Griffen Fitness - Newsletter

August newsletter

Greetings healthy people,

What wonderful weather we’ve been having. Finally… a summer. After three years of waiting Edinburgh finally sees the sun. So here is a summer holiday issue to celebrate.

Subscriber Offer
There are a couple of last minute places available on the WeightShed one day Motivator boot camp this Friday. This day runs from 8.30am – 5.30pm at the sports centre of Stewart’s Melville College and promises to be packed with new ideas and exercise techniques to get you ready for summer. Click on this link and book in for only £99. This amazing price includes all beverages, lunch, your own WeightShed gym bag, all study materials and a full day to get you looking fab. Book now!

What’s in Season for July
It's good to eat seasonal fruit and vegetables, so here's a list of what's in season locally:
carrots, gooseberries, strawberries, spinach, tomatoes, kohlrabi (lovely grated on salad), watercress, loganberries, sage, cauliflower, aubergine, fennel, asparagus, cabbage, celery, cherries, lettuce, mangetout, nectarines, new potatoes, oyster mushrooms, cherries, peas, peaches, radishes, strawberries, raspberries, rhubarb, tomatoes
sushi ingredients
Easy Recipe: Sushi, a healthy lunch alternative
Nori sushi rolls are deceptively easy to make and they look dead fancy. Here’s a step by step guide to producing your own Japanese delicacies. The nori seaweed wrapper is a rich source of calcium, zinc and iodine. The fillings are as healthy as you like, from the veggies listed below to fresh raw fish from the fishmonger, just make sure it’s fresh! All of the specialised ingredients (marked with *) can be found in either Pat’s or Hing Sing Chinese supermarkets on Leith Walk.

You will need:
1 packet sushi nori - sheets of toasted seaweed *
¼ cup seasoned rice vinegar - be sure it’s the seasoned type or you need to add sugar and salt yourself *
1 ½ cups packet sushi / Japanese rice *
1 tube wasabi - Japanese green horseradish * nori roll construction
Light soy sauce, for dipping *
Pickled ginger, for serving *
bamboo rolling mat *

fillings: avocado, carrot, cucumber, Japanese yellow radish*, or very fresh salmon, halibut or tuna

To make the rice
-    Add the rice to 1 ¾ cups of cold water and bring to a boil.
-    Reduce to the lowest heat and simmer, covered, for 20 minutes or until all water is absorbed
-    Remove from heat and let stand, covered, for 10 minutes
-    Turn rice into a large non-metal bowl. Drizzle seasoned rice vinegar over the rice and gently combine, then cover.
-    Whilst you’re waiting for the rice to cool, finely chop your ingredients into long sticks as pictured.

Now the fun bit, the rolling
-    Lay a sheet of sushi nori onto the bamboo mat rolling sushi
-    Spread a thin layer of the rice evenly on the sheet, leaving an inch free on the furthest side from you
-    Place your filling ingredients horizontally about two inches from the beginning of the rice.
-    You can spread some wasabi next to the filling to add extra bite.
-    Slightly dampen the exposed nori, then roll the mat.
-    TOP TIP – the rice is sticky, so keep a bowl of water handy so you can easily clean your fingers and dampen implements when required
-    Slice into approx 8 rolls using a wet sharp knife
-    Present your rolls on a tray with a dipping bowl containing some wasabi combined with light soy sauce.
-    The more you practise nori rolls, the easier it gets!
tray of sushi

Resisting Temptation Hint of the Month: Bring Your Own Food
It’s easy to use summer holidays as an opportunity to eat healthy. The weather is warm, lovely fruit and veg is in season and it’s the time to eat light and nutritious grub. Just because you’re on holiday doesn’t meant that you need to eat rubbish - use your break to get into good eating habits. If you’re going to a BBQ, take your own healthy options for the grill. Corn cobs, red pepper, big mushrooms, freshly caught fish and quorn burgers come up lovely on the ol’ hot plate, and means you can avoid the usual suspects of sausages, fatty meat and white bread. If you’re abroad, try foods you’ve never tried before – be a culinary adventurer!

Fad or Fab: Sports Drinks
There’s a huge variety of ‘sports drinks’ on the market, but are they really necessary? If you are a moderate exerciser where your sessions are an hour or under, the truth is that you don’t really need them. Water is best to sip on whilst exercising. Also be sure that you are adequately hydrated before and after a session. I’ve met folk who don’t drink water during at all, then believe a sports drinks when they’re exercising will be extra good!

If you are running long distance, doing an extended hill walk, long bike ride or are exercising in the heat you may find a drink containing some sugar (carbohydrate) helpful. This is because fluid with a similar carbohydrate concentration to blood is absorbed more easily by the stomach, thereby hydrating you better. Rather than spend money on fancy drinks, often with aspartamine in, on busy days I use weak ribena in my drink bottle. This is especially handy in hot weather. For those watching their waistlines, remember sugary drinks contain calories! Our western diet tends to be high in salt, so salt replacement is not that high on the agenda. If you feel you could benefit from an 'electrolyte replacement system', add a tiny wee pinch of sea salt to your drink bottle, only a tiny bit is required so you won’t taste it.

A word on drink bottles, get a proper sports bottle so you can keep it very clean in a dishwasher or washed by hand at a high temperature. Did you notice what Andy Murray drank on Sunday night in his four-hour battle? 95% water with only a very occasional lemony drink. That’s my final thought before I give sports drinks the thumbs down for most of us. Don’t believe the FADdish hype!

Website of the month: Runner’s World
Running is an exercise you can do anywhere, anytime. All you need is a pair of trainers (my come on holiday with me so I can explore the neighborhood) and the will to move. If you go somewhere hot, run in the morning before it heats up, or at sunset. Nice. I like receiving Runner’s World monthly newsletters as they give me lots of ideas about running. See www.runnersworld.co.uk. Some of the articles are subscription only, but they do publish a good number for free. Ignore the advertising and read the articles! Yes, it’s nerdy.

Article of the Month: Why Yo-Yo Diets Don’t Work
Last month a newspaper journalist telephoned me to ask how someone could lose weight very quickly for a holiday in four weeks. The unfortunate answer is that a ‘quick fix’ low calorie diet may work in the short term, but will end up with the individual ending up putting on more weight in the long run. Hence the term ‘yo-yo dieting’

“How is this?” you may well ask. In a nutshell, when you diet, your body ‘thinks’ it’s starving. Our bodies are sophisticated creations, and to understand how your metabolism works (how efficiently you burn calories) you need to think back to primitive times. Back in the day when food was scarce, if we starved it was because there was a shortage of food. As the body had less fuel to operate on, it would switch into ‘efficient’ mode, where the metabolism was slowed down. Now, as your metabolism is how efficiently your body utilises ‘fuel’ (calories), it would burn calories more slowly to make food ingested last better over the period of starvation. In this situation, the body also learns to store calories as fat for reserves for later, should the famine continue. Think of animals in hibernation, when their metabolism slows right down so they can survive through winter.

Our lifestyles have evolved radically and us lucky folk generally don’t suffer food shortages. However our biological systems have taken longer to adapt. So even though we may know that we are dieting (deliberately starving) ourselves to get thinner, our bodies ‘think’ “jeepers, I have to slow down my processing to make this food last”. So you may lose some weight in the short term (quite often water as well, if you’re on a high protein low carb diet, but more on that some other time), but as soon as your eating habits return to normal you will just put the weight back on, and then some. Your metabolism will have slowed down due to dieting, so you will store more calories as body fat.

This is a very simplified outline of why restricted calorie dieting in the short term will not do you any favours in the long term. It is very possible to tone up in a month, however significant permanent weight loss requires a more sensible and controlled approach to both nutrition and exercise.

Please email me if you'd like to read the Spectrum magazine article that resulted from the conversation with the journalist about getting fit for summer.

And Finally…
www.changeyourworld.org.uk - this week!

Have a happy and healthy July,

:)
Tracy

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August newsletter