I get very easily bored by eating the same things all the time and need to regularly change our dinners. I have very wide tastes in food and like just about everything. During the last three years my tastes have changed too and I find that I now eat things I would never have considered eating three years ago. For example, I now eat sardines fairly often whereas before I would never have even thought of having them.

Anyway, I have been thinking this week that I would like to try some new recipes but the overall menu for the week must be healthy and follow the following healthy eating guidelines:

• At least 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day. I love all kinds of vegetables so do not find this difficult. I have to be careful with fruit because they contain more natural sugars. However, if you do not have diabetes then this will not be a problem for you. I keep telling my family that they should eat a rainbow meaning they should eat a wide variety of colours as each colour provides different nutrients. They seem to like this idea and it helps to encourage them to eat up their fruit and veg.

• 3 portions of whole grains a day such as wholewheat pitta bread, wholewheat bread, brown basmati rice, wholewheat pasta, oats, bran etc. I normally have oats for breakfast, pitta bread for lunch and then basmati rice or pasta for dinner.

• 4 portions of fish per week. Two oily types of fish such as mackerel and salmon and two non-oily fish such as haddock and canned tuna. For lunch I will often have mackerel, salmon, sardines or tuna in pitta bread and then for dinner have cod, haddock, fresh tuna, fresh salmon etc.

• Lean meats with visible fat removed such as extra lean minced beef and poultry such as chicken breasts without the skin. I always have two dinners which include chicken, one dinner which includes extra lean minced beef or other lean meat such as pork steaks. On a Sunday we always have a roast but I try to choose the leanest meat I can and cook it without adding any extra fat.

• Skimmed milk, no fat/low fat yoghurt, low fat cheese. I do not eat much cheese although I love it as I have found that even low fat cheese is quite high in fat. I love fat free natural yoghurt (with no added sugar) and will often have it on strawberries in the summer. I always have skimmed milk on my cereal or in my cups of tea. I do not often drink coffee any more as I have totally gone off it even though three years ago I was a coffee addict.

• Beans, nuts, seeds, pulses. I almost always have butter beans on a Sunday and have red kidney beans once a week in a healthy chilli con carne or a totilla. I have a few walnuts and seeds with my breakfast cereal. I also like lentils but other family members are not very keen on them. I am always on the lookout for recipes with lentils that I think they might eat. Pine nuts are very nice sprinkled on fruit.

• A small treat – I like my two squares of 70% cocoa chocolate in the evening!

This picture from the Foods Standards Agency, the Eatwell Plate, is a very good visual guide to what we should be eating and in what proportions.

©2010 Quest For Health. All Rights Reserved.

The lack of organisation in my life drives me nuts and every time I spend hours searching for something I vow that I will be more organised in future. However, no matter how much I want things to be organised and no matter how much energy I put in to getting things more organised, my life is still in chaos and the more I try to organise things, the more chaotic I seem to make it!

However, when I was first diagnosed with diabetes I decided that I really needed to organise my diet much better than I had up until then. I decided that all processed and convenience foods would be eliminated from my diet and I would live on natural foods as much as possible.

I also had a family to look after which included two adult males and I was responsible for cooking the evening meal. I did not have time or the will to cook separate meals for them and separate meals for me so what was I going to do?

I explained to the men that the food I had to eat had to be what a normal person on a healthy diet would eat and fortunately, probably due to media influences around the time, they decided that it would be a good idea if they improved their diet too.

Now all I had to do was to get organised.

This is how I did it:

1. I found some healthy recipes to cook for our evening meal. There are lots of recipe books and websites full of healthy recipes available these days so it was not that difficult to find some easy to cook family recipes.
2. I made myself a weekly meal planner and jotted down the meals I planned to eat that week.
3. I bought myself a ring binder and put those recipes in plastic pockets inside of the binder.
4. I then made my shopping list by jotting down the ingredients I needed from each of the recipe pages.

It was easy and I was on my way to a much healthier way of eating.

I have kept this system up for almost three years and I could not live without it now. The best thing about it is that it frees up my time for more interesting things. I no longer have to spend hours thinking of things we can eat and no longer just pick up anything in the supermarket. Grocery shopping is now much quicker too.

Over the years I have added lots of new recipes to my recipe file and have a four week menu plan so we never have the same evening meal more than once a month. This makes sure our diet is varied and also helps us not to miss out on our favourite dishes. The ring binder is especially flexible as recipes can be added, taken out and rearranged as necessary.

Below are some Weekly Meal Planners I have created for you to use to set up your weekly menus. Click on the picture of the meal planner you would like. The meal planner will open as a PDF document for you to print. Alternatively, right click on the download link and save to your hard drive.

I hope these help you to organise your diet with very little hassle.

Download

Download

Download

Download

©2010 Quest For Health. All Rights Reserved.

She is a registerd dietician and offers the following advice about a healthy diet (with some extra comments by me):

1. Exercise regularly. Aim to do 30 minutes of moderate activity at least three days a week. If you prefer you could split the 30 minutes into 3 lots of 10 minutes. Make exercise part of your daily routine by walking the dog or walking to the shops.
2. Watch for hidden sugar in drinks. Water has no calories. Neither has black tea or coffee. However, if you add milk to tea and coffee make sure it is skimmed milk which has less fat and do not add sugar.
3. Eat three portions of fruit and three portions of vegetables a day. Filling up on fruit and vegetables is much better than eating biscuits, cakes and other high fat, high calorie snacks. This is good health advice as well as a good dieting tip.
4. Eat lean meats, poultry and fish. They are low in fat but be careful about how you cook them. Do not add extra fat during the cooking process. Steaming, poaching, boiling, grilling, baking and microwaving are the best ways of cooking meat to keep the fat value and calories down.
5. Limit alcohol consumption. Alcohol is high in calories and has no nutritious value. Scientific research has shown that drinking red wine regularly is good for the heart but other research has linked alcohol consumption to breast cancer so while trying to lose weight it is probably a good idea to cut down on the alcohol.

I think these are very good tips. I must find the motivation to exercise more!

©2010 Quest For Health. All Rights Reserved.