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Power Up Breakfasts for Tweenies

A good breakfast is particularly important to fuel your brain and give you enough concentration and energy for a busy day at School. But breakfast is the meal of the day usually most lacking in goodness, especially for children and teens. Did you know one of the most popular childrens’ cereal contains 35% sugar? A good breakfast will include slow release complex carbohydrates, protein, healthy fats and fibre and keep you full until lunchtime.

The following options will help balance your blood sugar too, keeping your mood and energy levels stable.

Food and Mood Diary

There is a significant and evidence based link between the food we eat and what our mood is like. Some foods can make us great and others can cause us huge anxiety or have a huge energy crash.

There tend to be ‘usual suspects’ that trigger this (the white starchy carbohydrates), but everyone is utterly unique! For example, it may be that high histamine foods and drinks like wine and fermented foods are driving your symptoms instead. It is invaluable to keep a ‘food and mood’ diary to track what you are eating and drinking along with your symptoms and mood because it helps to identify and links (then consider reductions or exclusions and alternatives).

Tips for Better Sleep

Sleep is so essential for our physical and emotional wellbeing but unsurprisingly, it is being impacted by all the worries associated with the current pandemic. Research shows that the less sleep we get, the more likely we are to make poor food choices (and the poorer food choices we make, the less sleep we get!). This handout gives you some practical nutritional and lifestyle tips for getting better sleep.

Most of us have heard of the expression ‘eat the rainbow’ but why is it important? Eating a variety of fruits and vegetables of different colours gives us each of their different and unique health benefits. For example, orange and yellow vegetables are high in beta carotene, the pre-cursor to vitamin A. Purple fruits and vegetables are high in anthocyanins which help heart health and reduce inflammation. By eating as many different coloured fruit and vegetables as possible each day, we will get a good variety of all the nutrients our body needs to thrive.

This challenge is great for adults and children alike to raise awareness whilst having a bit of fun.

One of the most important things is to eat foods that are nutrient dense and can sustain our energy, balance our blood sugar and hormones. Key to this is making sure you have some protein with every meal (chicken, eggs, tofu, beans, lentils).

In my experience this can be best achieved by stepping away from the daily sandwich. I love adult Yum Boxes for a more mix and match style lunch at your desk (enter KHNutrition at www.eatwell-uk.co.uk for a 10% discount).

Good ideas for healthy fillers are hummus, falafel, boiled eggs, nut butters, oatcakes, chicken slices, avocado, chopped veggies or alternatively soup / casserole in a thermos. For the days you simply don’t have the time to prepare your own food, click on this ‘Breakfast and lunch on the go’ free download for the most healthy options on the High Street.

Even if you are not coeliac or gluten intolerant, nearly all of us would benefit from cutting down on our wheat consumption.

A common days food in a Western diet is a wheat cereal for breakfast, a wheat bread sandwich for lunch and wheat based pasta for dinner. Our gut microbiome loves diversity and wheat 3 times a day isn’t diverse!

These are my favourite products I highly recommend as tasty gluten free alternatives.

Organic food is, without a doubt, the better choice, but buying all organic also comes with a price tag. I advise clients to identify the couple of key foods / drinks that they consume the most regularly and swap those for the organic version. In addition to that, there is a handy list attached here which details the ‘Dirty Dozen’ and the ‘Clean 15’.

The 'Dirty Dozen' are those fruit and veg that easily absorb the pesticides, so are the most important ones to buy organic. The ‘Clean 15' are those that don’t tend to absorb the pesticides, and not buying the organic version is fine.

Low mood affects us all. Sometimes it is triggered by a particular situation or set or circumstances (like lockdown for instance!). 

But sometimes low mood and depression can indicate a number of other things like hormone or blood sugar imbalance, a gastrointestinal issue, low iron levels, sluggish thyroid function (to name just a few). This is not just my belief, this is supported by science. If one of the systems of our body is out of balance, it can affect all the others.

Our body and mind are completely interconnected and food can alter our brain chemistry. I have so many tips to help with low mood but i've tried to condense it down to my top 10 tips. Hope you find this helpful. 

Just enter your name and email address to get my 10 tips to boost low mood.

You can have the best diet ever but your health still wont be at its best if for example, your stress is very high or you get poor sleep (just like someone with low stress, sleeping well, wont be at optimal health if they eat a diet low in nutrients). The body and mind are completely interconnected so we have to nourish our mind as well as our body. The body needs the right nourishment from food but also, from its environment.

Cortisol (the main hormone involved in the stress response) wreaks absolute havoc on the body especially the hormones. Our brain cells even become less responsive to neurotransmitters and our mood becomes affected.

It is sometimes hard to remove the increasing number of stressors we have in the modern western world so it is about finding techniques to reduce our stress. Here are some evidence based tips with some practical ways to implement them.