A Lazy Girl's Guide to Meal Planning - Part 1: Costco Wholesale (the Mothership)

January 1st is now two days away and coming with it a swirl of resolutions, hope, and diets galore!  In preparation for this new year/chapter of my life, I have begun cleaning out my fridge and cabinets for all the healthy, delicious food that I hope to fill them with.  I will also be starting my second Fit Girl's Guide challenge on January 5th - the Fitkini Body Challenge!

For me, the key to staying on track is not only through meal planning, but also through "emergency" back-up plans (i.e. what the heck will I eat when I'm too busy/lazy to prep and cook!?!)  Therefore, I thought a proper Costco trip was in order, to see what goodies I could pick up.  I have yet to visit Costco since I began my first Fit Girl's Guide challenge on December 1st, so I was interested to go in with my Fit Girl mindset!  I have dieted in the past, but something about the Fit Girl's Guide has made it easier and more realistic for me to create healthy meals!  (For one, the fact that they didn't completely drop carbs was one of the biggest selling points!)  Anyways, back to the crowded aisles of Costco, where I stood with the eyes of a hawk, scanning for any potential Fit Girl Finds!

The goodies:

Skinny Pop Popcorn:  My boyfriend actually hunted this down at Costco because he loves the stuff!  How can you not for 39 calories per cup?!  This giant bag costs $5.29 and is worth every penny!  Snack away without the guilt!

Kirkland Premium Chunk Chicken Breast:  6 - 12.5 oz. cans for only $11.59!  That is $2 per can!  I felt like I was robbing Costco!  Get the chicken, make a delicious chicken salad and you will not be disappointed (reminder: post my easy-peasy chicken salad recipe asap!)

Minsley 100% Organic Brown Rice (Microwaveable):  90 seconds for delicious brown rice plus no dirty pan?  Sign me up!  6 bowls costs $6.99, not the cheapest, but I will gladly pay $1 for an easy, filling side!

Good Grains Organic Quinoa & Kale Blend (with citrus & black pepper seasoning):  Found this in the freezer section and the package includes 4 steamable bags.  1 cup is only 100 calories!  Contains approximately 11 - 1 cup servings for $9.99.  Oh the glorious recipes I will prepare with this!

Trident Alaskan Salmon Burgers: Best part is that they are made from wild salmon!  Each patty is 170 calories and I cannot wait to enjoy these on a salad, in a pita, or protein-style!  No fillers in these either, the main ingredient is the salmon and the rest of the ingredients (mainly seasonings) make up less than 2% of the burgers. Great price as well, only $13.99 for 12 burgers!

Kirkland Tilapia Loins:  These are another great backup plan for a quick and easy protein.  Found in the freezer section, they are only 110 calories for 4 oz. of tilapia.  Planning on some fish tacos and ceviche with these bad boys!  $14.99 buys you a 40 oz. bag (~10 - 4 oz. portions!)

Sabra Hummus Singles:   I love having these around when I am in a rush to get out the door for school or work.  Each package contains 1/4 cup of hummus, which is more than you technically need for a snack if you are watching calories, but can be great to have half for snacktime and save some for lunch!  (Still better than grabbing a bag of chips from the vending machine!)  Each package is 150 calories and the box of 16 singles is $5.99.

Kirkland Creamy Almond Butter:   I normally don't consume a lot of peanut butter or any nut butter for that matter, however, the Fit Girl's Guide has really gotten me into almond butter.  I bought a small jar from my grocery store (for $7, yikes!) and it is almost gone!  When I stumbled across this 26 oz. jar at Costco I was pretty stoked because it only cost $10.99!  Also, there is only one ingredient: roasted almonds.  Ah the simplicity, I love it.  (Forgot to add this to my group photo above, so it earned itself a premium solo photo).

So those are my Fit Girl finds at Costco!  This bounty cost me under $100 and will provide supplemental recipe material for many of my meals (I'm actually getting excited just thinking about all the different possibilities!)  Next week I'm planning on tackling Trader Joe's... it might be a VERY long post!  Well this is fit girl Shelby signing out -- stay fit and stay happy!

Turkey Sausage Egg FitFuffin!

Good morning Fit World!

Woke up today to find out that I was one of the winners for the Fit Girl's Guide December #WinterWonderlandChallenge !  Feeling pretty motivated for my second challenge now!  Thought I would share one of my favorite breakfasts from the past month of the #28DayJumpstart by Fit Girl's Guide.  They called it an Egg McFitfun, but for some reason I couldn't remember the name and kept calling it an Egg FitFuffin!  My boyfriend really got a kick out of that (also he loved these healthy little breakfast sandwiches!)

Some of my favorite things about the challenge include the fact that the food is "boyfriend-approved" (as I like to call it).  I would also say it's kid friendly as well, which is great because often through our fit journey's we don't just cook and eat by ourselves!  We usually have significant others, family, and children that have to come along for the ride too.  As a busy grad student, I can only imagine how busy mothers are when trying to eat clean and live a healthy life, so when a program comes along that is great for the whole family, well HOORAY!

Another great part of the Fit Girl's Guide is the fact that the recipes are so easy!  They even outline your grocery list for the whole week and when to prep which items to keep your time in the kitchen to the minimal!  So with that being said, here is my version of their delicious Egg McFitfun (watch out McDonald's!)

Turkey Sausage Egg FitFuffin!

• Thomas' Light Multi-grain English Muffin (Only 100 calories & delicious!) - Simply put it in the toaster

• 1 Fried egg - Just use a little olive oil cooking spray & sprinkle with salt & pepper

• 1 Jones Farm Turkey sausage patty (see picture below!  These are so tasty for only 60 calories!) - I cooked in the pan next to the egg!

• 1/2 slice of provolone cheese (~35 calories) - I have learned to control my burning desire to eat as much cheese as possible at every meal!  One of my hardest habits to break!

• Tomato slice - This can even be heated up slightly in the pan as well!

• Small handful of spinach & raw mushrooms - Toss in the pan after the egg and patty have cooked and use the remaining grease/oil left in the pan to saute these!  Sprinkle with a dash of garlic powder for added flavor!

• Sit back and enjoy!

As you can see, my dog Tobi thought the Egg FitFuffin smelled delicious!  Here are the wonderful turkey sausage products I stumbled upon in the freezer aisle of my local grocery store!  Not only are they low calorie, but also have no MSG, no nitrites, and no preservatives!  I even introduced my family to them while staying there for Christmas; they were even a hit with my picky little brother (we never told them they were made of turkey, ha!)  To the right is the picture of breakfast with my family.  Instead of having an English muffin, I opted for a tasty hash brown (for 140 calories, we get ours frozen from Target!)  Kept the meal and my family healthy, while sharing with them a new breakfast option!

This is another variation of the Egg FitFuffin that I love!

This one used only spinach, tomato, and feta cheese along with the fried egg!  

Hope you enjoyed all the Egg FitFuffins!  I have seen recipes of pinterest where you can actually make a bunch ahead of time, wrap in foil, and freeze them!  This way you can simply grab one and warm it up for a quick, hearty breakfast to-go!  

Turkey Burger Wedge Salad

This delicious creation was the result of a much needed cleaning of my kitchen!  Hoping to clear out as much clutter and unused food as possible before the New Year, I found the perfect combination of ingredients for this amazing lunch.  (Going to keep these recipe blog posts short and sweet!  Could never figure out why most blogs babble on and on and give a whole family history to why the recipe is being made and featured!)  So here it goes!

Turkey Burger Wedge Salad:

1 Jennie-O Lean Turkey Burger, seasoned with garlic powder, salt & pepper

1/4 head of iceberg lettuce

1 hard-boiled egg

Tomato slices and diced

Sliced pickled beets

Reduced fat Feta cheese

2 tbl. turkey bacon bits (gobble, gobble!)

Walden Farms Calorie Free Blue Cheese (This is the key to keeping the salad low calorie!  I love browsing the dressing aisle for tasty new dressings and this one is delicious!)

Hope you enjoy!  I thought the turkey burger would be dry and bland, but the seasoning plus cooking it on the grill made in flavorful and delicious sans bun! 

Becoming a "Fit Girl" - Social Media as a Means of Fitspiration

28 days ago I embarked on the "28 Day Jumpstart" Winter Wonderland Challenge from Fit Girl's Guide.  These ladies have figured out quite the simple, cute & fun way to motivate girls to get fit via clean eating and at-home workouts.  Their Fit Girl's Guide was available for about $20 with an online code and easily downloaded to my computer, where I could view it there or on my phone.  This guide was complete with tips & tricks, grocery lists, meal prep plans, recipes, & more!  I was thoroughly impressed, but what was more impressive was the online community that has sprung from this Fit Girl revolution!

Many of the girls taking on the 28 day challenge decide to create new instagram accounts, often bearing the "fitgirl" badge somewhere in the name.  I chose to make one for myself so I could share my progress without forcing my new found "Fit Girl" lifestyle on my current friends and family.  Upon creating and sharing a few posts of my before pics & goals, I found myself swirling in a whirlwind of fitgirl likes, comments, & support.  After discovering the photo editing app "A Beautiful Mess" and realizing my talent for adorable food photos and designs, I woke up one morning to find that my Fit Girl instagram account had grown to almost 500 followers!  Fit Girl's Guide had shared one of my breakfast photos on their instagram to their 1.2 million followers and that was how I launched my new hobby as an insta-famous (as my brother calls it) Fit Girl representative (self-proclaimed)!

So now, on the last day of my 28 Day Jumpstart Challenge, I am almost 9lbs. less (which is impressive because I barely did the workouts and had many cheat meals/days), I have decided to expand my Fit Girl kingdom to the wonderful world of blogging.  The basis of my posts are easy, health recipes (because I am lazy and do not have much time to spend shopping, cooking, and prepping).  I hope you enjoy this page and my journey (and I apologize in advance if I go on public health rants here and there, it's my line of study after all).  Also, I'm not one to push products upon people, but I highly suggest you purchase a copy of the Fit Girl's Guide!

If you are interested, please follow me on instagram too!  (@fitgirl_shelby)

Case Study: Shape Up Somerville

Shape Up Somerville started as a community-based participatory research (CBPR) trial in 2003 with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.¹ The goal was to create a multi-level approach to prevention of obesity among elementary children in 1^st through 3^rd grade.²  In Somerville, “44% of the city’s 1^st through 3^rd graders were overweight or at-risk of being overweight.”² The city of Somerville partnered with Tufts University, the Somerville School Committee, and a variety of community-based organizations to engage the community and influence the multiple sectors that would have an impact on obesity prevention.³ A broad range of strategies were used to develop and implement projects that would coordinate efforts to create environmental changes within the community, specifically targeting elementary aged children.³

Formative research, including: focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and community meetings, were conducted to gather data for the community initiative.¹  Building relationships was crucial to the success of Shape Up Somerville.  Tufts University met with community leaders and conducted key informant interviews to gain support and trust within the community.¹ Additional support for the intervention was garnered from elected and appointed officials in the community, as well as numerous organizations.  To aid in the design of the intervention, focus groups were held with parents, children, and teachers.¹ Other forms of community outreach included: monthly parent and community newsletters, community events, local media utilization, meetings with the Parent Teacher Association, and the use of public forums for specifically parents.⁴

Projects and programs that Shape Up Somerville developed included:

• Shape Up Approved Restaurants that display healthy options on their menus.³
• Improved school nutrition program which increased the amounts of healthy food choices and decreased the amount of unhealthy options to students.³
• HEAT Club In-School Curriculum, which stands for Health Eating, Acting time.  90 teachers were trained to teach this curriculum.⁴
• Safe Routes to School to increase walkability in the community.  This included walkability checklists from parents, pedestrian trainings, and data collection to inform future policies and city planning.⁴
• Training clinicians and school nurses to address overweight issues among children.³
• Improvement of current parks and create new parks.³

These are a few examples of some of the original projects that Shape Up Somerville pursued, however more projects continue to develop and be implement as the community collaborative continues.  As Shape Up Somerville grew, it began to take on a Collective Impact approach, which enabled it to manage the intricate web of various organizations, individuals, and programs across the community.  Collective Impact includes five conditions, which were utilized by Shape Up Somerville to increase the efficacy of the community collaborative. 

Five Conditions of Collective Impact

• Common Agenda: It was critical that all stakeholders involved shared the same desired outcomes for the community.³
• Shared Measurement: Discussions among the community and partners took place to decide upon three key measures for Shape Up Somerville; weight, BMI z-score, and “increases in energy expenditures (EE) beyond increases in EE and energy.”³
• Mutually Reinforcing Activities: Projects and strategies were coordinated to produce a greater effect on the outcomes.³
• Continuous Communication: This took place via regular meetings and websites.  The community was constantly informed through media such as newsletters, newspaper columns, TV, and radio.³
• Backbone Support: The city of Somerville provided the backbone support for Shape Up Somerville and its projects.  A team of individuals was created to support and ensure the functioning of the initiative.

Shape Up Somerville did face some challenges while working to achieve its various goals.  While attempting to alter the school nutrition program, barriers such as budget issues, allocating resources and union contracts arose.  Also, some resistance came from parents and school staff initially, but was resolved shortly after implementation.¹  When the first changes were made, the sales of a la carte items at schools dropped, but over time, the sales and school lunch participation has increased.²  Somerville’s food service director notices that improvements and notes that “without access to sugary and high-fat treats and with messages about healthy eating coming from everywhere, students began to opt for our meals with fruits and vegetables.  Now we never hear complaints—these changes have become the new normal.”² 

Additional challenges were faced in regards to recruiting restaurants to be Shape Up Approved.  It was impossible to conduct focus groups with the restaurants and difficult to make contact with owners and managers to discuss the initiative and convince them to offer healthy options.⁵  This was mainly because there was no restaurant association or any sort of leadership organization that could have been contacted to enable contact with the restaurants that would have been convenient and considered trustworthy.⁵  This challenge was overcome by unplanned visits to restaurants and conducting on-the-spot interviews with owners and managers of restaurants that were identified during parent focus groups as popular locations.⁵

      From initial evaluation measures, Somerville children had decreased the amount of beverages sweetened with sugar by an average of at least 12-ounces per week when compared to controls in other cities.⁶  Also, sports participation and physical activity increased 0.2 per year.⁶  This data was from the first two years of Shape Up Somerville and likely there has been greater improvements over the course of the initiative since its inception in 2003.  BMI scores also displayed positive association from 2003 to 2004, in which children in Somerville on average reduced “approximately one pound of excess weight gain over eight months for a 9-year-old child.”²  More evaluation of the Shape Up Somerville is necessary to fully understand the impact it has had on the community, however evaluating an initiative such as Shape Up Somerville can be difficult due to the diverse amount of projects it envelopes, as well as additional outside factors within the community that would have an impact on the outcomes.

Today, Shape Up Somerville community initiative continues to develop and is considered a model program in the Let’s Move Campaign by Michelle Obama.⁷  Somerville is also a part of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Mass in Motion Program and has been funded and recognized by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as a leader in the national program Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities.⁷  Key factors to the initiatives success are its ability to be flexible, encompassment of multiple levels of a community to enact change, and its ability to be sustainable.  Using the five conditions of Collective Impact has helped it continue to be an impactful, engaging community program with a great number of partners and stakeholders.  Shape Up Somerville is a prime example of how the community, government, and organizations can band together to initiate environmental changes to achieve better health outcomes for its population.   

References

1.      Economos CD, Curtatone JA. Shaping up Somerville: A community initiative in Massachusetts. Prev Med. 2010;50:S97-S98.

2.      Cluggish S, Kinder G. Shape Up Somerville: District Tackles Childhood Obesity. The Education Digest. 2008;73:32.

3.      FSG.  Collective Impact Case Study: Shape Up Somerville.  Boston, MA.  http://www.fsg.org/Portals/0/Uploads/Documents/PDF/CI_Case_Study_Shape_Up_Somerville.pdf.  Accessed September 16, 2014.

4.      Shape Up Somerville.  Tufts University Web site.  http://www.nutrition.tufts.edu/index.php?q=research/shapeup-somerville. Accessed September 16, 2014.

5.      Economos CD, Folta SC, Goldberg J, et al. A community-based restaurant initiative to increase availability of healthy menu options in Somerville, Massachusetts: Shape Up Somerville. Preventing chronic disease. 2009;6:A102.

6.       Folta SC, Kuder JF, Goldberg JP, et al. Changes in diet and physical activity resulting from the Shape Up Somerville community intervention. BMC pediatrics. 2013;13:157-157.

7.      Shape Up Somerville.  A Decade of Shape Up Somerville: Assessing Child Obesity Measures 2002-2011.  Somerville, MA.  http://www.ci.somerville.ma.us/sites/default/files/SUS-BMI-ReportFINAL-4-12-2013_0_0.pdf.  Accessed September 14, 2014.

One small step for a pharmacy, one giant leap for mankind?

Today, CVS Caremark announced that it will stop selling tobacco products in all CVS/pharmacy stores in the United States by October 1, 2014.  This is a commendable stance for a major health-related corporation to take, and I applaud them for doing so.  I believe that as a health provider, health promotion should be of utmost importance, even if it means financial losses for said corporation.  The year 2014 might be the year to revitalize the nation's attack on tobacco and the adverse health outcomes that are associated with it.

January 11th, 2014 was the 50th anniversary of the first Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health.  Prior to the 1964 report, no other federal government reports had associated smoking with adverse health consequences.  Statistical data supported the report's association of tobacco use with coronary heart disease, lung cancer, bronchitis, and emphysema (to name a few).  Between the years 1935 and 2010, heart disease, cancer, and stroke remained leading causes of death.

Each year, tobacco use is attributable to approximately 443,000 deaths in the United States; making it one of the most preventable causes of death and disease.  The use of tobacco use costs the United States $193 billion annually in medical expenses and loss of productivity.  For most of the population, this isn't anything new or revolutionary.  I would assume that a large proportion of tobacco users are aware of the health risks associated to this health behavior, so what else can be done to help reduce tobacco use?  We have made progress in the 50 years since the Surgeon General's Report was released, but is this progress sufficient when we still have tobacco use associated with some of the leading causes of preventable death?  I believe, that what CVS Caremark has announced today could be a major turning point in tobacco prevention, if it is combined with appropriate support for resources for those with tobacco addictions.
  
Health People 2020, outlines goals for our nation by the year 2020; it's target for tobacco use is to lower the percentage of adults aged 18 years and older from 20.6% to 12%.  The goal for adolescents in grades 9 through 12 who have smoked a cigarette in the past 30 days is to lower from 19.5% to 16%.  New strategies need to be implemented to help prevent tobacco use, as well as help enable those who want to quit, be able to do so.

Unfortunately, I think tobacco use is not focused on as much as it has been in the past and I think there needs to be a revival in our efforts to fight against it.  Will CVS's move to stop selling tobacco at all CVS/pharmacy locations help us work towards these goals?  I definitely believe this is an excellent start and I hope that CVS's announcement will encourage other companies to initiate similar changes.