily, a few good bloggie friends convinced me that I should keep blogging under a new name, and even helped me brainstorm new names. This process was harder than I could have imagined and involved Google docs, long brainstorming sessions over gchat, and desperate emails to every creative person I know. When I began my health/nutrition blog three years ago, competition for blog names/brands wasn’t as fierce. Now, health/nutrition blogs seem to be a dime a dozen, and most of the great names are long taken.
After a lot of indecision (my poor designer! Jona deserves a medal for sticking with me through this whole process), I decided to go with Your Healthista. It’s similar to my old name and thus felt familiar and comfortable, but it also represents a change I’ve wanted to make for a while — expanding the scope of my blog (and business) to encompass a more holistic view of health. Health isn’t only about nutrition and food. It’s about fitness (clearly), but there are also so many elements that contribute to health. I never want to get stuck in nutritionism (i.e., “Eat more Vitamin B and you’ll be healthy!”). I think that’s a scary attitude. No food or workout is magic. So being able to change my blog and business name to reflect my focus on ALL components of health is actually sort of timely.
So how will Your Healthista be different from Your Nutritionista? In a lot of ways, it won’t be. I’m still going to be posting recipes, workouts, general food and fitness advice, contributer articles, and commenting on health/nutrition news and research. But I might also write about those other components of health — sleep, relationships, organization, careers, etc. I might post anything I (or my contributors) know about and believe can contribute to a healthier life in all senses of the word. As for me, my passions will always be food and fitness, but I’m open to other post ideas if you ever have them. Seriously. Just email me.
This post has gotten too long already, but I wanted to make sure to say THANK YOU. Thank you all for sticking around. Thank you for reading my blog. Thank you for helping me reach an amount of followers/readers I didn’t think was possible when I started this blog three years ago. And thank you so much for your input when I asked for it a couple months ago. You inspired me and lit a fire under my butt to work on this whole name-change thing. I really can’t thank you enough.
In conclusion, I’m asking a few things from you:
- If you have a health topic you feel like you’re an expert on, I would love to hear from you and maybe hire you to write for Your Healthista. Email me.
- If you have any feedback about this blog — what I’m doing right and what needs improvement, let me know. I’m all ears.
- Stay tuned for a nice lil giveaway later this week. As a thank you to all of you for sticking with me through this whole renaming business, I’m going to be giving away some sweet prizes!
