Healthy homemade pizza

Hello everybody!

Have you been experiencing a major craving for pizza, but you don't want to consume the thousands of calories and massive grams of fat that would be delivered to your door in less than 30 minutes, not to mention the 30-40 dollars including tip that you stand to lose?

Never fear, I have a great recipe that will make a very tasty pizza, and cost half the price of a delivery pizza. All the ingredients can be found at your local grocery store, and it takes less than 30 minutes from preparation to tabletop.

Ingredients:
Naan bread - I can get a package of two at Harris Teeter for $2.79. Always choose whole wheat. The garlic or tandoori flavors will make the pizza more flavorable, but it would be just fine it you get the plain whole wheat naan bread. Generally 1 bread = 1 person, so be sure to grab enough at the store to cover your family.

Hummus - this is a completely customizable base spread. I choose the sun dried Hummus from my local store, but the original recipe I started with called for a ricotta cheese and pesto mix. The ricotta is too creamy for me, and the pesto can be a bit overpowering if you put too much on. In my opinion, the hummus integrates perfectly with the other ingredients. I have also made it with no spread, only a brushing of olive oil and it came out very nicely.

Asparagus - Get a bunch of very fresh and medium thickness asparagus from your local grocer. Snap off the broad ends and set aside. This is also customizable. You can choose a lot of greens such as spinach, kale, I would even consider thinly sliced parsnip straws for this ingredient.

Ham - really good lunch meat does just fine for me. It is low-calorie, and protein-rich. In the past I have gone fancy and picked up prosciutto or other Italian meats, and it does make the pizza outstanding. Of course, it also makes it much, much more expensive. Sometimes I even have to feed my pepperoni fix and add them here instead of the ham. It's really up to personal preference.

Mozzarella cheese - Sargento makes some great and cheap finely chopped mozzarella that can be found at any store. I have used all kinds of cheeses such as fontina, provolone, Swiss, etc., but once again, it is personal preference and value-based. For me, the cheaper mozzarella is just perfect.

So now you have the basic ingredients. You can always add more, change it how you see fit. Some sun dried tomatoes, maybe some mushrooms would be excellent additions. Make sure you don't make it too thick on top or the naan bread base will not support the toppings.

-Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
-Place the naan bread smooth size down on a cookie sheet and brush with then hummus or whatever you choose to be your base sauce. Be sure not to make it too thick, you don't want to overpower the pizza or make it a gloopy mess. A light covering works just fine. If you're a big fan of cheese, you can choose to add a light covering of mozzarella to this base. I don't, and it works fine.
-Place the snapped asparagus into the base sauce, like you are making a mold. Continue to stack the asparagus across the pizza like you're making a checkerboard. Do this for all pizzas until you run out of asparagus and all pizzas are covered.
-Put the pizzas in the oven for approximately 10 minutes, or until you start to smell the asparagus roasting and you can see some browning on the naan bread.
-Pull it out of the oven and cover in the meat of your choice and then the mozzarella cheese until well covered. You can also add any herbs such as oregano, basil, thyme at this point.
-Put pizzas back into the oven for about 2-3 minutes until cheese is fully melted, then pull back
out and cut into any pattern you see fit and ENJOY!

Easy Take to Work Healthy Lunches: Part 1

It's hard to eat well when you're working full time. Most people go out to lunch, spending too much money and consuming too many calories and processed foods.You can easily buy food in advance, make your lunches at home, save money and feel better about yourself. Here's one of my regular lunches:

• Organic Applegate Herb Roasted Turkey Breast (or any of the other flavors they have).
• Trader Joe's Multi-grain sandwich round thins.
• Roasted Garlic Hummus (or any flavor you like).
• Raw Baby Spinach.
• French Green Lentils - pre-cooked from Trader Joe's.

Make two sandwiches with the hummus as a spread. Use one slice of turkey per sandwich and place some spinach on top to finish the sandwiches. Get a small tupperware and put about 3/4 cup of lentils in it.

A nice nutritious lunch for one! All of these items have a very good price at Trader Joe's - you'll find other chain stores will double the price of the Organic Turkey Breast.

For the rest of the day I'll take two other snacks, one mid morning and one mid afternoon. This usually consists of a raw almond and raw walnut mixture, around 3/4 cup, and a greek yogurt like Fage Total Greek Yogurt 2% or 0%.

Got my ass kicked today

Not literally, in case that was the only reason you tuned in, sorry for your disappointment.

I woke up early and hit the gym at about 5am. I do this from time to time, but normally I'm an afternoon lifter. Needed to get it out of the way early today because I'm moving and setting up utilities all day long, and we all know how time consuming that is.

So anyways, gym was pretty empty, and it looked like I was going to have a good session. Breezed through the first 6-7 stations, which are all Cybex machines like the picture on the right. Arms were starting to feel tight, and that's a good sign that the workout is being effective. A couple of meat heads came in and started using the bench press and squat stations for an eternity, so I decided to switch it up and do free weights for the rest of the morning, hit my pull-ups and abs, and call it a day.

Well, it suffices to say that I haven't touched free weights in quite some time. I think they are tedious, and boring, and don't do much for me than other weight stations do, so I typically avoid them for everything but curls. Today I got about 20 minutes into it and quickly noticed that I had rivulets of sweat flowing down my face and back, as if I never lifted before. About 5 minutes after that my shirt was completely soaked through, and the bench had standing water on it. Didn't feel exceptionally weak, but could definitely tell I was getting a max workout.

Finally, I finished all that up and spent about 5 minutes wiping everything down ,and then headed over to the pull up and dip bars. Normally, I can do 10 pull ups in a row and about 15 dips in a row in a set. I got up on this thing this morning and struggled to do 3 dips. WTF!!

My arms were completely dead. Triceps were so exhausted I could barely even hold my weight up on them, much less dip and pull myself back up. so I stopped for a minute to rest and thought pull ups may be a bit better, because they involved different muscles. Grabbed on to the bar and excruciatingly did 5 of them before I almost fell off the bar. By this time I'm water logged from sweat, physically exhausted, and thinking my body temperature was at least 106 degrees. For some reason I told myself "do 1 more set of 5 pull ups and then GTFO". If you don't know what GTFO means, ask your mom and dad. Or just google it.

Anyhow, I grabbed on to this bar, which seemed at least 4 feet higher than it was 2 minutes ago, and struggled to do 3 pull ups before gravity took over and pulled me to the ground, hard. Like, almost straight onto my ass and then the back of my head hard. i took that as a cue and promptly left them gym with my dignity intact.

Opened the door to the parking lot and lo and behold a frigging hurricane had popped up while I was in there. On top of that, I had parked about 100 feet farther away than normal for reasons unknown, so on top of my shirt being soaked through every piece of my clothing gets to be uniform. What a way to start the day. Hoping thing improve, but not looking likely.

Until next time!

Quickly gaining upper body muscle

I'm currently in the hiring process for both the local police and fire departments here, and their fitness requirements include a certain amount of timed pull ups and push ups. Since I have never been able to even do 1 pull up, I knew this was an area that I needed to start working on immediately, so I would be ready for the test in a couple months.

Now for a little back history: all throughout my life I have been weak in the upper body. Even when I was playing football and lifting weights constantly, my bench press max was never even close to my body weight. I could never figure out how to get stronger and keep progressing into higher weights. Since I started lifting again in the last 2 years, my bench press has risen, but still , nowhere near equaling my body weight. My biceps and triceps have grown, and become firmer, but the weight does not increase.

So anyways, at Wal-Mart I found a common pull-up bar for 19.99. It's one of those things that hangs on a door jamb, which you probably saw in some infomercial hosted by a wrestler or some other equivalent meat head. When I got home I put it in the doorway and promptly did 2 pull ups. I felt really weak while doing them, and didn't think my grip would hold. Thinking I needed to stay with it, I made a resolution to do at least 10 pull-ups a day, and also to do 100 push ups a day as well.

I saw results within the first week. Almost immediately, my bench press went up 10 pounds. I was able to do more on the incline press, and my curls were increased as well. The results didn't stop the next week: everything kept increasing. I'm simply amazed at the fact that all I needed to do to get stronger were simple pull ups and push ups. It never crossed my mind that these simple exercises would play such a pivotal role in muscle growth. I had always saw them as tedious calisthenics, which were slightly above useless, barring military punishment.

Now I am benching my body weight, and doing 10 pull ups in a row. I've upped my limits to 50 pull ups and 200 push ups a day and I'm getting so much stronger that I continuously amaze myself. I highly recommend fitting 100 daily push ups into your routine. When I first started out, I was doing sets of 20, at any time I had spare. It's really easy to do, and doesn't take any time at all. You will see results, and very quickly.