Great coffee-break diet, health and fitness reading

Here’s a few of my favourite reads from the past couple of weeks: when boredom strikes at work, why not spend five minutes browsing one of these, instead of wandering dangerously near the communal office goodies…?

5 Subtle Ways to Help Your Guy Eat Healthier (by Melanie from Dietriffic)

Do any female readers of The Office Diet struggle to get their chap to understand concepts like “five a day” and “wholemeal”? This is a great list of practical tips, some of which I already use on the long-suffering Boyfriend, such as:

Make up a large bowl of fruit salad with oranges, kiwi, grapes, mango, apples, strawberries, raspberries, or any combination you prefer.

It really does work! Check out my fruit salad recipe, or if you want a more exciting twist, Lorna’s “Pirate Fruit Salad” for some ideas.

Diet Blog)

While choosing a diet that is devoid of most additives is a good way to go, we mustn’t paint all additives with the same broad stroke. Here is a partial list of the safe, the potentially unsafe and the proven to be unsafe.

This is a very useful list to bookmark if you’re concerned about all those weird ingredients listed on food labels – check out what’s definitely safe, what’s probably okay, and what you should avoid.

Moonwalk Training – 20 Miles (by Shauna Reid from Dietgirl)

Everything hurt for the last mile but I stayed ahead of the beat in Girls and Boys. It was the quickest one, just under 14 minutes, as I adopted an Olympic walker style – arms pumping, nostrils flaring, generally looking like I had a stick up my butt.

Shauna’s training for the Moonwalk in Edinburgh in a couple of weeks time, and it’s been inspiring to read about her progress (and a bit daunting – I can’t imagine walking more than ten miles at a go!) She did her first 20 mile walk last week, and as ever, it’s a brilliantly written post – you feel like you’re suffering right there alongside her…

The 60-Second Guide to Healthy Living (by Alex Shalman from Practical Personal Development – though this post was on Dumb Little Man)

No time to spare? Here’s a minute-long guide that’ll help you get your head back in gear for dieting action! Five-second snippets like:

Understand that the only time is right now, so no excuse of ‘I’ll only cheat once’, or ‘I’ve been good all day, why not?’, is going to be good enough. Each time you put food in your mouth, you must treat it as the most important time.

(Image above by bonsaibutterfly)