Lauren Gleisberg shares the recipes for sculpted arms and a nutritious mint smoothie.
Lauren Gleisberg is a recently engaged health and fitness enthusiast, with several years experience in the industry. She's well-known for her motivating and achievable tips and programs, which can be found on her website. We'll be following her monthly with her plans for a healthy body and mind leading up to her wedding day.
My approach to health and fitness is to work smarter not harder. In other words, I like to share the most effective approach, so you feel that your effort is paying off! A large part of that is having a strategy behind workouts and incorporating moderation into nutrition.
When creating a strategic workout plan, I like to teach women to focus on the result. Where do you want to be? What do you want to look like? How do you want to feel? Once you identify the goal, you can create a plan in a reverse engineering style.
For many brides, they want to look amazing in their dress and feel good about themselves. Physically, the biceps and triceps are a great area to focus on since many dresses expose the arms. So with that as a physical goal, I would suggest adding in 1-2 arm workouts with weights per week. Incorporating weights are important because they will help shape and tighten the arms.
Here’s a weight training arm workout that I love:
Moderation is key with nutrition because it’s what allows us to stick to healthy eating long-term. It’s especially important for brides not to feel they have to follow a restrictive diet for two reasons. First, the psychology behind restrictive eating shows a link to increased binging, which is an unhealthy food habit that should be avoided. Second, restrictive diets are no fun; a bride has so many wonderful moments to enjoy that her nutrition approach should be one of moderation to enjoy an indulgence guilt-free on occasion.
Below you will find a recipe of mine that is a healthier version of a limited edition mint shake made famous by a popular fast food restaurant:
Ingredients:
-1 cup ice
-1 cup unsweetened vanilla almond milk
-1/2 cup vanilla Greek yogurt
-1/2 avocado
-1/2 banana
-1 tbsp/2 packets stevia or other sugar substitute
-1/8 tsp mint extract or ~10 fresh mint leaves
Optional:
-1 tbsp dark chocolate chips (thin mint smoothie, anyone?)
NOTE: mint extract will yield a closer taste to a shamrock shake, while adding the mint leaves is a more natural option and produces a slightly "earthy" taste - green juice lovers you know what I mean
Prep:
(1) In a blender, combine all ingredients
(2) Blend well until a smooth, creamy consistency is reached (this may take longer if you're using fresh mint leaves)
(3) If including dark chocolate chips, stir in after blending
Until next time,
Lauren
For frequent healthy living tips and inspiration visit Lauren's website or follow her on Instagram: @laurengleisberg
