Ace's Top Tips for 2016!

Happy New Year! Following two weeks of Christmas holiday indulgence now is the time when pretty much everyone resolves to get fit and healthy and lose some weight. We all feel like we need to take our wellbeing seriously at this time of year to set a pattern for the months ahead. So here are some top tips to help you get on your way….

• First of all it might be an idea to consult a personal trainer who, if you can't afford to have on a weekly or biweekly basis could certainly point you in the right direction certainly as far as exercise and nutrition are concerned.

• Adopt a new High Intensity Impact Training regime and try and get two HIIT sessions into your weekly schedule. HIIT is all the craze right now and it can all be done with just your body weight so you don’t need to join a gym! You can do HIIT at home and there are tons of online resources to help you do it. Get your friends and family involved- if you commit to training with someone it will make it much more fun and there's less chance you'll miss one of your training sessions! (If you want to take part in a group HIIT session- check out ace’s on  our schedule  www.ace-london.com

• Get the right kit in! Use the sales to buy a new pair of trainers or some cool sports gear – it can help motivate you. Don’t let not having the right things stop you... if you find some good discounts you’ll be excited to test out your new things.

• There are so many diet plans our there make sure you chose one that is right for your body type and that you can stick to! Joining weight watchers or slimming world is in many ways the easiest way to achieve results and food plans are all done for you. Do not attempt to do any fad diets or cut out any food groups. This can not be held up long term and although you might see some short term weight loss results it is impossible to maintain and the weight will pile back on.

• My Fitness Pal is a great app - it will work out exactly how many calories you can have a day and you record every little detail. It's a really easy (and free!)  app to use, but the real success lies in carefully recording each and everything you eat as soon as it's gone in your mouth. So long as you do this and you are vigilant, you'll lose that extra holiday weight!

• Drink Drink Drink… and not the hard stuff! Water helps your body get rid of the toxins, improves skin, reduces fatigue, healthier teeth, bones and joints as well as increases your fat metabolism! So don't wait until you are thirsty- aim to drink at least 2-3 life's a day and watch the fat melt away!

• Sleep & Relaxation- people often don't realise quite how important sleep is! If you want to make some serious changes, both in your body and your general healthy & wellbeing, make sure you try to get at least 7-8 hours of sleep a night. Let your body and muscles (especially if you are working out) recover and repair themselves. Try and schedule some sort of relaxation into your week. Cortisol (the stress hormone) and the adrenal system is complicated but high cortisol level are responsible for weight gain so try to keep those stress levels down by including some sort of meditation or yoga into your week.

• Last but not least – chose a plan. There is so much advice and information post Christmas  about healthy eating, exercise & fitness it can be completely daunting. Choose one or 2 people to listen to who offer ideas that are realistic and achievable and try to fade out the rest. A short term detox plan can help you get on your way but avoid anything too faddy that require an impossible number of ingredients in your cupboard and hours at your disposal. The best new years resolutions are ones that last more than a week so try and go for the long term lifestyle approach!

HIIT!!!

Everyone in the fitness world is banging on about HIIT (High intensity interval training) at the moment and ACE is totally on board with this craze. So what is it all about and why is it such a fat burning, fitness-building winner?
Basically HIIT sends your body into fat burning overdrive!

WARNING: here comes the science!!!

The trick to HIIT training is to push yourself as hard as you possibly can through the high intensity intervals to really get your heart racing and then slow your heart rate down during the low-intensity intervals. This method produces excess post-oxygen consumption (EPOC). This means that the fat burning isn’t over once you finish your workout - your body continues to burn fat for up to 24 hours afterwards! EPOC is influenced by the intensity and not by the duration! So you can burn loads of calories in less than 30 minutes… for once time is not the problem.

It may seem counterintuitive to think a shorter HIIT session could be more effective than a slower cardio session – a 45 minute run on the treadmill could burn 400 calories whilst a short 15 minute HIIT burns 250 calories.  BUT it’s the ‘after-burn’ where the magic happens – you can be sat on your couch watching TV long after your HIIT is over with and yet the EPOC means the calories continue to burn and your fitness continues to improve.

It’s a great idea to incorporate a HIIT workout into your weekly schedule. ACE is offering 2 HIIT sessions a week – Tuesday & Saturday evenings (although it’s the basic theory behind all our classes). Check out website www.ace-london.com and our facebook group www.facebook.com/acelondonuk for full details & schedule.

Whilst we take a well deserved break over the holidays, why not try out our HIIT home workout to keep your fitness levels up!? Check out facebook for details....

Snack Attack: a trilogy

Our third installment of snack related chat, are a couple of recipes that will inspire you to snack more healthily.

One sweet, one savoury – they are both extremely satisfying and delicious boosts for your mid morning or mid afternoon munching moment. Remember snacks are not two extra meals, so keep an eye on portions!

Both of these will be served at our healthy Chana Tea-Cember on 17^th December so make sure you come along to sample all our goodies and gain lots of happy snacking ideas!

Please send us any great snack ideas you have so we can share with our ace ladies.

Chocolate orange raw brownies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ingredients:

• 300g almonds (230g pulsed into a coarse flour, 70g chopped to add at the end)

• 7 tablespoons of raw cacao

• 200g soft dates (medjool works best)

• 75g honey/maple syrup/agave nectar

• zest of 2 oranges

Pulse 230g of almonds into a coarse flour in the food processor. Throw in all the remaining ingredients.

Add 70g of chopped almonds to the food processor and pulse a few times.

Spread the mixture into your brownie pan and leave in the fridge for 2-3 hours. Cut up and enjoy!

 

Egg white muffins

 

These are easy and nutritious – high in protein and low in calories (less than 20 per muffin) and extremely adaptable with whatever veg you have available.  Suitable for freezing and take hardly any time to defrost.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ingredients:

• One teaspoon coconut oil

• 1.5 cups of egg whites

• 2 cups raw spinach

• 1 cup of raw chopped cherry tomatoes (or sun dried tomatoes)

• 1 cup of raw chopped asparagus

• 1 cup chopped pepper

• Salt & pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 180 degrees (160 fan)

Sautée chopped onions in a teaspoon of coconut oil until soft and transparent. Add chopped peppers and cook until soft.

Add spinach, tomatoes and asparagus for a couple of minutes until vegetables begin to soften.

Separate eggs and stir in sautéed vegetables to the whites.

Fill each muffin tin with the mixture and cook at 180. Don't fill containers to the top as they will rise.

Bake for 20-25 minutes. To check if they are fully cooked stick a tooth pick in the centre and make sure it comes out clean.

 

We would love you to join us for our healthy Chana Tea-cember - please email info@ace-london.com for more infomation

For loads more recipe ideas visit www.ace-london.com/recipes

Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/acelondonuk

Instagram: ace.lifestyle

 

 

Snack Attack - part deux!

SNACK ATTACK - part deux!

 

Following on from our Ace lifestyle blog last week looking at some top snack tips (http://www.acelondonfitness.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/snack-attack-snack-conundrum-is.html) we found this great article about snack swaps - there are some brill ideas in here worth a read!!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-3334814/The-healthy-snacks-secretly-making-fat-eat-instead-including-FRIED-EGG-sandwiches.html

Some of these are no brainers but couple of things to be conscience of… 

Be a bit careful with dried fruit. Clearly they are a better alternative to a mince pie (or a doughnut for that matter) at this time of year, BUT they are full of sugar and it’s really easy to rack up the calories without realising it! A kids size box of raisins isn’t bad but fresh fruit is a much better alternative. An apple takes a satisfying amount of time to eat (which is important - don’t want your snack done in a few seconds) and is packed with fibre. Its much easier to count calories and control portions with fresh fruit than dried. 

Peanut butter on wholemeal or oat and rice cakes are a great snack. Make sure that you chose the right peanut butter. Got to be natural with no added sugar - Meridian is delicious! The fad for peanut butter is growing into other nut butters - almond, hazelnut and cashew - which can help keep things varied and interesting. They are all pretty yum and increasingly more available in supermarkets. Go on, push the nut butter boat out!

As an alternatives to crisps, roasted root vegetable crisps are a good choice. if you can make them yourself even better and then you can control the oil content. A great tip for root vegetable crisps is to use a peeler - for super thin strips which cook very quickly and don’t need much oil. Make them in batches and bag up as air tight as possible. 

 

Super Salads

 

Super salads.. 

 

This salad pic has created quite a lot of interest as salads go. When people think of eating healthily or dieting salads are the first thing that pop into your mind but without some creativity can get all rather standard and miserable. Alternatively they can require so many ingredients they hardly seems worth the trouble. These are pretty simple, varied enough to taste good without hours of chopping or prep. Eat with a slab of protein and get involved!

Salads are not a science so measurements are lax, and you can pretty much supplement every ingredient for something else… but here is the basic gist.

Quinoa and roasted red pepper salad

Ingredients

1 cup quinoa

2 red peppers

radish (sliced thinly)

3 spring onions (Sliced as thin as possible)

parsley

coriander 

toasted pine nuts

Dressing

1tbsp sesame oil

2 tbsp mirin

juice of half a lemon

2 tbsp soy sauce

Squeeze of agave or honey

tsp mustard (dijon or wholegrain or whatever you have in)

pepper juice

Something quite wonderful happens to a pepper when you shove it in a very hot oven with grill on for about half an hour (turning a couple of times to make sure all is even and good in the world). 

Once the peppers are black all over, take out the oven, leave to cool and pull off the charred skin. What you are left with is a very sweet, soft pepper flesh which is delicious with quinoa, buckwheat or any other healthy grain. When you’re slicing it make sure you scrape away pepper seeds but keep hold of the pepper juice that it makes and add it to your dressing. 

Mix everything together. Pour the dressing on fairly last minute so that the radishes stay nice and crunchy - they add an important texture to the salad. Taste and make sure seasoned well (the soy in the dressing may not be enough so add salt). 

Roasted veg and tahini dressing

this salad works well with quite a wide range of vegetables. Done it before with squash and beetroot and have thrown in broccoli and red pepper when its lying around, so think of this recipe as a guide which you can adapt according to taste and what you need to use up in your fridge

ingredients

2x cauliflower head

2 x aubergine

2 x red onion

1 tbsp. ground coriander

1 tbsp. ground cumin

roughly chopped parsley and/or coriander 

toasted chopped nut of choice - I usually use almonds, pine nuts or hazelnuts. 

dressing

tahini paste

lemon juice

water

salt & pepper

Cut veg into relatively equal size so they cook evenly. spray oil. evenly coat with spices and season. roast for about half an hour, check on them half way through and spoon around if some bits are going brown.

cool

scatter herbs

pour over dressing

chuck on the nuts

job done

 

Green salad

A green salad is a green salad is a green salad. Except when its slightly better that your average green salad which this one is!

Mix up your leaves - this one is baby gem (cut lengthways) Chicory and a dolce verde romain lettuce (which is my current lettuce squeeze!). Variety is important to get a good sweet (romain, gem, iceberg) and bitter (watercress, rocket, chicory) mix and different textures. 

Add a large ripe avocado, pumpkin seeds and cress. 

Cress is massively underused, it is super cheap, tasty and can massively elevate salads so get some in, or hanker back to school days and grow your own. 

To keep in the realms of super duper healthy, dress with lemon juice (just before serving) and season.

or make a simple lemon vinaigrette with extra virgin love oil, white wine vinegar, whole grain mustard and a lot of lemon juice. 

 

Snack Attack

 Snack Attack!

The snack conundrum is something that we come up against time and time again. We all love to snack and we all find that there are various non meal times in the day when a little energy boost is needed. Classic snack times are mid-morning and mid-afternoon, and are usually the times when chocolate or some other handy, sugary filled convenience sends your healthy eating off into the wrong direction. The problem is that snacking on something sugary with no nutritional value, releases insulin into your blood stream, which then processes the sugars from your food and helps store it as excess fat.

There is actually nothing wrong with snacking. Having 3 nutritious meals and 2 nutritious snacks is a great way to keep your blood sugar levels steady and to avoid overeating at mealtimes. The trick is not to let snack times creep up on you. Plan for them. Decide you’re going to have them twice a day, what they are going to be, and make sure you have what you need at the time you need it and… Enjoy (with a nice cup of tea).  

Snack facts:

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•  A healthy snack made up of complex carbohydrates, protein and healthy fats               increases your energy levels for a longer period of time than sugary snacks do.
• Choose nutrient dense snacks, such as fresh vegetables and humus, a boiled egg, a handful of nuts, an apple or some melon chunks, greek yoghurt and berries, rice cakes with cottage cheese, rice cakes with peanut butter (personal fav and sometimes easier to organise than a boiled egg!).
• Snacks have to be small and not too calorific. Snacks are there to keep you going, but not to add 2 more meals to your day. Around 150 calories per snack is a good guide.
• Timing is everything, your first snack should be consumed around 2 hours after breakfast, and your second snack about 2 hours after lunch. This will help keep your blood sugar levels constant, and hopefully stop you from raiding the work vending machine.

Snacking wisely can really help you to lose weight and can add many essential nutrients and vitamins to your diet to help your body remain in a fat burning state!

Happy snacking…

Snack the ace way! We’re doing a bit of a snack deep dive over the next few weeks – look out for our blogs, recipes and some tasters at our classes. Make sure you put December 17^th in your diary for our healthy Chana TeaCember – we will have loads of snacks on offer, with recipe cards and endless advice!

For any more information on snacking or other nutritional matters do not hesitate to get in touch info@ace-london.com.

Ace's post workout snacks

It is even more important to eat a snack post workout then pre workout, this is because you need to make sure that you feed your body to help repair muscle tissues and replenish glycogen stores which are depleted after a tough workout. (The body breaks down most carbohydrates from the foods we eat and converts them to a type of sugar called glucose. Glucose is then stored as glycogen in the muscles and liver to fuel our bodies when we need the energy.)

Post workout your body needs plenty of protein combined with carbohydrates. Your muscles will be like sponges ready to soak up the glycogen to store as energy for your next workout, and now is the best possible time to consume carbs. Try and eat something within an hour to hour and a half after your workout. You can either have a full meal, or a small snack if you are not planning to eat a meal for a few hours. Here are some post-workout snack ideas:

A Protein Shake Made from a protein powder of your choice, water and a banana, is a great choice as your body quickly converts it to energy.

Banana and peanut butter sandwich This a favourite of Charlotte’s! Just slice a banana in half, length ways and spread a tablespoon of crunchy peanut butter (preferably Meridian with no added sugars, salts or palm oil), then slice across into small pieces and enjoy!

Protein pancakes These are a proper treat, and you will look forward to these throughout your workout. They are more of a meal then a snack, so make these for your post workout breakfast. See our website for recipe.

Tuna on whole wheat toast You could swap the toast for a couple of whole wheat crackers or rice cakes.

Scrambled eggs on toast Scramble 2 eggs on some whole wheat or dark rye bread.

Peanut butter, banana and chocolate shake All you need is one medium banana, a tablespoon of peanut butter and 1 cup of low fat chocolate milk blended with some ice.

0% fat Greek Yoghurt with berries Non-fat Greek yoghurt (Fage Total is the most delicious) and a cup of berries is a lovely post workout snack and the yoghurt is so thick and creamy it feels very indulgent. Add a squeeze of honey, as that will be converted straight into glycogen.

What are your favourite pre/post workout snacks? We’d love to hear your ideas!