Frugal Family

Frugal Family: Cut Bills, Bad Habits, Prices, Calories

This week Frugal Family offers simple, easy-to-keep-New Year’s tasks that have immediate impacts on your health and budget. Take a look at tips to save on power bills, cut back on bad habits, shop smart, save time and money on food and improve your health

This is the time of year for making resolutions to improve our lives. With the best intentions and lots of hope, we usually find ourselves failing miserably and feeling guilty in short order. Most of the time the failure to succeed is because we set our expectations too high. If we can’t save a set amount of money each month for that cruise, how do we expect to turn financial savvy overnight? Just as it took years to develop bad habits like overeating or smoking, it is going to take time to undo them. A much more productive way to reach our goals is by taking small steps in the right direction, things we can succeed at today and feel a sense of accomplishment. Attaining a goal creates confidence and allows us to tackle the next, harder …

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The Instagram Diet Plan: Can Social Media Help You Lose Weight?

Could publicly tracking food consumption introduce a level of accountability that will help dieters succeed?

After a summer of trying delicious dessert recipes on Pinterest and a fall of long work hours coupled with less-than-healthy food choices, I am now a few pounds above my preferred weight.  I am not about to tell you what that weight is, but I will say I am about eight pounds above the midpoint of the range I like to weigh. The last time I got lazy and let myself pick up a few pounds (which was during a period of long work hours, high stress and little sleep), I lost weight by keeping a food journal. I wrote down everything I ate and kept a calorie count. It worked well because I was really loathe to go over my daily calorie target. However, it was also tedious and not at all enjoyable. So, the other day I was browsing Instagram and it …

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Getting Protein Without Eating Meat

Protein is not unique to meat products, but those eliminating or reducing meat intake need to be careful to replace this easy and familiar source of protein.

By Ian Lee October is Vegetarian Awareness Month, which makes it a great time to think about incorporating more non-meat options into your diet. Even for those who don’t plan to switch to full-time vegetarian eating, the Meatless Mondays trend means more and more people are looking for healthy vegetarian options for family meals at least once a week. Protein is not unique to meat products, but those eliminating or reducing meat intake need to be careful to replace this easy and familiar source of protein, according to dietitian Gloria Tsang, founder of nutrition network HealthCastle.com and author of Go UnDiet: 50 Small Actions for Lasting Weight Loss.  “Protein builds and maintains muscles, organs, skin and blood, assists in energy …

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How Do Different Chocolate Products Stack Up?

Not all chocolate products are created equal: They can vary wildly in flavonoid content, fat and calories, and quality of ingredients. How can you be sure you're expressing your love with the healthiest chocolate option?

By Ian Lee Chocolate is a staple of Valentine's Day, and for good reason. It's a sinfully sweet treat, of course, but it also contains flavonoids, a type of antioxidant that has been shown to have health benefits for the very target of Cupid's arrow—the heart. However, not all chocolate products are created equal: They can vary wildly in flavonoid content, fat and calories, and quality of ingredients. So how can you be sure you're expressing your love with the healthiest chocolate option? According to dietitian Gloria Tsang, author of the new book Go UnDiet: 50 Small Actions for Lasting Weight Loss and founder of nutrition network HealthCastle, many products you might find in the chocolates section of your grocery store or gift shop have …

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Ditch the Processed Snacks and Snack Healthy

Take a look at tips to avoid highly processed foods and snack healthy.

By Ian Lee, Health Castle February is National Snack Foods Month. However, many of the items we think of as traditional snack foods are highly processed and loaded with sodium and fat and are bad choices for a healthy diet, especially for kids.  According to dietitian Gloria Tsang, author of the new book Go UnDiet: 50 Small Actions for Lasting Weight Loss and founder of nutrition network HealthCastle, highly processed snack foods are a key cause of our growing obesity epidemic—even those that claim to be diet-friendly, low in sugar or fat-free. "Snack foods have been engineered to the point that they no longer resemble real food," Tsang said in a press release. "Then the packages are covered in claims to make them sound healthy and diet-…

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Make a New Year's Resolution That Sticks

Instead of one big resolution, try 10 little ones, which you can implement all at once or one per week for the first few months of the year.

By Ian Lee, Health Castle We've all done it: made a big, fat New Year's resolution that we swore up and down we'd stick to. And we did stick to it—for about six weeks. So what's the secret to making resolutions you can actually stick to throughout the entire year? According to dietitian Gloria Tsang, author of the new book Go UnDiet: 50 Small Actions for Lasting Weight Loss and founder of nutrition network HealthCastle.com, the key is to skip the overambitious resolutions that often leave us miserable and frustrated and focus on small, achievable resolutions that add up to create dramatic, long-lasting results. "You can't feast your way through the holidays and then expect to give up all sugar on January 1," Tsang said in a press release…

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