With Christmas approaching quickly, we know you’ll be attending a lot of parties, get-togethers, dinners, and more. Coach Manders has put together her best tips and advice for navigating the holiday parties. Because the last thing we want is for you to be nervous or anxious at this time of year. Hopefully, these tips will help you relax so you can truly enjoy yourself.

There’s nothing worse than getting home late after a long day and realizing you have nothing in the fridge to eat. It’s times like this when a lot of us succumb to less than ideal food choices, or expensive takeaway. Having a backup plan for times like these is important. And it can be as simple as having nonperishable food items in your cupboards like pasta, rice, quinoa, canned vegetables, and frozen food in your freezer like seafood and vegetables, all of which can be cooked quickly in a pinch.

Check out The Ultimate Health & Nutrition Gift Guide!

Ah, The Holidays! It’s the most wonderful time of the year! It’s also when nutrition tends to become an afterthought for most folks for a few reasons…

This is a 30 day journaling & mindfulness project, designed to improve your relationship with food, abandon food guilt, & help you gain full control over your eating habits. Our goal is for you to come out of this more in tune with yourself, what is on your plate, & your eating behaviors. Your next 30 days with us are going to show you a lot about yourself, particularly your relationship with food. Each day, you will have a journaling prompt to complete, along with a mindfulness task to carry with you throughout the day.

New Year's resolutions are the traditions in which we commit to changing an undesired trait or behavior in ourselves, in order to accomplish a personal goal or otherwise improve our quality of life. Until I was 27 years old, my New Year’s Resolution was always weight loss related (along with 90% of the population) with the hope to get the holiday weight gain off. I set myself up for failure, year after year, starting in October, by throwing in the effort towel a little early. I would overindulge for nearly three months straight, only to waste a time meant for personal growth on superficial nonsense that was brought about by my own hand (and mouth).

Each week we choose an ingredient and challenge our clients and community to come up with an exciting recipe featuring the ingredient. Sometimes the ingredient is more challenging and sometimes it’s quite simple to incorporate. The point of the challenge is to encourage everyone to try something new and to get comfortable with being uncomfortable in the kitchen. It’s easy to make the same things over and over out of convenience, but it can become monotonous and boring. Adding variety to our diet is so important for sustainability and overall health.

Fats help us make hormones, and they're the most satiating macronutrient - they slow down digestion and keep us full.

It’s the start of a new week and that means there’s a new ingredient challenge. And this week it’s the most basic fall ingredient of them all. Hello, pumpkin! Pumpkin’s incredibly versatile and I urge you to explore with it this week. It’s great in sweet and savory dishes and it’s rich in vitamin A, potassium, vitamin C, and fiber. You can’t go wrong with this one.

This gut-healing chocolate, date, and sweet potato mousse are so quick and easy to make and requires no baking! My VERY sizable serving ended up being around 20g of carbohydrates, 6g of fat, and 8g of protein, making it a great pre-workout or post-workout treat.

Here are some quick, go-to options for carbs when you’re in a bind and don’t have time to cut up your own potatoes or wait 30 minutes for your rice to cook!

As soon as I heard the sentence “your wrist is broken” come out of my doctor’s mouth, I couldn’t stop laughing. This was ridiculous. 2018 had to be playing tricks on me. With Hashimoto’s coming to light in May, finding out my body wasn’t producing hormones in July, and now this???

The ingredient challenge this week was black beans so I decided to work on my baking skills. I’ve never been the best at baking with protein powder, and I gave up for some time because it gets quite expensive if you have to continually throw away batches and batches of food. But I decided it was time to experiment again.

Sometimes, folks are so busy that can’t spend a few hours in the kitchen a week to food prep. Or, they aren’t Master Chefs (yet). I went scouring through the frozen foods section of a few grocery stores and found some quick go-to options. My hope is that these options alleviate some stress and help you guys with time management.

Our bodies need to recover. The harder you train, the more important it is to make time for it. Preventative care is so important, yet many of us wait until we’ve pushed ourselves too far. I hear it all too often, the frustration from clients who’ve suffered an injury because they weren’t proactive or they ran themselves into the ground. Recovering from an injury is stressful and a test of our mental strength. Trust me, I’ve been there myself.

Another Pizza Party coming right up. This time with those fall flavors we love and that keeps us feeling all warm and cozy as the temps drop. Our ingredient challenge this week was Butternut Squash. Who doesn’t love a sweet and savory pizza tho? I mean, come on! This one did not disappoint at all. Save it for a day when you have the macro room though or for a rest day! Definitely a treat!

This week we challenged our clients and ourselves to come up with the most creative recipe using butternut squash, our ingredient of the week. I decided to keep this recipe super simple and even used a combination of Butternut Squash pasta sauce and regular tomato marinara.

I LOVE pizza! And every once in a while I get a serious craving for it. I also love cooking and eating at home because I can control what goes into my meals. Sure, eating out is great every once in a while, but pizza is rarely loaded with the amount of protein and veggies I want it to be loaded with. So I figured, if I could just come up with a killer crust recipe, I’d be set.

We all know that one person who seems to have their life together, everything seems so easy and carefree. I think we all strive to be like that in some way or another. That person probably goes into each day with a plan.