Nutrition Corner

19 Healthy High-Protein, Low-Carb Meals Ideas That Keep You Full: Eating low-carb is easier than you might think. Dietitians explain what a balanced low-carb meal looks like,

6 tips for a healthy holiday makeover: From watching portions to serving up delicious new traditions, these tips can help you create a healthier holiday.

Recipe for The Day

Grilled Carrots, Italian-Style (With Goat Cheese + Pistachio Pesto): "Top Chef" winner and "Top Chef: Amateurs" guest judge Joe Flamm combines flavors from his Italian and his wife's Croatian backgrounds to create delicious recipes at his Chicago restaurant, Rose Mary. For our Italy episode, he shares two hearty, quick and easy grilled veggie dishes: these tasty carrots and halved baby zucchini and summer squash with whipped cheese and chile-herb vinaigrette.

Lifestyle & Fitness Focus

4 Ways to Incorporate Cardio Into Your Workout or Strength Training Routine

• Circuit Training: This is a series of exercises with no rest between switching your activity.

• Cardio Classes: These are good ways to stay motivated and an easy way to get your friends involved. They're great for competitive folks as well. Not only is strength training involved, but they're also intense cardio sessions.

• Intervals: We have talked about intervals that solely used the treadmill. However, combining the treadmill with strength training is a great way to mix things up for an all-around workout that incorporates more cardio.

• Tabata: This is one of my favorite cardio strength training secrets. Work for 20 seconds, rest for 10 seconds, and repeat eight times. That is the base for all Tabata workouts (though it can be endlessly adjusted).

4 Leading Causes of Weight Gain and Obesity

• Engineered Junk Foods: Heavily processed foods are often little more than refined ingredients mixed with additives. These products are designed to be cheap, last long on the shelf and taste so incredibly good that they are hard to resist. By making foods as tasty as possible, food manufacturers are trying to increase sales. But they also promote overeating.

• Food Addiction: Many sugar-sweetened, high-fat junk foods stimulate the reward centers in your brain. In fact, these foods are often compared to commonly abused drugs like alcohol, cocaine, nicotine and cannabis.

• Aggressive Marketing: Junk food producers are very aggressive marketers. Their tactics can get unethical at times and they sometimes try to market very unhealthy products as healthy foods.

• Insulin: Insulin is a very important hormone that regulates energy storage, among other things. One of its functions is to tell fat cells to store fat and to hold on to the fat they already carry. The Western diet promotes insulin resistance in many overweight and individuals with obesity. This elevates insulin levels all over the body, causing energy to get stored in fat cells instead of being available for use.

3 Foods That Help You Lose Weight and Fill You Up, Too

• Eat Your Beans to Fill Up With Fiber: There are lots of reasons to put beans on your shopping list. Beans are an excellent source of fiber, and any food that’s high in fiber will be filling. Plus, fiber helps to fill you up without adding any calories to food (since our bodies can’t digest fiber).

• Savor Salmon to Feel Full, Longer: Why put salmon on your list of foods for weight loss? Among its many health benefits, salmon is a great source of protein — 3 ounces (oz) of wild Atlantic salmon has about 16.8 grams (g) of protein.

• Enjoy Eggs for a Protein-Rich Breakfast: Eggs can help with weight loss because they are high in protein (two large eggs have 12.6 g), and it requires more energy to break down a protein than it does a starch, which many breakfast foods, including bagels, cereals, and muffins.

Forget push-ups — these 4 dumbbell exercises chisel defined pecs, triceps and shoulders

• Incline Press: For this exercise, try to rest your back on a workout bench or use a bosu board or foam roller underneath your mid to upper back instead. Keep your core engaged and your upper back raised as you perform the press. If you have one dumbbell, perform a single-sided incline press or use two dumbbells for the variation shown above.

• Champagne Press: You can focus on working one side of the body at a time, isolating the muscles and recruiting the stabilizer muscles in your core and shoulders, or work dual. Keep the dumbbells pressed together to help activate your arms and shoulders, and draw the dumbbells down toward your chest before pressing away from you with power.

• Incline Fly: Using the same incline as the press, engage your core and press your feet down with both knees bent. From this base position, draw your elbows wide and squeeze your pecs at the bottom of the exercise. Count for 3-4 seconds on the eccentric portion of the exercise — as you lower the weights — then drive upward with control.

• Cross-Body Fly: For this exercise, stand with your feet hip-width apart and engage your core. As you lift one weight at a time, avoid swinging your upper body or driving your hips forward and allow your chest, shoulders and arms to do the hard work. Cross flyes also engage your biceps and latissimus dorsi (muscles that run down the sides of your back) and hit the upper pecs.

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