Back to School!
While the world around us gets back into the day to day routines, it’s helpful to jump onto the scheduling to make the most of your time & lifestyle.
We love holidays as they change and bring added extras of fun & celebration. Which is fantastic for a while, but if we lived like this every day, then how would the special times be any more special. A big plus would be our waistlines, our wellness and our budgets, so back to the dependable good for us planning. We get to look forward to Autumn and apples, mushrooms, root vegetables & rhubarb..
While we still have plenty of sunshine absorbing fruits and vegetables, make the most of stone fruit, berries & melons, along with sweetcorn, tomatoes & leafy greens.
Eating the rainbow is a superb challenge to start well.
Berries & melon & passionfruit for breakfast can tick off reds, blues, orange & green straight off the list.
Including avocado, rocket & tomatoes with either a salad, in a sandwich or tossed through a pasta gets two more greens and a red on the chart.
Roasted peppers, onions & garlic combined with sweetcorn, fish or seafood, beans or your choice of proteins along with a handful of parsley, basil or mint, for dinner, add roasted pumpkins, carrots or kumara for your vitamin A,
If you can include a juicy slice of pineapple, an orange or a banana during the day for the yellows means you are winning in the coat of many colours race!
I love to think of my fruits & vegetables as the building blocks of meal planning, then I add in protein & carbohydrates. Sometimes the protein comes from dried beans – also a vegetable, and also a protein, who needs another slice of ham anyway!
Including quality dairy products, I’m focused on my calcium intake these days as well, and the varieties are endless. Yoghurt with breakfast comes with gut loving enzymes & probiotics. Fresh cheeses such as ricotta, goat curd, cottage cheese gives me easily digestible options such as cheese on toast with fresh ripe tomatoes. Grated cheese like cheddar, havarti and mozzarella love melting over broccoli, cauliflower & potatoes, so they join in the party every other day.
If you don’t eat one or two vegies or fruit because you don’t like them, it’s no big deal just get more of the stuff you do like.
See if you can make a daily color challenge for February, your incentive is the vitamin & mineral power house you’ll become before winter.
A note about potatoes while I’m mashing about, your usual spud purchases should be immune from the fat chip price rises – it’s the particular potatoes grown for the deep frozen to become deep fried in food production that are facing the cost inflation.