Champion Breakfast

Start the day off right with this healthy breakfast egg white omelette!

Ingredients:
•cooking spray
•two or three egg whites (the picture is with two)
•honey
•sliced fruit! (I used raspberries, strawberries, and bananas, but blueberries would be a great addition!)
•granola

Instructions: heat your pan on high with cooking spray. When ready, add the egg whites, followed by the fruit and pure honey. After a couple minutes, fold the omelette in half, then cook for a couple more minutes on medium heat or until ready! Then, top the omelette off with some granola. Boom. Breakfast is served.

Simple, Healthy Snack

If you're looking for a quick, healthy snack, look no further! Toast a piece of 100% whole wheat bread, then spread on some flavored Greek yogurt, and top it off with a bit of granola and fresh strawberries! Yummy, nutritional, and the wheat with Greek yogurt will keep you fuller for longer!

Oatmeal Benefits and Simple Recipes

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It helps you start the day off right by getting your metabolism moving, and if you eat a good, healthy, hearty meal, you'll be less hungry throughout the day.

One thing I like to have on my breakfast menu is oatmeal! To be honest, before I learned a whole lot about nutrition, I was a super huge fan of sugary cereals and would end up eating 2 or 3 helpings in one sitting. But once I began to amend my diet and actually look at nutrition labels before buying things at the grocery store, I started to incorporate more oatmeal into my breakfast! Oatmeal offers plenty of health benefits because of its richness in antioxidants and fiber content. With oatmeal, you can lower cholesterol, build your immune system, keep your bowels moving, and stay fuller longer! YAY!

If your morning meal is normally rushed, buy Quaker Original Instant Oatmeal (bonus: no sugar added, wahoo!). Just empty the packet into a bowl, add 2/3 cup of water or milk, heat it in the microwave for a minute, and BAM. Breakfast is served. Of course, oatmeal tastes quite bland just on its own, but try your best to stay away from flavored oatmeal, because it's high in added sugar and sweetener. Instead, try some of these quick, simple, and healthy oatmeal recipes that I use to spice up your plain oatmeal:

• Chocolate Banana Oatmeal: add a tablespoon of Nesquik Chocolate Flavoring (no sugar added) and one whole sliced banana 
• Blueberry Nut Oatmeal: add blueberries, chopped walnuts or sliced almonds, and a bit of pure honey
• Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal: add chopped apples, cinnamon, and granola or sliced almonds for an extra crunch
• Nutty Peanut Butter Oatmeal: add sliced almonds or peanuts and a tablespoon of peanut butter to up your intake of protein!

Great Apps

For all you iPhone owners out there, here are a few sweet apps I have on my phone that are great for people looking to get healthy & fit!:
•myfitnesspal - I use mfp to track everything I eat as well as some of the workouts I do (I don't track all my workouts, because I mainly use it for nutritional purposes). Shows you the amount of calories you consume/burn off, the nutrition labels on what you eat, pie charts of your daily intake of protein/carbs/fat, and helps you keep track of your dieting progress! You can also add your friends to view their fitness goals and daily food diaries (my username is coolbeans_britt). I use this all the time to make sure I'm eating a proper, well-balanced diet.
•Nike Training Club - Along with Insanity and distance running, I use NTC for exercise. With NTC, you can get lean with high-intensity cardio, get toned with light weights and intervals, get strong with increased weights and reps, and get focused with workouts targeting specific areas of the body.
•Nike + iPod - I have a chip in my Lunars that I synch with this app, and it tracks my running distance, pace, and calories burned.
•Fooducate - This app lets you scan barcodes on foods or search items and it will tell you all about the nutritional values, weight watchers food points, or things to be on the lookout out for. Great app that I use whenever I go grocery shopping!

Sweet Tooth

For everyone craving a healthy, but yummy snack, try this simple recipe! All you need is a banana and your choice of flavored low-fat yogurt (we chose a banana with vanilla yogurt because bananas taste amazing frozen, but you can use berries also!). Peel and cut up the banana, then dip the pieces in yogurt and let it sit in the freezer for about an hour! The result tastes like frozen yogurt bites with ice cream in the middle, but without all the extra calories (:

Keep Dinner Light

• Most of us find ourselves relaxing after dinner and after a long day of work/school/play. It's pretty standard to eat dinner, then kick back in front of the tele until bedtime. In that case, the body's energy is only used toward digestion, and the rest that isn't burned off is stored as fat. Rule of thumb: breakfast is the biggest meal of the day, followed by a light lunch and an even lighter dinner. 
• Eating a lighter dinner will help you get a better night's rest. Your body won't be using as much energy trying to digest a heavy meal, so it will be able to rest more fully. 
• What does a "lighter" meal mean? Keep it to salads (easy on the dressing, y'all), water-based soups (not the creamy stuff), fruits, and veggies! Try to not eat carbs or heavy meats at dinner, because those foods are more processed and require more energy to burn off (that's the stuff you need early in the day for energy and before workouts!)
• Try to eat an early dinner before 6 if possible. Late dinners and foods consumed after 6pm are metabolized more slowly overnight, which leads to extra fat storage. 
• If you're used to that midnight snack, try drinking water instead. Thirst can sometimes be mistaken for hunger, which leads to overeating.

Eating Habits

Being healthy and fit doesn't only come from working out, but it comes from maintaining a proper, balanced diet. Here are just some of the eating habits and rules I've learned to abide by since adopting a healthier lifestyle:
•Take a daily multivitamin! It's important to get the proper nutrients and vitamins your body needs to stay healthy.
•Limit consumption of refined sugar as much as possible. Learn to say no to baked goods, pastries, ice cream, sugary cereals, candy, and chocolate. Instead of putting refined sugar in coffee, try using milk or honey!
•Stay away from trans fats and keep consumption of saturated fats to a minimum. No fast food!
•Salads are healthy for you because of the lettuce. If you use too much dressing, you might as well just have a burger and fries! Instead of dressing, I like to put Parmesan and fruit or sautéed mushrooms for flavor.
•Going on a diet doesn't mean only counting calories. 200 calories of candy is much worse than 200 calories of fruit. The less processed your meals are, the better!
•Starving yourself is NEVER good. Your body's metabolism will slow down, and once you stop dieting, you'll quickly gain back what you lost. Always eat at least 1200 calories a day, and aim for 5 smaller meals spread throughout the day instead of 3 big meals.
•Eat whole grain pastas and bread! Look at the ingredients on food labels and say away from "enriched" or "refined" flour, which doesn't contain any nutrients.
•To all of you broke college students out there: RAMEN IS SO BAD FOR YOU !!!! You're better off making ham sandwiches or PB&J on wheat bread.
•If I'm hungry for a snack, I try to stick to fruits and stay away from salty foods like crackers. The salt will just make you crave more and you'll end up eating more than you want to.
•Drink water, never soda or concentrated juices.
•Limit alcohol consumption!

It may seem like a lot of rules, but once you get used to eating well, you'll start to crave food that is not only good, but healthy for you as well!

-Brittany