*Edit April 2017* See my latest post about my IBS here - at time of writing I’m 60 days symptom-free and I’ve done it 100% through diet.
I recently started up a little series on how to detoxify your home. For me the heart of the home is definitely in the kitchen. But forget about homemade oven cleaner and descaling your kettle with vinegar for now - more than anything I believe that being healthy on the inside plays the biggest part in detoxifying your entire life.
From quitting smoking and cutting down on alcohol (if applicable?!) to making your meals from scratch using good quality whole foods, you really do owe it to yourself to look after your body.
Sounds like a lot of money and effort, right? Bear with me for a minute 😉
If you’re anything like I was just a decade ago, your diet might consist largely of oven food, sandwiches and fizzy drinks - anything and everything processed. You may also regularly feel bloated, tired, irritable and suffer from ailments like spot-prone skin.
I am not in any way trained to be giving anyone specific dietary advice, but it’s my belief having suffered my entire life with IBS and all of the symptoms above that making simple changes to your diet can literally change your life.
And a lot of them are just plain common sense that we’re so used to hearing that they’ve become background noise:
Drink more water.
Eat more fibre.
Eat real, whole foods.
Cut out the junk.
Blah, blah, blah.
But the junk is everywhere and we’re so used to buying it that we actually think store-bought bread and fruit squash drinks are healthy for us!
As a society we’ve become incredibly lazy with our food, going for convenience and what we perceive to be the cheapest option over real home-cooked meals, and as a result we’ve actually forgotten how to live well.
And that’s understandable. We don’t have time to read labels and we don’t have time to cook from scratch every night.
Right?
Would you like to know an easy way of cutting out the “junk” food that you don’t even know is junk?
Get ready for this…
Stop buying foods with ingredient labels.
Seriously. The more unpronounceable ingredients in something, in most cases the more processed it is and the more preservatives it has, meaning it’s really not that great for your health.
And if you’re pressed on time at home, just boil/steam loads of veggies on the hob, pop some plain meat or fish in the oven, then top with a ton of fat like hemp seeds, olive oil or butter. Done. For lunch, chop up a salad and boil some eggs, cover with olive oil and hemp seeds. Done. Just keep it simple until you have time to experiment with recipes.
And it doesn’t have to be more expensive; in fact, my dinners usually make at least four very generous portions and are usually just made up of two carrots, two sticks of celery, a courgette (zucchini for our friends across the pond), dried or fresh herbs, a couple of chopped tomatoes, meat or cheese, plus some steamed veggies and a ton of fat like olive oil, olives, hemp seeds or butter.
We do buy organic wherever possible, and we buy the majority of our veg, dairy and eggs from our local farm shop, meat comes from our local butcher and anything else we get from online specialists.
But that’s only recently after years of shopping in every other supermarket and having made the switch from processed food to whole foods, and I can say hand on heart that the price difference is about £10 a week, if that.
It’s the initial transition from junk food to whole foods that is noticeable price-wise but the way I look at it is that you get much larger portions of food with a much higher nutritional value, so if anything it costs you less to eat overall.
Ever felt starving hungry just an hour after a Maccy Ds and found yourself reaching for the equally as bad biscuit tin? Uh huh.
My biggest tip however has to be that we’ve changed our priorities in terms of where and how we spend our money. This benefits us cost-wise and it’s sthuper duper kind to the planet.
- We don’t go to shopping centres every weekend looking for more stuff to buy because we no longer buy into disposable trends like fashion or interior decorating.
- We buy good quality clothes and furniture when we actually need them, which allows us to spend a little more on items that are classic, well made and will last us years if not decades.
- Most importantly this gives us more money per week to spend on food - the most important thing we could spend our money on.
If you’re still worried that you can’t live without your expensive cigarettes or gin, or the latest poorly-made winter coat from almost any given high street chain, there are tons of free resources out there to help you quit smoking/drinking and keep recipe costs low, just have a Google.
And don’t bother spending money on cooking books - BBC Good Food is my all-time favourite resource for simple recipes.
If you do want a good cooking book to get you started, my go-to is Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food. My Dad gave me a copy of this many years ago and I love it, here are some of the recipes from it for free here.
So how has cleaning up my diet changed my life?
I’ve changed a lot of things in my life, from my use of chemicals around the home to changing all of my personal care products, but generally I use my diet as my main gauge in how my health is faring.
From bloating, stomach cramps and constipation to headaches and spots, across the board my symptoms have almost completely cleared up, and I can tell when I’ve eaten something dodgy because either my stomach goes mad or I break out - refined and even many natural sugars and carbs are a definite no for me.
I’ve found a love for cooking and all the benefits that come with it - improved health and reduced ailments, becoming more in tune with my body, learning new skills, becoming a more confident and competent cook, spending more quality time with Graeme as we cook together, not vegging out in front of the TV (as much…).
I don’t believe in fad diets or calorie counting as you often buy into “low fat” and “low calorie” foods that are actually packed full of sugar. If you’re overweight, simply nothing can substitute a healthy balanced diet and exercise.
But instead of telling you what I don’t eat, it might be more helpful to give you a typical run through of my day:
Breakfasts
At work: Hot water with lemon. A while later a banana. That’s usually all I need but sometimes I’ll have Eat Natural’s Buckwheat Muesli with milk. Buckwheat is a bit too crunchy for my liking but I’m trying to use the box up.
Weekends: Hot water with lemon. Porridge (so gluten-free oats with milk, I’m on dairy but I’m planning to switch it up with oat milk etc. to see what works for me) cooked on the hob NOT in the microwave (nuking your food is not cool and I avoid it if possible), topped either with a sliced banana, or blueberries that I quickly stew in a pan with a splash of water.
^^Terrible, terrible advice. Lemon makes me phlegmy, bananas are basically just sugar, muesli and oats are grainy nastiness that I’ve since cut out.
Here are some new breakfasts I’ve been having instead:
Frittata (breakfast, lunch or dinner)
Fry whatever veg you want in grass-fed butter/ghee/coconut oil with the taste removed (cuz urgh, coconut), then top with two or three eggs that you’ve quickly beaten, fry for a while with a cover on until it sets, top with grass-fed cheese, olive oil and hemp seeds for your extra fatty goodness.
My favourite veggies include tomato, mushroom, kale, spinach - or even cooked broccoli, sweet potato, butternut squash or red cabbage leftover from the night before.
Takes 10-15 minutes, maybe 20 while you get into the swing of it, tops.
Sweet potato “toast” (breakfast, lunch or dinner)
Slice lengthways, brush with olive oil and season, cook 10 mins each side at about 200C, poke with a knife to check. Lay on a bed of greens like spinach, chard, rocket, watercress, fresh herbs and/or kale, and top with good fats like avocado, grass-fed cheese depending on your tolerance, and olive oil and hemp seeds. Takes 25-30 mins. DONE.
Or, in a pinch, boiled eggs most days are absolutely fine.
I follow breakfast with regular sips of water. We use BPA-free stainless steel reusable water bottles, so no chemical leaching or unnecessary waste from plastic bottles.
We got ours from these guys and we fill them up with water that’s gone through a Brita filter, which doesn’t get all the nasties in our water out but 1) we checked our local water report and our water isn’t actually that bad and 2) the Brita’s still better than nothing for now.
Lunches
At work: A huge salad with boiled eggs and maybe boiled potatoes. All eaten cold so no need for the microwave. And no, I don’t mean lettuce, cucumber and tomato, I mean kale, spinach, chard, rocket, watercress, cavolo nero, fresh coriander or parsley, grated carrot and courgette, cucumber, hemp seeds, olives, olive oil, and eggs/ham/tuna/salmon.
Weekends: The frittata or sweet potato toast recipes from above work really well, or just a huge salad again.
Leftovers from other evenings warmed up on the hob/in the oven, NOT the microwave (no nuking, ta) - or I’ll make fresh soups like minestrone, Asian-inspired broths or carrot soup like this recipe minus the onion.
Soups are honestly so quick and easy, and sometimes to pad it out we’ll buy fresh bread from a local baker who uses nothing but flour, water, yeast (a natural sourdough starter) and salt, with natural seeds, herbs and olive oil - exactly how a loaf of bread should be. If you live anywhere near Milton Keynes (UK) I highly recommend you try them sometime.
Dinners
Basically whatever we feel like throwing together so long as it’s all from scratch with fresh, whole foods. So homely things like vegetable risotto, meat or lentil curry, plain meat with veg and potato, gluten-free pasta with bologneise or vegetable tomato sauce, and fish pie.
More terrible dietary choices. Ditch those carbs, they is evil!!!
Either we now have meat/fish with loads of veg like sweet potato fries as they’re a safe carb for my tum (chop, oven for about 40 mins) and steamed kale or cabbage, topped with hemp seeds and olive oil; takes about 50 mins from start to finish and is very light on actual work.
Or (takes about 1.5 hours and requires a little more work):
- I start with a base of celery, carrot, mushroom, tomato, kale, fresh herbs, courgette, garlic, ginger, chili - and root turmeric if I’ve remembered to defrost it
- Blend all except for the mushroom, tomato, kale, herbs and courgette, which I chop
- Fry it all until soft in grass-fed butter, ghee or coconut oil with the taste removed, with some dried herbs and spices of choice
- Add meat like minced beef or chicken, if desired, finish cooking for however long is appropriate for the meat you’re using
- Steam a big bunch of kale and/or red cabbage in place of rice/potato/bread/pasta
- Top with fats like feta, seeds, hemp seeds, olive oil, a fried egg or two - get creative
I hope I’ve inspired you to feel a bit more empowered to start thinking about changing your diet.
Just keep it simple, make little changes at a time and learn to listen to your body.
You might find that you start cooking everything from scratch and still get weird symptoms, in which case you may still be sensitive to something like FODMAPs, like me - you lucky thing you!
So don’t give up on it, just keep researching and questioning everything you eat and how it makes you feel.
And have fun with it, food is something you need to consume every single day so you might as well learn to enjoy it!
*Edit April 2017* See my latest post about my IBS here - at time of writing I’m 60 days symptom-free and I’ve done it 100% through diet.
Disclaimer
• Your life and health are your own responsibility.
• Your decisions to act (or not act) based on information or advice anyone provides you—including me—are your own responsibility.
