Our Favorite Healthy Living Reads This Month

To provide the best options for healthy eating and supplementation, we are continuously looking at the stream of new and changing research in diet and exercise to offer the best, most natural new products to our customers. From healthy Valentine's Day tips to winter exercise, we wanted to share a few of the best articles that we've found recently that've helped us (and may help you) achieve our personal goals for 2017.

A Heart-Healthy Valentine's Day

A traditional V-Day celebration involves a lot of chocolates and a high-calorie dinner. If you're trying to stick to a diet (or your sweetheart is), there are a lot of great gift and date ideas that are very enjoyable. Learn more about some alternatives to the boxes of sweet temptations, cooking at home, sharing an entree out, and others. Read more here at Heart.org.

Why Pea Protein is Growing in Popularity

We recently launched a lineup of Pea-based protein snack chips (you can see them here) because of the unique benefits of pea protein versus others (such as whey). This plant-based protein is perfect for vegan/vegetarian diets, is hypoallergenic, easy-to-digest, and is more environmentally-friendly to produce, and it's quickly exploding in popularity. Read more here at Today.com.

Make Portion-Control Easier with the Lose It! App's Visual Guides

One of the best dieting apps is "Lose It!" and they've added an awesome new feature to help with the common problem of poorly estimating serving sizes. Now, when you log your serving size, there's an option in the bottom corner to help figure it out, which pulls up a reference to a common object as a simple guide. This can help you make better decisions for your diet, plus helps you log your meals much more accurately. Learn more about the app and download it free for Apple products here, and for Google/Android products here.

How and Why You Should Exercise Outdoors During Winter

While we tend to want to hibernate during the dark, cold winter months, there are some unique benefits to getting yourself to exercise outside when the temperatures are frigid. In our post, we go over concepts such as getting extra exposure to the sun (and Vitamin D), burning more calories than exercising in warm weather, and more. Plus, find out some great exercise tips once you're ready to bundle up and head out. Read our post here.

Pre-plan Your Workout with a DIY Clothes Organizer

It's well-known good advice to lay out your exercise clothes the night before to give you a little boost (and save time) the next day for going to the gym. You can take that a step further and prep for the entire week with this interesting do-it-yourself organizer courtesy of the targetteachers Instagram account. It simply hangs in your closet next to your other clothes. It can cost under $10 to make, but could make your life easier and your workouts more frequent. Learn more here at Lifehacker Vitals.

From Target Teachers Instagram. Click to view post.

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