Guacamole Grilled Cheese Sandwich

So what is better than grilled cheese sandwiches? Adding guacamole to it! What is not to love-bread, melted cheese, and creamy guacamole? Although it requires more steps than the other recipes I posted, it is definitely worth it in the end. Here’s the recipe thanks to two peas & their pod!

Guacamole Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Yield: 2 sandwiches

Cook Time: 5-7 minutes

Ingredients:

To make the guacamole:

2 ripe avocados

1/2 small onion, minced

1 clove garlic, minced

1 small jalapeño, stems and seeds removed, minced

2 tablespoons cilantro leaves, finely chopped

1 tablespoon of fresh lime juice

1/2 teaspoon coarse salt

A dash of freshly grated black pepper

1 Roma tomato, chopped

4 slices crusty white bread

4 slices Cheddar cheese

Butter, for buttering bread

Directions:

1. To make the guacamole-cut avocados in half. Remove seed. Scoop out avacado from the peel, put in a large bowl. Using a fork, mash the avocado. Add the onion, garlic, jalapeño, cilantro, lime juice, salt and pepper. Stir until well combined. Add the chopped tomato and stir.

2. Heat a pan or griddle to medium-high heat. Spread desired amount of guacamole on both slices of bread then top with cheese. Butter outer slices of bread and grill on one side for about 2 minutes or until golden and crispy. Flip the sandwich and grill until golden brown. Make the other sandwich the same way and serve warm.

Enjoy!

The Do’s and Don’ts of exercise:

I am not a personal trainer nor do I have much experience about exercising but there are a couple of things that should and shouldn’t be done that is pretty obvious when it comes to exercising.

• Definitely exercise. According to Physioroom.com, we were meant to run. It is not good to be sitting around all day, drive, and go to sleep. There are so many ways to exercise! If you don’t like one method, try another.
• Do warm up. A lot of people tend to not warm up before exercising. This is how injuries occur. Warming up slowly increases the circulation in your body.

• Don’t give up. The key to a good exercise is to change it up once in a while. Eating the same meal every night would get boring right? It’s just like exercise. This will keep your routine going.
• Don’t overdo it. Knowing your body’s limits is one of the most important lessons you learn with exercising daily. You won’t turn from a couch potato to a trainer in weeks. Start off slow, if not, you might hurt yourself.

For more information visit physioroom.com

Eating Disorders

According to the South Carolina Department of Mental Health, it is estimated that 8 million Americans have an eating disorder, 7 million are women. An eating disorder is an illness that can threaten your health and even your life due to unhealthy eating. This can include anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating. Anorexia is characterized by extreme thinness, intense fear of gaining weight, denial of low body weight and lack of menstruation among girls and women. Victims with anorexia weigh themselves repeatedly, portion food carefully, and eat very small quantities of certain foods which can become an obsession. Unlike anorexia, bulimia is eating large amounts of food and feeling a lack of control. This is followed by forced vomiting, excessive use of laxatives, excessive exercising or a combination of these behaviors.

Eating disorders aren’t only about losing weight but also excessive eating. People who are binge eating are often obese or overweight and they have a higher risk of higher blood pressure or cardiovascular disease. For more information, check out NIMH.

Also, I found this awesome picture, hey sex sells! Anyways, it’s from a non-profit organization called The Joy Project. They have come up with solutions to end the epidemic of eating disorders. They try to reduce the rate and severity of eating disorders through research, education and support programs.

Summer Workouts

Fruits and vegetables are very important when maintaining a healthy eating habit.

Apart from eating healthy, one should exercise also to keep this healthy balance, even if you workout once a week. Your body will get used to it and soon you’ll expand to more days a week. I found this great website, divine.ca, which gives you all these workouts depending on the body part you want to work on. It is called the Exercise Finder and it gives you pages and pages of different workouts. If one doesn’t work for you, try out the next one! Also, since summer is right around the corner, and everyone is trying to workout, especially on their abs! I found a great video.

CFDA

So I came across this interesting video on YouTube, The View featuring Victoria Beckham, discussing the issues of underweight models.

The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) are reaching out to designers, stylist and casting agencies asking them to be responsible when choosing their models. According to Paulins and Hillery, CFDA has issued voluntary guidelines for fashion models for the NYC Fashion week in 2007. Some of these guidelines include, no underage models, education concerning warning signs of eating disorders and healthy snacks and food during fashion shows. However, critics believe they should have expanded and set a BMI like Spain. But what if some of these girls are naturally thin? The fashion industry does not want to discriminate models but they should be healthy and have the right proportions.

Around the World

Many people are wondering what other countries are doing about underweight models. It seems that they are handling it way differently than the US. According to Euronews, Israel has blocked its media, websites and catwalk shows from using extremely thin models or those with a low BMI (Body Mass Index).

The BMI is pretty much used to determine the weight and height of a model. The average BMI is 18.5, anything below that is underweight. Today’s models have a BMI from 14-16. Therefore, Israel is passing a law to protect vulnerable teenagers from eating disorders. According to officials, there has been an estimate of 30 young adults and teenagers dying each year of anorexia or bulimia. Something has to be done! According to CNN, Spain is also taking a stand, they were the first to ban overly thin models at a top-level fashion show and it caused outrages among modeling agencies but it raised restrictions at other venues.

Organizers say they want to project an image of beauty and health, rather than “heroin chic look.” A spokesman for the Association of Fashion Designers of Spain spoke of how the main concerns are the quality of the collections, not the size of the models.

Refreshing Smoothies

Since this whole “pro-ana” organization (the organization that favors eating disorders) is going against what should be taught to young adults and teens, I want to promote my readers healthy lifestyle habits. I have come across so many yummy and easy-to-make recipes which I will share with you guys! Since the weather is finally starting to warm up in the east coast, I came across these healthy smoothies to cool you down during the summer. Courtesy of neverhomemaker, I came across the Watermelon Hydro-Cooler

What you’ll need . . .

1 cup watermelon slices (de-seeded)

1 cup ice

1 large banana

1/3 cup applesauce

Toss everything into your blender and blend. Drink immediately, as it tends to separate after 20 minutes (into water and fruit). And enjoy!

In case you do not like watermelons and might prefer strawberries you might want to try Basic Strawberry Smoothie

What you’ll need . . .

1 frozen banana (essential that it’s frozen)

3/4 cup frozen strawberries

1/2 cup Greek yogurt

1/2 cup almond milk

Toss everything in a blender and blend.

Add more or less milk depending on your texture preference.

To jazz it up, add cinnamon. Or vanilla extract. But I don’t think you need to and Enjoy!

So who should we really blame for the cause of all this, the fashion industry or the media? This chart from the website Rader Program, sets up some of the reasons why women want to be thin. However, it is no surprise that the fashion industry prefers skinny models. This has been going on since Twiggy in the 1980s.

Unfortunately, when Kate Moss started advertising Calvin Klein, her look set new weight standards for models.

From then on Calvin Klein and other designers favor extremely thin models. But first the whole problem starts with the photo shoots, designers make the sample sizes smaller each time for models to wear for the ads and editorial spreads. This means that models get thinner and thinner each time. Unfortunately, some models show up at fashion shoots looking so unhealthy that photo editors are forced to add fat to their bodies in retouching, and to airbrush out their protruding bones. Not only are models are promoting to be thin, but also foods/drinks. The drink Skinny Water ® had to withdraw their ads because customers were complaining their headline, “Skinny Always Gets the Attention.”

The ad for Pretzel Chips® used the tagline “Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels,” which is the phrase that Kate Moss admittedly said she lived by.

Also, according to the Business Insider, there is a group of girls that call themselves “pro-ana,” who are a community of women for favor anorexia. Twisted right?

So have you ever looked at a fashion magazine and came across all these skinny models and wished you looked like them?

I bet a lot of people have felt that way. It is nearly impossible to open a newspaper or magazine, shop at a mall or turn on a TV without being confronted with the message that being thin is very desirable. It seems as if it has become part of our lives to wish to have the bodies like some of those girls.

A couple of weeks ago, in one of my classes, we came across the current issues in the workplace. Apart from the other two issues that were presented, code of regulations for appearance really caught my attention. According to Ethics in the Fashion Industry by V. Ann Paulins and Julie L. Hillery, this has become a major issue in the fashion industry today because eating disorders and unhealthy lifestyles are being promoted. Our fashion industry has been criticized for many years for the promotion of the “unachievable beauty ideal” (66). This has made a huge turn for society because from an early age we are bombarded with images and messages that reinforce the idea that to be happy and successful, we must be thin.