Hard to believe, but Barb Filutze's summer runner's training program came to an end last night. Didn't it just start?! Actually, it went a week later than expected because they missed a week when the Gov. and the PA state politicos had a standoff and the state parks were shut down.
I made it to the training most weeks and there was always a crowd of a hundred or more. Last night, there was food...lots of it... and, I noticed, much of it was healthy -- lots of fresh fruits and veggies and salads.
Last nights guest speaker and the veteran runner was nutritionist Sandy Sweet. Sandy gave us her top 10 tips for a healthy diet -- which included: never skipping a meal, eating 5 different colored fruits or veggies every day, always eating breakfast, eating protein at every meal and watching portion sizes.
She had a display of foods on the picnic table -- Cambell's tomato soup, Heinz ketchup, Prego spaghetti sauce (and a few other things I can't recall right now) and asked us what we thought they all had in common (besides tomatoes). I was going to shout out sodium, but..it was sugar. Who'd have thought your spaghetti sauce could have teaspoons of unnecessary sugar? (Sandy did say that sodium was probably another bad thing they all had in common).
Sandy said there are products (spaghetti sauces, soup, etc.) that don't have the extra sugar, but you have to read the label to find out. Her tip -- look for anything that ends in "ose" (dextrose, sucrose, etc.) -- they are all forms of sugar.
Another label-reading tip from Sandy: When buying whole wheat bread, look at the ingredients and be sure that the first ingredient says "whole wheat." She said all bread is made of wheat, so any bread could technically be a "wheat" bread.
Here are a few photos I snapped between chasing after the kids and stuffing my face:
Here's the shirt the program finishers received (this is the back).
A crowd shot.
Another crowd shot.
Barb giving her opening message.
My running friend, Fred Beckwith and me (my four-year-old was the photographer)