Chocolate Milk – “A Damn Near Perfect Food”

Women’s Health Magazine has compiled a list of The Best Fitness Foods for Women and I was pleasantly surprised to find goodies like chocolate milk.  Sure, it offers lots of calcium, but isn’t it even more fattening with chocolate added? Sports nutritionist Susan Kleiner, Ph.D, author of High-Performance Nutrition: The Total Eating Plan to Maximum Your Workout , explains that “there’s way more to milk than just calcium. In fact, it’s a damn near perfect food, giving you a lot of valuable energy while keeping your calorie count low.

“The chocolate kind is loaded with calcium, vitamins, and minerals just like the plain stuff, but new studies confirm that milk with a touch of cocoa is as powerful as commercial recovery drinks at replenishing and repairing muscles.”

The list includes some other delicious foods such as:

Hummus – If you don’t eat a bowl of it and keep your portion to a neat 70-calorie, 3 tablespoon portion, you’ll get all the complex carbohydrates, protein, and unsaturated fats you need to fuel activity.

Eggs - a whole egg, in fact. The yolk is a good source of iron, and it’s loaded with lecithin, critical for brain health, says nutritionist Kleiner.

Chicken Thighs – I always thought dark meat poultry had too much fat for my diet. But Dr. Kleiner explains that “dark-meat poultry is significantly lower in fat than red meat yet has all the iron, zinc, and B vitamins that women need in their diets.”