2 frozen bananas (just place a couple of very ripe bananas with their peel on in the freezer for a couple of hours)

4 ounces of natural yogurt

1 tablespoon honey (optional)

Take the bananas out of the freezer and thaw for about 5 minutes at room temperature (don’t let them thaw too long as you want them to still feel quite cold and a little frozen).  Place the bananas in a blender and pour the yogurt over the bananas.  Blend on high for about 1 minute.  The mixture doesn’t have to be perfectly smooth you want it to have an ice cream like consistency.

Serve and add a little honey over the top if you’re using it.  If the bananas you used are very ripe then you may not need the additional honey.

This is a great healthy dessert but is also a good way to use up those very ripe bananas no one wants to eat!

For the Fondue:

7 ounces natural yogurt

2 ounces of dark chocolate roughly chopped (if your kids aren’t used to dark chocolate try 1 ounce dark/1 ounce milk chocolate)

2 tablespoons cocoa

3 teaspoons maple syrup or honey (less if you use milk chocolate)

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

For Dipping:

Pineapple chunks

Banana slices

Peach slices

Mango slices

Strawberries

And any other fruit you can think of!

Warm the yogurt in a small pan at a very low temperature, make sure you don’t heat it too quickly as the yogurt will curdle.  Slowly add the chopped chocolate and stir until melted in.  Then add the cocoa, maple syrup and vanilla.  Mix until smooth.  Place in a fondue pot or small bowl and serve with cut fruit for dipping.

Baked Chicken and Banana Recipe

4 halved skinless chicken breasts
1 can corn kernels (drained)
2 bananas (peeled)
2 tablespoons butter
8 bacon strips
1 1/2 cups cream
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350F. Lightly butter a baking tray and spread corn evenly covering bottom of tray.

Take the chicken breasts and carefully cut a small pocket in each chicken breast (slice into the side as if you were dividing into two thin pieces). Press half a banana into each pocket (you can mash bananas to make this easier).  Close chicken breasts over and sprinkle with salt and pepper if using.

Place chicken breasts carefully on top of corn. Drizzle with cream.

Cut the butter into small knobs and place evenly through tray. Top each chicken breast with bacon slices.

Bake in preheated oven approximately 30 to 40 minutes or until bacon is crisp and chicken is cooked through.

What a great way to get the kids to more fruit, mix it with chicken!

Little Bit o’ Sweet, Little Bit o’ Salt, Whole Lot o’ Good Snack Mix for Kids

1/2 cup soy nuts, honey roasted
1/2 cup nuts of choice, raw and chopped
1/2 sunflower seeds, raw
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup whole grain pretzel sticks
1/2 cup whole grain cereal of choice
1/2 cup banana chips
1/4 cup mixed dried fruit

Mix all ingredients in a bowl and serve.

Whole Wheat Apple and Pecan Rolls Recipe

2 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups white flour
1 1/4 cups milk
1/4 cup sugar
2 1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup margarine or butter
1/4 cup honey
1/2 cup warm water
2 packages baking yeast
1/2 cup finely chopped apple (peeled)
1/2 cup chopped pecans

Directions:

Mix the white and whole wheat flour together and set aside.  Heat the milk in a small sauce pan but do not boil.  Stir in sugar, salt, margarine or butter, and honey and mix.  Set aside to cool.

Add 1/2 cup warm water to a large bowl and stir in the yeast.  Add the milk mixture.  Then stir in the flour.  Batter should be thick but light enough to mix through.  Cover with a clean cloth and place in a warm place to rise.  The dough should double in size.

Once the dough has risen, fold in the apple and pecan pieces.  Lightly grease 18 large muffin cups and spoon the batter into them.  Cover and set aside to rise until double.  Once doubled again bake at 375F for approximately 20 to 25 minutes until baked through.  Remove to a wire rack to cool completely.

* Note: When setting the dough aside to rise make sure you place it in a warm place (a little warmer than room temperature) and away from any drafts.

No Meat Soft Tacos

6 soft corn tortillas
1 cup shredded Monterey jack cheese
1 cup canned re-fried beans
3 medium-size tomatoes (diced)
1 medium-size onion (chopped)
1 cup chopped lettuce
1/2 cup bottled salsa

In a small pot warm beans over medium heat until they start to boil, stirring often.  Remove from heat.  Plastic wrap your tortillas and microwave for 1 minute to warm and soften.  Place the tortillas on plates.  Scoop 2 tablespoons of beans onto the tortillas.  Sprinkle with cheese.  Add tomatoes, onions, lettuce, and salsa.

Baked Wheat French Toast and Peaches

Fat free cooking spray
1 8oz pkg whole wheat baguette
4 egg whites
4 whole eggs
1 c 1% or skim milk
5 c fresh or frozen peaches, sliced
1 1/2 Tfresh lemon juice
1 t vanilla extract
3 T brown sugar
1/4 t ground cinnamon

Spray 9 x 13 pan with cooking spray.  Slice baguette into 1/2 in slices and arrange in bottom of baking dish.  Whisk together egg whites, whole eggs, milk and vanilla extact.  Pour over the bread.  Toss peaches in 1 T brown sugar and lemon juice.  Spread peaches over top of bread mixture, scattering evenly.  Combine remaining 2 T brown sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle over the top.  Refrigerate overnight. Preheat oven 350 degrees. Bake uncovered for 40 minutes. Can be served with vanilla yogurt on top.

Healthy Homemade Oatmeal Muffins

Ingredients:

¾ cup flour
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 ½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
¾ cup uncooked oatmeal (traditional slow cooking oats)
1 teaspoon cinnamon
¼ cup butter or margarine
¾ cup buttermilk
1 egg

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 400F.  Grease a 12-hole muffin tin well and set aside.  Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, sugar, cinnamon and oatmeal in a large bowl.  Mix together well.  In a separate bowl mix together the butter, buttermilk and egg.  Mix well.  Gently fold into the dry ingredients.  Take care not to over mix.  Pour batter into 12 muffin cup tin and bake for approximately 15 to 20 minutes or until baked through.  Best served warm with a little butter and jam.

Kid Fitness Programs

Kids’ fitness is a major concern today with several kids becoming overweight or even obese by the time they reach their teenage years. Over 40% of the kids in the US are believed to be overweight. Even though obesity is often believed to be because of genetic factors or because of over-eating, lack of proper exercise is also a major reason for obesity among children. There is an imbalance between activity and diet that causes even children who eat normally to put on excessive weight. Obesity is determined by calculating the body mass index, which is the ratio between the height and the weight. A BMI between 17 and 23 is considered healthy. Anything higher than this is considered to be obesity.

These days, there are special fitness programs exclusively for kids. These include exercises, healthy nutritional plans, and even emotional strengthening. Kids’ fitness programs are designed to be a lot of fun. They are also designed based on their age.

Kid fitness programs are comprised of several activities like: T-ball, hockey, soccer, basketball, lacrosse, flag football, track and field, boxing, kickboxing, and martial arts. There are also special fitness programs that use unique skills like dancing, ballet, cheerleading, gymnastics, and yoga. Kids should also be encouraged to participate in rigorous activities like tag, chase, jump rope, random running, racing, swimming, cycling, and walking.

There are also fitness programs that involve the whole family. These are a great way to incorporate healthy living into the entire family’s routine, so that the kids do not feel alienated when they have to exercise alone. Nowadays, many summer camps are incorporating fitness programs into their regimes. There are also special fitness programs for kids with disabilities.

Fitness Programs provides detailed information on Fitness Programs, Fitness Training Programs, Golf Fitness Programs, Kid Fitness Programs and more. Fitness Programs is affiliated with Gym Equipment.

Children’s Fitness

Remember your physical education (PE) classes in school? If your experience was anything like mine, it was a class you truly hated. And if, like me, you were not a natural athlete, your painful memories may have actually discouraged you from exercising later in life.

A recent New York Times article, “Putting the Gym Back in Gym Class” (October 13, 2005), explores this problem and examines what some PE professionals have proposed to improve the situation. In part this re-evaluation is due to the sharp curtailment of school PE programs in recent years. As the article explains, “School administrators began cutting physical education programs…because of the way many classes were taught. Budget cutters who remembered playing dodge ball and Red Rover came to view gym class as dispensable.”

But there is also a genuine understanding that PE has not, for the most part, been successful in promoting health and fitness. Only a tiny percentage of students continue playing the sports they learned in gym class after graduating from high school. (When was the last time you and your friends enjoyed a game of dodge ball?)

And many of the sports emphasized in gym failed to help those who needed it most. As Anne Flannery, the president of PE4life, a PE advocacy group, points out, “In dodge ball it’s the very child that needs exercise the most who’s picked off first…in a game of soccer probably four or five of the most athletic kids touched the ball, and everybody else just stood there.”

This certainly describes my own PE experience. I quickly learned that if I kept a low profile, and was discreet in minimizing my participation, I could still get by with a grade of “B”, or at worst a “C’. During our weekly outdoor runs, I would disappear for a few rounds into a shallow ditch behind a row of hedges, out of sight of the gym teachers. My dodge ball strategy was to pretend I was hit early in the game when there were still enough players in the game that nobody noticed.

Today, there is a growing emphasis on teaching skills that are useful beyond gym class. Instead of learning how to dodge a ball or climb a rope, children in some schools are taught to lift weights, balance their diets and build cardiovascular endurance. There is also a movement towards fewer competitive activities and more activities that emphasize personal achievement such as rock-climbing, kick-boxing and tai-chi. As Ms Flannery says, “It’s about giving these kids the tools and skill and experience so they can lead a physically active life the rest of their life.”

This approach certainly makes a lot of sense. It’s usefulness is also backed up by a recent study published in the October 2005 issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. University of Wisconsin researchers observed 50 overweight children and found that they lost more weight when they cycled, skied cross-country and walked than when they played sports during class time. They also found that sports like football and kick ball produced less overall movement, in part because reluctant students were able to sit on the bench much of the time.

The new approach to PE is certainly to be welcomed as a major improvement over the old system. But if the goal is truly fitness for life, I believe these new developments leave out a crucial ingredient: They fail to train kids HOW to do whatever physical activities they engage in – whether it be sports, or everyday activities like sitting at a desk, standing, walking, driving a car – in a way that minimizes harmful strain and risk of injury.

Promoting cardiovascular fitness is fine as far as it goes, but this kind of grading system has a serious flaw in that it both mirrors and reinforces the preoccupation of most adult fitness programs with the quantity of activity activity performed, rather than the way participants use their bodies while performing those activities. We tend to be interested in how many laps we swam, the amount of weights we lifted, or the speed of our runs rather than how well we used our body in performing those sports. In other words quantity rather than quality.

To see what this leads to, take a look at any group of runners or joggers. You will probably see tight necks, hunched shoulders and painful expressions on many of their faces. These runners may be getting a cardiovascular workout, but in the process they’re putting a lot of unnecessary and harmful pressure on their bodies. No wonder so many people who begin fitness programs drop out after a few weeks, often due to pain or injuries.

Of course it’s important that children engage in vigorous physical activity; we don’t want them to grow up to be couch potatoes. But making “effort” the primary basis for grading students – even if it’s as easy as reading a heart monitor – does our children a great disservice.

What makes this particularly sad is that we now know how to help people improve their movement quality. The twentieth century saw the development of numerous somatic therapies and teaching methods that have proven effective in helping people of all ages perform all their activities, from everyday ones like walking and using a computer right through to vigorous sports, with greater ease, efficiency and safety.

The method I know best, first as a student and then, for the past twenty years as a teacher, is the Alexander Technique. It has a long history of helping people with stress-related conditions like back pain and stiff necks and shoulders and it is often used by musicians, dancers and actors to improve the quality of their performance.

The Alexander Technique is taught by specially-trained teachers, but some of it’s principles could easily be included in PE classes. Take for instance the Alexander-related process that has come to be know as “body-mapping”. This approach includes learning, on your own body, just where important joints are located and how they function.

It turns out that most of us have serious “mis-maps” of our own body which cause us to move in ways that attempt to reinforce those incorrect ideas. For example, many people think their hip joints are at waist level when, in fact, they are located far lower on our torso. Correcting this mis-map is quite easy to do and almost always results in much smoother bending, walking and running patterns.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if PE programs included teaching this kind of useful self-knowledge to our kids so they could go through life using their bodies as nature intended? And look back on their PE experiences with fondness and gratitude?

RESOURCES

“Body-mapping” is a term coined by Alexander Technique teachers William and Barbara Conable. You can read a short introduction to the process at http://www.alexandertechnique.com/articles/bodymap

The Conables have written a wonderful book describing the process in detail, “How to Learn the Alexander Technique – A Manual for Students”. As the title implies, the book was written mainly for people taking Alexander Technique lessons, but I have found it to be a valuable resource for anyone prepared to spend a little time exploring the operation of their own body.

Another book, full of practical suggestions, is “Mind and Muscle – An Owner’s Handbook” by Elizabeth Langford. It covers some of the same ground, although she does not use the term “body-mapping”.

Both of these books, along with a great many other books, videos and CD’s about the Alexander Technique can be ordered at The Alexander Technique Bookstore at http://www.alexandertechnique.com/books

Robert Rickover is a teacher of the Alexander Technique living in Lincoln, Nebraska. He also teaches regularly in Toronto, Canada. Robert is the author of Fitness Without Stress – A Guide to the Alexander Technique and is the creator of The Complete Guide to the Alexander Technique http://www.alexandertechnique.com

“Body-mapping” is a term coined by Alexander Technique teachers William and Barbara Conable. You can read a short introduction to the process at http://www.alexandertechnique.com/articles/bodymap

The Conables have written a wonderful book describing the process in detail, “How to Learn the Alexander Technique – A Manual for Students”. As the title implies, the book was written mainly for people taking Alexander Technique lessons, but I have found it to be a valuable resource for anyone prepared to spend a little time exploring the operation of their own body.

Another book, full of practical suggestions, is “Mind and Muscle – An Owner’s Handbook” by Elizabeth Langford. It covers some of the same ground, although she does not use the term “body-mapping”.

Both of these books, along with a great many other books, videos and CD’s about the Alexander Technique can be ordered at The Alexander Technique Bookstore at http://www.alexandertechnique.com/books

Robert Rickover is a teacher of the Alexander Technique living in Lincoln, Nebraska. He also teaches regularly in Toronto, Canada. Robert is the author of Fitness Without Stress – A Guide to the Alexander Technique and is the creator of The Complete Guide to the Alexander Technique http://www.alexandertechnique.com