The Basics

Hi again Ladies! Hope you’ve had a great week. We’ve just started to see the sun again here in Fiji after one month of torrential rain!

My kids have been sick with an evil bug that’s finding it’s way from village to village and so I’ve been force feeding them home made garlic bread, making mounds of mashed potato so I can throw in every vegetable I can find without being met with too much resistance, and making slushies – ‘just like the one’s from Boost mum’ – loaded with fruit.

We’ve had a busy couple of weeks with birthdays and late nights and school holiday craziness and Jonah said to me when he started to get sick, “Mum I think I’ve had too much party food!”
Which made me think about the basics…

Whenever I need to talk to people about good health and preventing disease, we go back to the basics with food, which looks something like this:

Everyday food
Sometimes food and
Party food.

My kids could give a health promotion talk on which foods come under which headings and we talk about them a lot. If your kids can GET this now, it can save them a lot of struggle later.

Everyday foods are the foods we need to eat, well, everyday, if we want to stay healthy and prevent disease.
These include the 5 + 2 principle…..5 serves of veggies and 2 pieces of fruit per day, (non-negotiable), lots of water, good quality protein like fish, chicken and lean meat, grains like oats, nuts and seeds (very easy to sneak in if there’s no allergies), dairy or soy and some eggs (2 a day are fine).
These are daily essentials and should be eaten as fresh as possible. They give you a mix of immune building nutrients that strengthen your body and keep things like blood sugar on an even keel. They also give us mums energy and nourish the body processes that support fertility and keep your mind sharp, just to name 2 of many examples.

Sometimes foods are the Friday night pizzas, the weekend pancakes, the occasional desserts, the school holiday and Christmas baking…you’re with me yes?
They are foods that we eat sometimes not everyday and not in large amounts. They are loaded with sugar, nasty fats, refined flours and salt, which is why they taste GREAT, but our bodies can’t deal with them everyday and we will eventually crash like Jonah. Eat them sometimes.

Then the Party foods are for celebrations. Eat them and enjoy them.
Lose the talk about how you’ll have to work it off at the gym tomorrow, let your kids go nuts and make themselves sick, have a party!
But if your life is like mine, parties are occasional events, they happen maybe once a month (although at times it feels like a lot more with kids!!), and our health and waistlines can handle a celebration.
It’s good for the soul too.
These foods deplete our energy, send the kids feral, give us headaches and leave us dehydrated…BUT - If we are eating the everyday foods, the sometimes and party foods are ok, just not everyday.

Food isn’t good and bad, it doesn’t have morality. It’s just food. It will be there tomorrow. And if you’re eating your greens and an apple a day, the odd afternoon chocolate bar isn’t going to give you diabetes or heart disease. It also doesn’t make you bad.

Give yourself a break.

Learn to love your veggies, snack on fruit instead of ice cream, drink water often, but don’t run shrieking at the sight of a magnum.

Next week I’m going to start to give you some ideas about daily allowances for sugar and salt etc, and maybe freak you out a bit with amounts in packaged and fast foods but at least you’ll know which foods fit firmly into which category and which foods you may just decide to do away with altogether. (Or maybe just keep for party time).

One of my choices is soft drink. My kids are point blank just not allowed to have anything beyond the occasional lemonade at a party and they understand why.

But we'll talk more next week.....I'm off to round up the remaining mash and veg so I can smoosh it into salmon patties for tomorrow night.

Lv Jane

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