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Sunday, December 14, 2014

A Smoothie King in Sheep's Clothing

I walked into the Smoothie King and had to squint my eyes. What a clean, bright establishment! Larger than life photos of happy, healthy people and huge letters encouraging me to "Be Good" to myself wrapped around the store.

But I knew going in that Smoothie King is a sugared-up wolf in sheep's clothing.

I don't normally patronize Smoothie King. But I live in a new town and need to promote my Texas Fit Chicks boot camp, so I visited the establishment in the hopes of dropping off a flier or two and reaching people who have a desire to "be healthy." So my daughter and I decided to throw them some business one Saturday morning.

As per usual when we go out to eat, Zach and I visited the nutrition website to select a healthy smoothie before I was standing at the counter to make a decision.

I was utterly flabbergasted at the nutritional listing of the smoothies. I'd estimate 99% of these things are nothing but sugar bombs. Here are a few of the highlights (review it yourself here). Note that these are for the 20 ounce "small" smoothies:

Remember, to convert grams to teaspoons, divide by 4
- Orange Ka-BAM -- 469 calories, 108 grams of sugar (the equivalent of 27 teaspoons of sugar)
- Lemon Twist Strawberry -- 398 calories, 94 grams of sugar (23 teaspoons)
- Coconut Surprise -- 460 calories, 64 grams of fat, 83 grams of sugar (20 teaspoons)

I could go on and on. And on.

Do you know what sugar is doing to us as a country?
- Weight gain
- Diabetes
- Impaired immune system
- Increased risk of heart disease
- Leptin resistance (causing an inability to tell when we've had enough food)
- Cancer
- Sugar addiction

And more:


I'd be willing to bet that the average person on the street considers a stop at Smoothie King to be a healthy choice. One that is helping, not hurting, their attempts to live a healthy lifestyle.

And then they order the equivalent of 25 teaspoons of sugar.

As a personal trainer and fitness nutrition specialist, it is so frustrating to see deceptive marketing everywhere you look. Without guidance or a desire to really find out what is healthy and what is not, the average person does not stand a chance in a grocery store or restaurant.


Now Provides Fiber!

Come. On.

From the LiveStrong website:
Sugar is the first ingredient on the list in Kellogg's Froot Loops. Grains include whole-grain corn flour, wheat flour, which is not a whole grain, and whole-grain oat flour. Froot Loops contains oat fiber and soluble corn fiber. This cereal contains hydrogenated vegetable oil, a trans fat. It also contains natural fruit flavors and several dyes and artificial colors. It's fortified with vitamins and minerals and contains BHT, a chemical preservative. A 1-cup serving contains 110 calories, 1 g of fat, 25 g of carbohydrates, including 3 g of fiber and 12 g of sugar, and 1 g of protein.
Sugar is sugar is sugar. Whether it's coming to you in the form of a banana or Froot Loops does not matter. While it's not popular to stand up and say you ought to limit the amount of fruit that you eat, it is true that we need to keep an eye on our fruit intake in addition to watching added sugar. Which is everywhere!

- Yogurt
- Instant oatmeal
- Ketchup
- Peanut butter
- Jarred tomato sauce

It's everywhere.

Here are some of sugar's aliases:


















Ugh. My trip to Smoothie King was weeks ago, and I'm still disturbed by it.

By the way, I did find a smoothie with no sugar in it -- the Gladiator. At 180 calories, 45 grams of protein and no added sugar, it was a good choice in a sea of bad choices. The best choice on the kids' menu was the "Choc-A-Laka" with 210 calories, 15 grams of sugar, and 13 grams of protein. It's made of frozen yogurt and cocoa, and contains 255 mg of sodium. Ho hum.

Be careful out there, people.

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Workout of the Day

P90X3 Yoga

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Six Months Later

Wow, now that was quite a blogging hiatus! Six months later and our life looks quite different than it did on May 28, back in Dallas/Fort Worth making homemade laundry detergent.

The past two years have been turbulent for our family, to say the least. Without going into too much hairy detail, suffice it to say that we have been put through the pressure cooker, and have come out on the other side wiser, humbler, and thankful. Things happened to us that were utterly, completely bewildering to me. In the process I learned that God does not do things TO us, but he does things FOR us...even though at times that was very hard to swallow.

We learned about good friends. We learned about tough decisions. We learned about flexibility. We learned about letting go. Here are just a few of the changes in our life over the last six months:

1. We moved to suburban Austin.

Three hours and 200 miles south of our old homestead, we now live in bustling Cedar Park, north of Austin. It did not take long for us to like it here. It is a great place to have a family, with tons of activities, a great library, tons of grocery stores -- a Sprouts just a mile from the house! I was immediately struck with just how nice people are here. It's not unusual for someone to chat with you at the park, and as my commuting husband will attest, drivers actually let you in when you try to merge. It's all very refreshing.

2. We are home schooling our kids.

Considering that my husband just spent ten years in the public school system, you might think that our decision to home school our two children is some sort of statement on today's public schools or anyone who chooses to send their kids there. It is not.

Public schools are very important to our society. Zach continues to support the institution in his current position; in fact, he is able to help more districts now than the single district he used to work for. For many students, public school -- and the wonderful, dedicated teachers who work there -- is among the only positive things in their day-to-day life.

But Zach and I have the desire, the resources, and the ability to teach our children at home. We also have some very fantastic, very bright children. While I admit that my first response to Zach's suggestion that we home school the kids was, "WHAAAAT? You want me to do WHAAAAAT?", it has been among the best experiences of my life.

As our research proved during the decision-making process, I uncovered the fact that not all home schooling mothers wear embroidered denim jumpers and buns in their hair. And when I met the other moms in our home schooling co-op group (where we meet each Tuesday), I found out that these people are smart, talented, and dedicated to giving their kids an excellent education. A classically trained opera singer, a nuclear engineer, an illustrator of books about Mesopotamian hieroglyphics (that is a real thing, apparently!) are just a few of the moms in our group.

I am learning history, Latin, science, and math right alongside my kids, and in the process I learn more and more about the pure awesomeness (put that on a vocab quiz!) of my kids. Our family relationship has grown so much in the last four months. I could go on and on about it, but I'll just jot down a few of the things that I love about doing school at home:

- Learning is constant -- not just 8-3. When the kids were in school, I found it difficult to extract what it was they were learning about, so reinforcement was lacking. Now we learn, then reinforce all day long, and then talk to Dad about it at dinner. We are learning all the time.

- We can go as fast -- or slow -- as we want. Today Kate finished up 1st grade math curriculum, and so we will move on to 2nd grade math.

- Quality play time. We get so much work done in less time, which means more time for parks, Legos, reading, field trips, library visits, imagining, silly games, and more.

- Less stress. Quite simply, I have never seen my children so happy. "I used to dread Mondays," Drew told me a few weeks ago. "Now I look forward to them, because I want to see all the new stuff we're going to learn." That alone makes this decision worthwhile.

3. Zach gets to be home from work at 5:30pm.

This is a really big deal. He is home from work, and work does not follow him home. No one calls, rarely is something looming over his head. Rarely is he brooding about a decision to be made or a tough conversation that has to be had. Work life balance. It's where it's at!

Among the things that have not changed are:

- Our 5am workouts.
- My Texas Fit Chicks boot camp (although my new class starts at 5:30am instead of 5am, which makes a remarkably BIG difference).
- Our general health-nutness. (It's actually much easier to be a health nut in Austin...there are more of us down here.)

All in all, things are good. Finally. For many bitter, angry months we asked ourselves, "What did we do to deserve this?" and now we happily, thankfully ask ourselves, "What did we do to deserve this?"


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Workout of the Day
PiYo Buns