Here's how to clean up your diet to shift winter weight, get more energy and look luminous fast!
- Ban these harmful foods from your cupboards
- Easy tips for choosing better food options
- Make small food swaps for big health changes
1. Bread and Pasta Swaps
WHY: Bread and pasta are made with wheat flour that contains gluten, which is incredibly irritating to your gut lining. It can cause an inflammatory reaction, leading to bloating, digestive problems and more.
Giving up bread and pasta is the first step towards a flat tummy!
- Courgette spaghetti - Get your hands on a spiralizer and work on your wrist strength! If you don’t have a spiralizer, use a peeler to create thin courgette ribbons.
- Add an extra portion of green vegetables or half a sweet potato to a meal instead of bread or pasta.
- Serve your eggs on a bed of spinach rather than a slice of toast.
- Spread some avocado on a flax cracker instead of bread.
- Eat more ‘pseudo-grains’ including quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat, seeds and nuts, which are perfect swaps for gluten-containing grains. *Bonus: these alternatives are also rich in protein and give you a wider array of nutrients.
"Switch bread and pasta for more nutritious ‘pseudo-grains’ including quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat."
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2. Soft Drink Swaps
WHY: Juices, cordials and fizzy sodas are packed with sugar that gets straight into the blood stream. This can be damaging for health because it causes a huge rise in insulin, a hormone that increases inflammation (which contributes to wrinkles and more serious health issues) and fat storage. Nooo!
Hydrate without sugar to avoid the wrinkle monster!
- Fruit juice (even freshly squeezed) is concentrated with fructose because all the fibre that was created by nature to help your gut and liver deal with the fruit sugars is removed. So swap juices for plain water, or make it more exciting with some mint or basil and ice.
- Swap cordial for cold herbal tea – we love liquorice and peppermint, which is delicious when chilled.
- Swap fizzy soda (including sugar-free because they are filled with unhealthy additives) for sparkling water with 1tsp Organic Burst Baobab powder.
Are you too reliant on supermarket meals? Read on for our easy swaps...
3. Processed Food Swaps
WHY: Ready-made meals are never as fresh as homemade! This means they are lower in vitamins, plus they’re usually packed with preservatives, and served in plastic boxes that leach toxins into the food. Ugh!
Eat meals that raise your energy instead of making you feel heavy.
- Chuck shop-bought soups – they may be low in calories, but that doesn’t make them healthy. Once a week make a raw soup for dinner. This Kale, Avocado & Wheatgrass Gazpacho is so easy, nourishing and delicious.
- Stock your fridge with foods perfect for quick mid-week dinners: bags of greens, pine nuts for sprinkling on salads and veg, a block of feta cheese, some fresh sprouts.
- At the weekend cook up a batch of your favourite roasted veg, hard-boil and peel some eggs, cook a pan of buckwheat or brown rice, and even poach some fish. You’ll be ready to go for a healthy week!
"Avoid preservative packed ready-meals because their plastic boxes leach toxins into the food. Ugh!"
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4. Sugar Swaps
WHY: Sugar is now being called ‘the new tobacco’ because it’s so harmful to our health, contributing to our obesity and diabetes epidemics.
Make sweet food a treat rather than the 4 times per day staple it has now become!
- Bring your sugar levels down by swapping tropical fruits like pineapple, mango, banana for fruits that contain less, such as berries, nectarines, apples, pears, lemons, avocado, tomato, olives and Organic Burst Acai Berry.
- Eat slices of apple spread with nut butter instead of sweet snacks like biscuits or chocolate.
- If you add sugar, honey or syrup to your baking or smoothies, try pure stevia drops, or rice malt syrup instead, which do not contain fructose and so have a less harmful effect on your metabolism.
- Avoid ‘fat-free’ yoghurts because they add extra sugar to make them more tasty. Go for plain full-fat Greek yoghurt or coconut yoghurt. *TIP: these alternatives contain more protein and fat so they’re more filling and make you forget your sweet tooth.
“Fructose-free stevia drops and rice malt syrup don’t harm your metabolism like sugar or agave."
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5. Fat Swaps
WHY: There has been a big confusion about fat over the last 30 years! Saturated fat has been blamed for heart disease and vegetable oil was named the hero. But now we know much more about how to treat fats so they nourish our cells and don’t become harmful in our bodies.
Get a luminous, healthy, glowing look with the right fats.
- Cook with saturated fats because unlike vegetable and nut oils they don’t become damaging when you heat them. Replace your cooking oil with coconut oil, organic butter or animal fat.
- Bin your vegetable oils including canola, safflower, sunflower and corn oils, because they are heat-treated, bleached, and heavily processed. Plus they produce oxidation (damage to our cells) in our bodies if you heat them.
- Forget shop-bought salad dressings as these are always made with processed vegetable oils. Instead, make your own dressings with extra virgin olive oil or other cold-pressed plant oils like avocado or nut oils.
- Swap a coffee-shop muffin (made with vegetable oil) for a nut bar or some paleo granola.
- Snack on olives instead of crisps (fried in vegetable oil).
What are you going to swap? Be honest with yourself and pick 1 or 2 swaps that pop up in your life often. These are the ones that will make the biggest change to you.
We promise it will be worth it!