Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

This week foods that help depression and anxiety, how much exercise you need for lifelong youth, and how bad habits impact dad’s swimmers.

Next week’s Mindful Meal Challenge will start again on Monday. Sign up now to join us!

Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!

I also share links on Twitter @summertomato and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

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Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

Next week’s Mindful Meal Challenge will start again on Monday. Sign up now to join us!

This week dinner is your enemy, vegetarians suffer from depression, and vitamin B supplements cause cancer.

Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!

I also share links on Twitter @summertomato and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

Read the rest of this story »

One of the hardest things about making your healthy habits stick is finding ways to do them when you are very tired, stressed or busy.

Randi is a school teacher, which means that in the summertime she has more free time to focus on her healthstyle. During that time, she enjoys making delicious and healthy meals for herself and her family.

However, when school is back in session she no longer has the luxury of a full day to plan her meals, which leaves her feeling stressed about what she is going to make for dinner each night. This pressure causes her to avoid cooking altogether, substituting snacks for a proper meal on the weeknights.

As a breast cancer survivor Randi’s health is of the utmost importance to her. She knows that cooking nutritious meals each week is necessary to maintain her weight and stay in good health.

Luckily for Randi she has all of the tools she needs in order to achieve her cooking goal. By acknowledging some of her limiting beliefs and finding ways to work around them we come up with a strategy that enables her to cook healthy meals year-round.

Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.

Related links:

Foodist Kitchen

The No.1 Thing That Prevents You from Changing Your Habits (limiting beliefs)

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If you’d like to be a guest on the show, please fill out the form here and tell us your story.

After successfully losing over seventy pounds on a meal replacement diet Cara has reached her ideal weight and is feeling great. But now she faces a new challenge: weight maintenance.

Knowing that diets rarely work long-term and that she needs a more sustainable approach to her healthstyle she is ready to tackle the hard work. In Cara’s case, that means getting over one of her biggest fears.

Cara hates cooking, but knows that learning how to prepare her own food is necessary in order for her to maintain her weight loss. After putting it off her entire life, she says she is now “trying to focus on how to make the hard work doable.”

Together we explore the story Cara has built up in her mind over the years regarding food preparation. Having struggled with this topic myself, I share how I got over my own fear of cooking and suggest ways she can approach it in a much less intimidating way, find inspiration and even get excited about it.

Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.

Related links:

Foodist Kitchen

How To Overcome Your Fear of Cooking

Listen:

Listen on iTunes

Listen on Stitcher

Listen on Soundcloud

If you’d like to be a guest on the show, please fill out the form here and tell us your story.

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

Next week’s Mindful Meal Challenge will start again on Monday. Sign up now to join us!

This week the folly in calorie counting, sardine population down 95%, and Dow Chemical asks EPA to ignore science on pesticides.

Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!

I also share links on Twitter @summertomato and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

Read the rest of this story »

Rachel knew that having a baby would make it harder to maintain her healthstyle. But it’s now been 18 months and she still hasn’t found a way to regularly make the best choices and ends up eating out 2-3 nights per week.

Her issue is that her old healthstyle––which she loved––required an amount of time and energy that simply aren’t realistic for her anymore. She and her husband love to cook elaborate meals, but trying to fit it into their new baby life just isn’t working.

We also identify a few other invisible barriers that are blocking Rachel from fully utilizing her tiny New York kitchen. Subtle barriers can derail any well-intentioned healthstyle, but when you’re exhausted and every single part of your life feels new and overwhelming, identifying and eliminating those barriers is extra hard.

Together, Rachel and I come up with a few ways to simply her meals and make weekday cooking more practical.

Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.

Related links:

Foodist Kitchen

How To Cook Perfect Rice Without A Rice Cooker (and store it for months)

Listen:

Listen on iTunes

Listen on Stitcher

Listen on Soundcloud

If you’d like to be a guest on the show, please fill out the form here and tell us your story.

For the Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup. 

Great news! The Mindful Meal Challenge was such a success we’re going to run it again every week. Sign up now to start on Monday!

This week how to trust your future self, a simple way to better choices, and how parents impact your adult relationships.

Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!

I also share links on Twitter @summertomato and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

Read the rest of this story »

Photo by Jules Clancy

Huge thanks to Jules Clancy of Stonesoup for this week’s article introducing me to the concept of mindful cooking. I’ve certainly made the mistake of viewing cooking as a nuisance, even though I know it ultimately benefits me and my family. I love this new way of looking at it.

Jules LOVES real food and hanging out in her kitchen. She has a degree in Food Science and is the author of ‘5-Ingredients 10-Minutes’. For a free eCookbook of delicious 5-ingredient recipes sign up for the Stonesoup weekly newsletter.

Recently I realized I’ve been making a huge mistake. Like many modern food writers, there’s one thing I’ve had completely wrong. Rather than celebrating the joy that cooking can bring to our lives, I’ve been guilty of apologizing for activity in the kitchen.

I’ve stressed how quick and easy my recipes are (I did write a whole book called ‘5-Ingredients 10-Minutes’) instead of sharing how great they taste or how good they make you feel.

I still believe cooking need not be complicated nor time consuming to produce delicious, satisfying results. But I now realize that apologizing for time spent in the kitchen, sends the message that cooking is a chore. Not an activity worthy of your precious minutes and hours.

The thing is, I love cooking. And I want to share that love.

I hope to inspire you to reframe how you think about cooking. Because there’s so much more to gain than just improving your healthstyle.

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Serena had always enjoyed cooking dinner and it was a Home Court Habit she highly valued. Then when her schedule got a little crazy her cooking habit fell by the wayside. While struggles like this are pretty normal when life gets busy, what stumped Serena was that her cooking habit never resumed even when her schedule got back to normal.

Often what stops you from maintaining a healthy habit is that you view it as a chore rather than as something you enjoy, but this wasn’t the case for Serena. She truly did love to cook and felt very strongly about all the ways it positively impacted her life that were now missing.

So what happened?

It took some digging, but Serena and I ultimately discovered that she had lost one of her Supporting Habits––meal prepping––that gave her the edge she needed to maintain a regular cooking habit. It turns out that meal prepping is the difference between whether making dinner is easy when she gets home from work or feels like a big project she doesn’t have the energy for. We then took a look at her current schedule and found a way to fit meal prepping back into her week so she could start cooking again.

This episode takes you through how to go about identifying and reinstating Supporting Habits that are necessary for maintaining your Home Court Habits and long-term health.

Wish you had more time to listen to the podcast? I use an app called Overcast (no affiliation) to play back my favorite podcasts at faster speeds, dynamically shortening silences in talk shows so it doesn’t sound weird. It’s pretty rad.

Related links:

Foodist Kitchen

Decision Fatigue

Zojirushi rice cooker

Farro recipes

Listen:

Listen on iTunes

Listen on Stitcher

Listen on Soundcloud

If you’d like to be a guest on the show, please fill out the form here and tell us your story.

For the Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup. 

This week skipping workouts decreases brain circulation, the FDA considers what’s “healthy,” and nuts have fewer calories than thought.

Too busy to read them all? Try this awesome free speed reading app to read at 300+ wpm. So neat!

I also share links on Twitter @summertomato and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

Read the rest of this story »