For your diet and workouts to best serve your body, it’s important to focus on foods and exercises that fit your personal goals. This week’s health tips show the possible benefits from several nutritious foods and challenging workouts—like sweet potato to support your blood sugar or incline walking for strength and balance.
Packed with fiber, minerals, and antioxidants, dates are healthy no matter when you eat them. But they happen to make an excellent pre-workout snack.
They’re rich in natural sugars (about 16 grams per Medjool date) that break down quickly in your body, providing you with rapid fuel for your muscles during exercise. Dates also contain a solid serving of potassium, an essential electrolyte for muscle function. You lose potassium when you sweat, so it can be helpful to grab a handful of dates after your workout, too.
If you’re trying to avoid blood sugar spikes, try adding more sweet potatoes to your meals. These root vegetables are rich in complex carbs, which take longer to digest, and low in simple sugars that can temporarily spike blood sugar.
For even greater blood sugar benefits, let your cooked sweet potato cool completely before eating it. This process converts some starch in the potatoes into resistant starch, a healthy complex carb. Toss cubed, cold sweet potatoes into a salad, or reheat them, which won’t affect the levels of resistant starch.
Treadmill and outdoor walking are both great for your heart, strength, and endurance, but walking outdoors tends to challenge your body more. Uneven terrain, hills, and wind make your muscles work harder and test your balance and coordination.
If winter weather has you stuck inside, there’s a simple way to add that element to your treadmill workouts: adding an incline. Start small with a 1% increase, then gradually work your way up. You can also vary the incline throughout your workout to make it even more similar to a hike.
Looking for a way to sneak more vitamin B12 into your diet? Try eating more yogurt. It’s a solid source of B12—with 86% of the daily recommended intake in 1 cup—and it has an easily absorbable form of the vitamin. In fact, the B12 in dairy products is about three times more absorbable than B12 in meat, fish, and poultry.
For a healthy breakfast, opt for Greek yogurt—which has more protein than regular yogurt—and add fruit for more fiber and nutrients.
You need plenty of magnesium, as the mineral supports sleep, keeps bones strong, helps muscles contract, and more. Before turning to a supplement, try adding more magnesium-rich foods to your diet, like cashews.
A quarter cup contains about 85 milligrams of magnesium, which is around 20% of the daily recommended value. Plus, cashews provide healthy fats, fiber, protein, and other vitamins and minerals.
