This week, we welcomed in spring (in theory, anyway), which led to anticipation of sunny afternoons spent sipping smoothies in the park and warm evenings whiled away on a patio with friends and a Caesar or two; both great ideas, though as our HuffPost Living team reminded us, your smoothie will be a lot healthier if you made it yourself (store-bought means more sugar and less protein), and the Clamato in your Caesar is awfully high in sodium. But it's been a long winter and we all have to indulge once in a while -- plus, blogger Barbara Aleks Hecht has encouraged the females among us to stop obsessing over the size of our butts, so maybe a sugary drink here and there shouldn't be considered the end of the world (or the diet).
Besides, as nutritionist Rose Reisman has pointed out, taking the restriction of food too far -- for example, following the latest diet trend of engaging in a modified fast for two days a week -- tends to lead to psychological and physiological hoarding of fat and calories as soon as the deprivation is over, which sounds like an even worse game plan than not watching what you eat at all. Perhaps one way to look at it is that now that we'll all be walking, playing Frisbee and -- assuming it eventually stops snowing -- swimming a little more in our down time, we can afford to consume a bit of extra energy. Or to put it in terms Canadians can understand: The balanced meals of Artic char, fiddleheads and chokecherries should still be the norm. You just have a little more license to sneak in the very occasional butter tart, Nanaimo bar or Coffee Crisp now that you're incorporating more movement into your week.
