Chicken breasts are the secret weapon of any weeknight warrior worth her salt. We grill them, bake them, pound them into cutlets, and toss them in a stir-fry. If you’re a 30-minute-or-less Tuesday night cook, chances are you’ve got a bunch of chicken breasts in the freezer right now.
Which begs the question: Could you be storing them better? Probably.
If you’ve ever been to Duckfat, one of Portland, Maine’s hotspot restaurants, you know they make some of the best milkshakes around. While you can’t go wrong with one of their panini or an order of poutine served over duck fat fries, it’s their milkshakes we crave the most — specifically the Maine blueberry shake. Inspired by the folks at Duckfat, we developed a milkshake recipe with a base that’s even better than ice cream and blended in just the right amount of ripe blueberries. If there is just one cool, creamy treat that makes its way into your hands this summer, it should be this rich blueberry milkshake.
You can thank Chip and Joanna Gaines for farmhouse kitchens — or blame them, if you’re not fans! While this trendy kitchen style was a thing well before their show got popular (after all, the current-day style is based on historic homes), the couple’s signature Fixer Upper farmhouse vibe seems to be what everyone is craving these days. And with relatively good reason. It’s cozy, charming, and has that perfectly worn-in feeling that makes it ideal for families, cool couples, and every homeowner in between.
Not sure who Chip and Joanna Gaines are? They’re a married couple who run a remodeling and design business. They’re also the stars of HGTV’s widely popular show Fixer Upper, which gives a farmhouse look to basically every house in Waco, Texas.
In Houzz’s 2017 Kitchen Trends Study, millennial respondents (ages 25 to 34) named farmhouse kitchens their preferred style. According to the survey, with homeowners focusing on wanting more family time (49 percent) and more home cooking (41 percent), there’s a natural need for a space that can do double duty as a stylish spot to entertain and a family-friendly zone where cooking up weeknight meals is easy and seamless. Enter: farmhouse-style kitchens.
Ah, Pinterest. What would we do without you when it comes time to throwing parties? From food to decorations to cocktails, the site is chock-full of inspiration — but you know that already. Something else you already know? Pinterest can also be an overwhelming rabbit hole that can take over your life.
Don’t waste time getting sucked into all those sometimes-too-crazy pins! Instead, just use this little cheat sheet of the best ideas and you can plan a shower for your bride-to-be in no time.
Oh, zucchini — it’s hard to explain our feelings about this summer vegetable. We cheer when it arrives, but then all too quickly it overwhelms us. How do you keep up with the vegetable that just never seems to stop giving? The good news is that it’s one of the most versatile veggies out there, so you’ve got loads of options when looking for ways to keep your zucchini consumption exciting. Here are 20 ways to enjoy the summer standby.
It’s no secret how much Joanna Gaines, of HGTV’s Fixer Upper, loves giant clocks and shiplap! If you’ve seen just one episode, chances are you’ve seen her use both of those things — probably even on the same dining room wall.
She’s certainly got a specific style, which we totally love. It’s just that we’ve seen her do it so much that we’ve figured out her magic formula. Here are the five things you need if you want to design your own Fixer Upper kitchen.
Back when they were infants, CrossFit and paleo were the best of friends. Robb Wolf was giving CrossFit nutrition seminars. CF boxes were running paleo challenges and offering meal plans to clients. Tens of thousands of people were introduced to paleo through CrossFit and CrossFit through paleo.
Over time, however, they drifted apart. CrossFit met and fell in with the Zone Diet—a calm, well-mannered lad with impeccable balance, and paleo’s dad got a job in another city. They ended up going to different schools. These things happen. It’s fine. Both CrossFit and paleo are better versions of themselves for having met each other.
For the past year, my Primal Health Coach team and I have been working with Absolution CrossFit (of LaGrange, IL) co-owner and coach Laura Rupsis to understand what CrossFit athletes are missing in their diets and lifestyles. We’re convinced we can help them. I’m convinced we can help coaches help their clients using a Primal approach.
CrossFitters want:
To perform better. They’re interested in eating healthy food, but they don’t want their performance to suffer because of it.
To lose body fat and gain muscle. Who doesn’t? Losing body fat can improve performance in exercises where you manipulate your own body weight, but not if it means losing muscle and strength.
CrossFitters worry about:
Getting enough calories. With Paleo diets it’s notoriously hard to overeat, which is great if you’re trying to lose weight, but not so great if you’re trying to support an active training and competing schedule.
Getting enough carbs. I don’t blame your average CrossFitter for giving up on paleo. Keeping up with WODs while eating lean meat and getting your carbs from broccoli and asparagus sounds like hell. It doesn’t have to be that way on Primal, and I’ll show you how.
Burning out. CrossFit is taxing. There’s no way around that. And our real lives are busier than ever. Between kids, work, commuting, cooking, cleaning, and, hell, living, we all have a ton on our plates. Throwing one of the most intense training programs in the mix can push people to the breaking point. I’ll explain how going Primal can help prevent or mitigate burnout.
Many of the top CrossFitters have given up on paleo, opting for more flexible diets. Orthodox paleo just doesn’t work for the highest level of CrossFitters, who expend a ton of energy and eat a ton to compensate. And we can guess that this isn’t a spurious breakup. CrossFitters are students of the body and the inputs that make it run smoothly. If they’re moving on from paleo, something isn’t working.
But there’s a problem: Many of the most influential CrossFit bloggers, thinkers, and coaches are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They assume if paleo doesn’t work, Primal doesn’t either. Researchers even released a study showing that paleo eating undermines the benefits of CrossFit training. It was just retracted for being, well, completely wrong, but it goes to show the forces arrayed against the union of CrossFit and paleo.
Although paleo and CrossFit have drifted apart, parallels remain. CrossFitters don’t fear fat, eat plenty of animals, understand the importance of plants, and love them some bacon. Even the movements prescribed by CrossFit are ancestral at their core—squatting, picking things off the ground, running, jumping, bending, reaching, climbing, hoisting, pressing things overhead, pulling—only performed at greater intensities.
Rather than merely recreate the paleolithic movement milieu, CrossFit transcends it in many ways.
CrossFit asks you to go as hard as humanly possible without breaking down, sacrificing your quality of movement, and hurting yourself, all while paying homage to your heritage as a human animal. That’s no joke, man. And they take it seriously. All the CrossFitters I know spend almost as much time warming up and doing “prehab” mobility work than they do working out. Sure, people get injured—as they do in every sport. Contrary to popular belief, CrossFit has never been shown to be more dangerous than other types of training. Recent studies show that CrossFitters experience no more shoulder injuries than other athletes, for example. If anything, CrossFitters get fewer injuries than athletes on other programs.
My point is this: CrossFit asks a lot of your body. I’m here to argue that Primal eating and living can help you answer. There are many reasons why the Primal Blueprint, in contrast to paleo, can make CrossFitters fitter, faster, and recover better. I’ll just list a few for now:
Primal is a more flexible version of paleo. It’s more malleable, allowing use of some of the most potent foods for recovery from intense training—dairy, whey protein, and dense starchy carbohydrates. Early incarnations of paleo restricted dairy, assuming universal intolerance, and cautioned against starchy plants, assuming everyone was sedentary.
Primal isn’t paleo. Paleo is a great approach to diet for most people. You could do a lot worse than eating animals and plants and avoiding potentially allergenic foods. But the paleo diet people are criticizing is an archaic, narrow version that just doesn’t apply to the Primal Blueprint. As new evidence unfolds, Primal adapts. It’s the only way to stay honest in this business, even if it means dining on crow (which, by the way, is totally Primal) from time to time.
Primal gets you fat-adapted. While the most intense WODs definitely burn through—and require that you replenish—a ton of glycogen, fat adaptation benefits every athlete. A fat-adapted athlete will burn more body fat at any given intensity. A fat-adapted athlete will hold on to muscle glycogen longer, saving it for later. A fat-adapted athlete has more and better mitochondria with the metabolic flexibility to burn fat, ketones, and carbs. And once you become fat-adapted and build those fat-burning mitochondria, they don’t just disappear. You can even eat more carbs, and your muscles will maintain the upregulated ability to burn fat.
Primal is macronutrient-agnostic. My personal flavor of Primal is definitely higher fat and lower carb, but that’s me. That’s what works for my goals and lifestyle. For a top CrossFitter, Primal might be higher carb and lower fat. It’s really up to you and your goals.
Primal is way more than diet. Heck, your average CrossFitter could maintain whatever diet they want, only follow the Primal lifestyle laws, and see huge improvements to their performance and recovery. Sleep, sun exposure, social contact, mental stimulation, circadian health, nature exposure, and other lifestyle factors all have huge impacts on not only your physical health, but also your physical performance.
The primary goals of the Primal Blueprint are to offer information about how various macronutrients, micronutrients, and other food compounds affect your health and performance, and allow—nay, force—you to chart your own course. Some say that’s a weakness, a lack of conviction. So what? Ideological conviction is exactly what we don’t need.
In the coming weeks, I’ll address the common criticisms CrossFitters make about paleo, why they don’t apply to Primal, and how going Primal can actually solve many of the most common issues CrossFitters face.
Tune in tomorrow for the first official post in this series. Thanks for stopping by today, everyone. Have questions you’d like me to take up around CrossFit (or other intensive training program) and the Primal Blueprint? Share and discuss in the comment board.
Summertime usually means one thing for me: travel. Once Labor Day rolls around, the pages of my day planner are tattered and smeared with travel plans. Being in my late 20s and from the Midwest means a handful of summer weddings to plan for, along with college reunions, weekends spent camping and floating the river, day trips to the beach, and visiting friends in my old New England stomping grounds of Vermont and Massachusetts. A trip back home to Oklahoma or Texas is definitely in order, and a friend in Seattle is due for a visit.
If you dream of having a smart home but don’t have the cash (or the patience) to completely wire everything in your house to operate with the touch of a button or the sound of your voice, we feel you.
But just because you’re not completely “plugged in” doesn’t mean you have to live life unplugged. This WeMo Mini Smart Plug (on sale now as part of Amazon’s Prime Day deals, which will fully reveal themselves in all their glory on July 11) connects to your home WiFi and allows you to control any appliance you plug into it with a free companion app. And if you have an Alexa-enabled device, you’ll save money on a purchase today.
For now classes are 6pm and 640pm at 2840 Wildwood st in the Boise Cloggers studio.
Book your class NOW!
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The first day of Tabata, I wondered WHAT AM I DOING - I AM 56 !! Five weeks later I knew that it was what I needed. I learned that I could push myself well beyond my comfort zone and feel good later. I have a marked improvement in physical as well as emotional endurance. - Lyn C.
When I was first told about Tabata I was very excited from the word go, however that excitement stemmed from the fact that I had no clue what it meant. I missed the first week of class b/c I was traveling for work so when I came in during the 2nd week I had some making it up to do.
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Back when they were infants, CrossFit and paleo were the best of friends. Robb Wolf was giving CrossFit nutrition seminars. CF boxes were running paleo challenges and offering meal plans to clients. Tens of thousands of people were introduced to paleo through CrossFit and CrossFit through paleo.
For now classes are 6pm and 640pm at 2840 Wildwood st in the Boise Cloggers studio.
Book your class NOW!
click this ==>
Jump Dee Jump
