Food - fun and healthy….not a chance I hear you say, but there are ways of being creative with food which will keep even the fussiest eaters coming back for more.

If you’re struggling to get your ‘5 a day’ into your daily routine, or worse are still struggling to get the nutrients into your children (if you have them), then smoothies can be a healthy and fun alternative.  There are however certain do’s and don’ts…

The don’ts

The main problem with blending all your fruits into one giant drink is that there is a high likelihood that it will be a sugary paradise and the exact reverse of what you are trying to achieve.  Blended fruits have a lot of the fibrous (sugar stabilising) content broken down while at the same time liberating large amounts of fructose sugars.  The combination is stressful on your liver, bad for your blood sugar and will assist you on a pathway to adding fat to your body which is probably not why you were doing it in the first place.  Generally if it looks bright ...

If you’re like most people, when the new year comes around, you’re full of good intent to make positive changes in your life.  In fact around 25% of us make resolutions in January with the majority focused towards weight loss, exercise and nutrition.  

The difficulty with nutrition based goals is that there is a great deal of confusion with what is good and what is not.  All the way back to 1992, the UK government published nutritional recommendations with four key components 1. eat more fruit, vegetables and salad,  2. cut down on fat,  3. eat more fibre and 4. eat more starchy carbohydrates. 

When researchers asked the public ten years later if they could name some of these recommendations and despite spending significant sums of money on awareness campaigns, only 16% of people interviewed could remember even 3 or 4 of these core principles.   

On reviewing the current nutritional guidelines provided by the NHS some 30 years later (https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/the-eatwel...

There’s always a temptation at this time of year to think that no matter how badly your nutrition is for December it’s okay, as you can sort it all out in January! However, the research suggests that when you use the mindset that you’ll sort out today’s bad habits tomorrow, it creates two new problems.  Firstly it sets up a “what the hell” mindset today, as you excuse all your good work and secondly, it creates a “what’s the point” mindset tomorrow.  Meaning, that when you’ve gone so far away from where you wanted to be, your brain can’t see the route back and gives up at the first hurdle.

So, what nutritional plan should we have navigating our way towards the holiday period?

1. Plan, plan, plan -  As the old saying says - failing to plan is planning to fail.  If you can plan out your meals for the week, ahead of time, then you can keep yourself more on target with any long term plans that you have. If you feel that you haven’t got time to plan all your meals then try at least to plan
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