As we move into March and the Spring weather(fingers crossed), how many of you are slipping from your New Year’s Resolutions? Did you manage to lose those Christmas pounds/kilos? Have you managed to fit some exercise into your busy life? How’s your eating habits?
Here are some great tips to help you maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Make fruit and vegetables part of each meal. For breakfast make a smoothie with fresh or frozen blueberries, raspberries, bananas, freshly squeezed orange or pink grapefruit juice and mix with natural yoghurt. Add some fresh fruit, sliced apple dusted with cinnamon, sliced pear dusted with ground ginger to your cereal. For lunch try a vegetable soup – if you don’t have time to make some yourself, choose from the fresh cartons in the supermarket. Toast a slice of wholemeal bread, cut a clove of garlic in half and squish over the toast, drizzle over a little extra virgin olive oil and spoon on some heated tin tomatoes. If you have time, grill halved fresh tomatoes (sit them on a basil leaf first for extra flavour) and use those. You could also slice up a courgette and add that too – they are really tasty raw -. For dinner add broccoli, spinach or broad beans (frozen are fine) to pasta dishes. – even spaghetti Bolognese !-
Choose water instead of fruit juices. Keep a bottle of water handy at your desk, or a glass of water in the kitchen or by the ironing and sip it during the day. (I have two glasses of water on my desk as I type!).
Plan your meals a couple of days in advance. This will help you to keep to a healthy eating plan, as you know what’s coming up over the next day or so. Plan a couple of hours in your week when you can make some freezable meals for those occasions when everything goes wrong and you are not going to get a healthy dish prepared for the next meal. Rather than chocolates for Easter, perhaps you could ask for a new cookery book. Try cooking some vegetarian meals, especially if you have never done so in the past. Try and eat fish at least twice a week. There are lots of television programmes nowadays about cooking, look out for some that make fish the main part of the programme to get you inspired.
Try and take some sort of exercise every day. Park the car a little further away from your destination; get off one stop earlier from the bus or train; walk the kids to school; walk up the stairs at work; make it a rule never to use a lift.
Even if you can’t manage all these ideas, incorporate one or two into your daily life and see how much better you feel. All ready for Spring the Summer!
Theresa Wright
Health Therapist
0118 9710255
