Be Healthy and Relax

Once again, Joe and I are flip flopping. I’m giving some words of fast food wisdom here and he’s discussing a debt related story over at our other site, How I Will Be Rich. Take some time and enjoy both posts.

So what do you do when you are on the go, in a hurry, and hungry? You stop for some fast food of course. One out of every four Americans has done that already today. That’s the actual statistic of how much we eat fast food. It doesn’t take a nutritionist to know that eating fast food is not the healthiest choice. However, if you order right, you can definitely find healthy alternatives on that drive-thru menu. Sometimes you just don’t have time to pack your lunch and it’s true that it’s worse for your body to just not eat at all. You’ve got to eat something.

There are some healthier fast food restaurants out there. Subway, Sub Marina, Panera and the various sandwich shops can be fairly healthy if you avoid excessive cheese and condiments. Sometimes you don’t even have those options. Maybe all that’s around is McDonald’s or Wendy’s or Carl’s Jr. Then what? Eat as healthy as possible

When you do stop, avoid these:

• Chicken Nuggets – This is not an alternative to real chicken. This is deep fried and who the heck knows what actually goes in to them.
• Onion Rings – Deep fried and absolutely terrible for you.
• French Fries – Greasy, Salty and Fried. Need I say more?
• Soda – Soda is just empty calories. A large soda typically has about 310 calories. Not to mention they are loaded with sugar and promotes diabetes and tooth decay. (My recommendation is to cut soda out of your diet completely.)
• Avoid excess condiments – Mayonnaise, nacho cheese, tartar sauce, sour cream, gravy. Avoid putting too much extra junk on your food.
• Salad Dressing – The salad is good. The dressings, not so much. Caesar dressing itself adds about 200 calories to you salad.
• Shakes – Shakes are loaded with fat and calories. Big no nos.

Here’s what I recommend:

• Grilled Chicken Sandwich – Usually about 420 calories but very low in fat and a good source of protein.
• A Regular Hamburger – Only 250 calories and low in fat with out cheese and condiments.
• Salad – The salads are good. Get the dressing on the side and use it sparingly. If they offer it, request a low fat dressing.
• Fruit cups – Most fast food places offer fruit cups or fruit and yogurt cups. These are good choices.
• Chicken Wrap with Grilled Chicken – Low carbs, low calories, high in protein.
• Grilled Fish Sandwich – It’s good if it’s grilled as opposed to deep fried.
• Baked Potato – Order it without cheese or sour cream but with as much veggies as you like.

So if you are on the go, didn’t have time to make lunch the night before and all that is available to you is the various fast food joints, you do have some options. Don’t starve yourself. Your body needs some sort of food to keep you going and if fast food is your only option, then you’ve got to take what you can get. I’m not a fan of fast food and I very rarely eat it but if you are like Joe and myself, you want to maintain a healthy lifestyle even on the go. I hope some of these pointers help.

Today’s post is a very special one. Today is Blog Action Day. This is a day when thousands of bloggers from all sorts of topics will be coming together to write on a post about the environment. This is one of the most discussed topics in society today, so Matt and I thought it would be great to add our contribution of awareness to Mother Earth. It’s a small part we will play, but with the combination of all these voices, maybe we will see a change in the right direction. In any case, click the image on the right to check out the site and read what everyone else has to say. Matt also wrote a post about the benefits of recycling over at our other blog, How I Will Be Rich.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.”

-Margaret Mead

I have chosen to focus on the importance of purchasing organic foods. There are endless amounts of reasons why the consumption of organic foods are important to our health, but I would like to leave that for another post in the future. Since the act of purchasing organic foods not only help you live a much healthier life, it also helps us sustain the earth’s natural state and reduce the harmful effects that can come from non-organic techniques.

While shopping at large, big-name grocery stores, we rarely see vegetables and meats that say they are grown organically. It seems like in the past year there has been a bigger push to bring these organic options to these stores. Luckily it’s not as difficult to find these earth-friendly foods, but searching the local farmer’s market or natural foods stores still lead in making organic options available in most every brand. The national leaders in these are the Whole Foods and Wild Oats, even though they are now the same company. While roaming these stores, it feels like there’s almost no way to avoid purchasing an organic product, and that is great! If you have never shopped at one of these stores, or any other natural grocery store, do it! Support your own body, right along with the rest of the world.

The idea of organic has been around forever, since food was once grown fully natural! Ever since the food industry has wanted to focus more on the mass-production side of everything and make apples freakishly red and massive, they began using pesticides and injections to make crops and animal products much more desirable. What these producers didn’t realize is the quality and taste of their product went down the tubes, along with harming the environment. I bet they’ll come up with some injection for awesome tasting apples now… hopefully they don’t take that idea. Check out last week’s post, Got Real Milk?, if you want to read a little about the injections that go into much of today’s milk. Simply put, organic foods are those that are not grown and produced with the help of pesticides, antibiotics, synthetic fertilizers, or genetically modified organisms. These non-organic methods pose both harmful effects upon our health and the world around us.

The sprayed pesticides are the leading contributor to harming the earth stemming from non-organic foods. Once sprayed, these pesticides sink into our waterways, kill almost any organism it touches, and pollutes our air. Ridding these pesticides from all of these areas costs America an average of $50 per acre to bring back Mother Nature back to her original state. Not only does this spraying kill the targeted insects on crops, it also kills their predators, such as bees and birds. This causes the food cycle and balance to be completely thrown off and into a spin. While the birds and bees are not doing so well, nor is our atmosphere. Sprayed pesticides are accountable for at least 10% of the depletion of earth’s ozone layer. The next time you’re out in the sun, you better re-apply more often than ever before, thanks to our trusty non-organic farmers.

Luckily, America is realizing this and imposing more laws against these pesticides and other non-organic methods onto farmers. This is a great start, but unfortunately, this is not stopping American companies to produce such products and ship them around the world for other countries to use and pollute with. Once again, luckily, more organic food farms are popping up at a greater pace than ever. Even though growing organically is not the most efficient way, more than 8,000 farms have decided to focus on this style of farming. By having these products available in most stores nationwide, we are able to support these farmers, and of course, Mother Earth by purchasing them. It might be more expensive to buy organic, but it is a small price to pay to support the world around us.