That's Fit

Fruit overripe? Don't let it go bad -- there's an easy and healthy way to preserve those fruits for future eating.

Here are some "kick butt" tips for keeping fit, active and regret free on the Fourth of July from KickYourButtIntoGear.com. As KickYourButtIntoGear.com is owned and managed by a fellow expert in the field of fitness, Exercise Physiologist, Tracy Benham ... the tips are awesome advice for you and you family to adhere to!

• Sports and summertime go together. Plan an activity early in the day. Play baseball, touch football; go to the local pool or beach.
• Get outside early and see if you can think of and do more than four activities before four o'clock to celebrate the Fourth.
• Eat a bowl of fruit before you head for the barbecue goodies. Tons of fruits are in season. Make a Fourth of July fruit cocktail. Blueberries, raspberries, strawberries...
• Use a plate. You will be less tempted to mindlessly snack.
• Skip the cheese and the Mayo on your burger and load up on lettuce tomatoes, pickles, onions and relish.
• Alternate cocktails and other caloric beverages with a glass of water. Or ... just avoid the high calorie beverages all together!

Sounds impossible, doesn't it? Who in the world ever thought of going to Disney and eating healthy? Crazy talk, right? Wrong! Your loving online Fitzness Expert (me) who has extremely high standards on what I put in both my children's mouth and my own can spend a day at the Magic Kingdom or EPCOT and eat as well as I would in my own home. Disney has made grand efforts to improve the healthfulness of the foods they offer, and has even gone overboard with an abundance of fresh fruit stands located throughout each theme park.

I just spent a week at Walt Disney World in Florida and returned home half a pound less than I was the day before vacation. Want to eat right while enjoying the magic with Mickey Mouse? Read on.

• Mickey makes mealtime easy on the fitness fan. Every restaurant I ventured through offered several menu options based on lean grilled meat, veggies, and/or fruit. Even the children's meals come standard with side items like: grapes, carrot sticks, and unsweetened applesauce. They also come with bottled water or skim milk. Sweet! Parents would have to go out of their way to substitute french fries and soda for their children instead of the healthy stuff. Eww! You the fitness fan, certainly wouldn't do that!
• Sit down dining restaurants offer Egg Beaters cooked without oil in lieu of regular scrambled eggs. I enjoyed this perk while dining with Minnie and Goofy at Disney's Yacht Club Resort.
• Resort dining facilities offer endless refrigerators full of fresh fruit, veggies, yogurt, dried fruit, nutritious snack bars and more.
• Seek out healthier desserts. Anywhere they are served, Disney has made efforts to make reduced fat, low sugar or fresh fruit treats available.

Something wonderful happened a couple of weeks ago at my supermarket: Fresh, ripe strawberries started appearing on the shelves, and my fridge has been full of them ever since. That's right -- it's strawberry season. I'm crazy about berries of all kinds, and strawberries are my favourite. Thankfully, my body loves them too -- they're low in calories and high in nutrients and antioxidants.

Me, I eat my strawberries au naturel -- I slice them, put them in a small Tupperware container, tote them with me to the office and munch on them all day long. But if this doesn't float your boat, here are some other ways to enjoy them:

• Add them to your morning cereal
  
• Throw a handful in a protein smoothie
• Stir some into a bowl of plain yogurt, and add just a little bit of honey for sweetness -- and some granola too if you like.
  
• Throw some in your salad
• Slice and serve with some fine cheeses
• Entertaining? Top slices of angel food cake with them -- and maybe a bit of whipped cream if you're feeling indulgent

Got any ideas you'd like to share?

By this point, most of us have accepted the fact that dessert is out of the question most nights of the week. Well, if we want to maintain our weight, that is. But we can't help the occasional indulgences, right? After all, what fun is life if you can't eat something you enjoy every now and then? And for some of us, what we enjoy is a sweet, delicious serving of dessert.

And who doesn't love a good slice of New York-style Cheesecake every now and then? I know I can't resist -- I love sweet, rich things. And though cheesecake can't been good for you by any stretch of the imagination, it might not be all the bad. What do you think?

I'm always shocked and amazed that anyone would actually consider the doughnut an appropriate part of breakfast. I imagine most folks would snub the idea of eating cake as a good idea in the morning. The doughnut is literally FRIED CAKE! Who the hell thought that would be a good idea for a meal?

In my younger years, I suppose I just considered doughnuts, well.......doughnuts! My parents always seemed to have a bag or box of them on the counter and they were a fairly regular part of my breakfasts growing up. (My Mom probably never thought about what she was actually feeding me either!) Then one day I had the epiphany. Doughnuts are made by frying cake batter in oil for about 90 seconds. They're also often filled or covered with cream, chocolate or just pure sugar.

I have a bunch of fun, lower in fat, less bad for you dessert options in the recipe section of my web site Fitzness.com. This Low fat Blueberry Napoleon with pistachio cream is a favorite of mine that is hugely popular at holiday parties. I like sweet treats too, but I'm not willing to stuff myself or my friends with butter or oil. Some of the recipes are real deal healthy, and some of them just offer better versions of the really bad stuff.

I love to bake and my treats are rarely pretty, but they're incredibly low in fat and absolutely delicious. Enjoy! Healthy Holidays from your online trainer Fitz!

I definitely have a sweet tooth that I fight on an almost a daily basis, so any article that promises a healthier way to satisfy it always has my immediate attention. And this one had something I didn't really think of before: figs.

Figs have been around for centuries, and amazingly there are over 150 different kinds. They are a good source of dietary fiber, and when used in dessert recipes can be just as satisfying and decadent as more traditional sweets like chocolate and ice cream.

Want to give 'em a shot? Try this recipe for Figs with Port and Toasted Almonds. Sounds good to me!

Fall is a bit of a dieting disaster for me -- there's Thanksgiving, Halloween and the birthdays of several people close to me, mine included. So when turning down dessert isn't on the agenda, what's a girl to do? Well, offer to make dessert and use a healthy recipe. eDiets has four great recipes:

• Low-fat pumpkin cheesecake
• Pecan rice pudding
• Baked apples
• Low fat mocha almond pie

Sound yummy? Check out the recipes here. And if you have any healthy fall dessert, please do tell!

This is it. This is the dessert we've come to know and love at my house. No more big bowls of ice cream, chocolatey brownies, or sinful creations. This is all we need, all we want, all we crave. Seriously.

Who knew a hearty serving of fresh fruit could be so inviting? Not us, until we gave it a try and then stuck with it. Now, the sugary, fatty stuff isn't even appealing. Our mouths drool for strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, grapes, watermelon, and kiwi. When the season for this fruit finally comes to an end, we'll substitute apples, oranges, and bananas. Give us any sort of fresh fruit and we're satisfied. You could be too.

Why not slice and dice some of your own fresh fruit today? Forget the ooey, gooey something you'd normally eat and give this a try. Do it again tomorrow, the next day, the day after that. See if you can let go of your unhealthy habits and learn to love what's good for you. I have a hunch you can.

To read up on the merits of fresh fruit, click here.

One of my favourite desserts is Trifle. Fruit, whipped cream, custard, lady fingers and sherry is about the most perfect combination of sweet goodness, but it's not the best for the ole'waistline.

So when I saw this healthy-sounding recipe for trifle on our sister blog, Slashfood, I almost jumped for joy. Here are the ingredients that you layer in a bowl:

• Angel food cake -- it's one of the healthiest cakes out there, if there can be such a thing)
  
• Raspberry yogurt (can be low-fat)
  
• Cool whip (can be fat-free)
  
• Fruit -- they suggest canned peaches and strawberries, blueberries and kiwis.
  

Yum -- I can't wait to try this. For the full recipe, check out Slashfood.

Chinese food isn't exactly known for being healthy -- at least, the Western translation of it isn't -- but it appears as if strides are being taken to make it more waistline-friendly, and they're starting with a sweet treat: Traditional mooncakes.

Made with sugar-infused lotus-bean paste and duck eggs, mooncakes are a traditional pastry given and eaten at Autumn Feast in China each year. But at 975 calories and 46 grams of fat, they're far from a healthy choice. So forward-thinking bakers are coming up with healthier versions -- including a diabetic-friendly one that uses a sugar substitute. Others are filling the pastry with fruit and yogurt, and some are cutting our refined white sugar and flour. You can even find organic mooncakes. But while these versions might sound healthier, they'll pack a calorie wallop no matter what and should be consumed in moderation.

What do you think -- is calorie-cutting a positive global initiative?

We all know that desserts are bad for us. They're made almost entirely of sugar and fat, and they hold very little nutritional value, if any at all. And yet we can't seem to resist them. Well, this article might make you think twice. It's a bit shocking how many desserts out there pack more of a calorie punch than the meal itself. For example, one slice of Dulce de Leche Cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory has 1,010 calories, 74g fat, 76g sugar, 83g carbs. Oh my!

Next time you just must have dessert, wait until you get home, where you can actually keep track of what you're putting into your mouth. Great ideas for dessert include fat-free pudding, frozen yogurt, fresh fruit with a big of fat-free cool whip or even a few pieces of chocolate. But you might know an even better healthy dessert recipe -- if so, please share!

Barbecuing is one of the great things about summer. But as I mentioned in this post, all that fatty meat can be a recipe for disaster. So what can you do to make your backyard barbecue healthy and fun for the whole family? Well, we've written a lot on summer barbecues -- there's these suggestions from our own Jessica, these ideas for games, and then there's this article from Glee Magazine, which lists some suggestions for your summer backyard barbecues:

• Have veggie burgers instead of beef burgers
• Replace potato chips with soy chips
• Enjoy a fruit-based dessert instead of s'mores

They also suggest using vegan cheese instead of regular cheese, but being a die-hard cheese fan, I can't advocate that. After all you need to have some fun at the barbecue, right?

Another thing I love at barbecues is fresh veggies cooked on the grill. What about you?

Whenever I've realized that I've let a few too many extra pounds creep up on me and decided that it's time to up the exercise and decrease the calorie intake, the one thing that I find I crave the most is gooey, sugary desserts. I know that cravings work differently for everyone, but for me it's not salty snacks I dream about, it's sweets.

While I realize that cutting out high-calorie foods with low nutritional value is what's necessary when trying to lose a few pounds, sometimes I just can't talk myself out of dessert. If you often find yourself feeling the same way, you may be interested to hear that "mini desserts", or desserts that are still full of calories but which are served in very small portions, were named by the National Food Association as the top food trend for 2007. This article about the delicious, bite-sized treats, lists some of the tastiest and where they're being served at restaurants across the country.

The great thing about mini-desserts is, if you don't live in any of the cities listed and can't visit the restaurants to try desserts recommended, you can still go out to your favorite eatery and order something delectable off the menu. You just have to remember to share with a friend or make sure to only eat a small portion on your own. The trick is having the will-power to stop at just a few bites and still feel satisfied.