CityView Magazine

36 | January/February 2015 cakes, both of which you can find on her website. Erica's advice for great cooking is to use spices. She says she keeps all of her food full of spices to keep it flavor- ful and zesty. Eating healthy doesn't mean having to eat bland. Simplicity is also a must. She rarely makes anything with more than five ingredients. She feels that one of the biggest deterrents for people doing their own baking or cooking is that there are so many reci- pes out there that are complicated, half of which require items that people don't have in their cupboards. She is really into batch cooking where she spends a few hours on Sunday doing all her food prep for the week and creates simple dishes in different combinations from that prepped food throughout the week. While they are simple dishes, they don't look or taste simple in the end. When asked what tips would she give for someone trying to get healthy and loose weight she states, "Take baby steps. Have an end goal in mind, but take it one step at a time. All the infor- mation out there can be overwhelming. All the things you need to do can be overwhelming. But I always tell people, 'Better is better.' When people are try- ing to get healthy, much like they do in the New Year, they can't help but fail at their approach because they clean out their cupboards, throw all the bad stuff away, sign up for a workout class, and they do all of this at once. ey over- whelm their physical capability because people can only have so much tolerance for change. And they fail. But if they would take small steps and acknowl- edge that every step in the right direc- tion is an improvement; they would get a lot further then they would have if they did it all at once and three days later feel very dissatisfied because they did not accomplish anything. I have a saying; 'e road to success is paved with the bodies of those that tried too hard.' It's not that we don't want to try; it is that we don't want to try everything at one time." CV You can find Erica Chard's Cross- Fit Raeford at 230 Lindsay Road. Her FitGrub Food website is www.whole youhealth.com. Photo by Matthew Wonderly Erica's favorite: Almond Butter Turn upside down for Fit Grub

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