Following the Christmas binge and the subsequent guilty resolutions to lose weight, many more of us trudge through rainy January, miserable and hungry. Chocolate sales fall and the gyms fill up, but how long does it ever last? Healthy living does not have to be the nightmare it often seems to be.
Oxford University research suggests that around 33,000 lives in the UK could be saved each year if we followed the recommended guidelines and advice on healthy eating (20,000 of these deaths being due to heart related illnesses). Just small changes to your diet or squeezing in your 5-a-day can dramatically improve your health (which will be great news for the cost of life insurance quotes when everyone starts eating healthier). Take a look below at a few of our favourite healthy eating resource websites, which we hope can bridge the gap between healthy eating and happy eating. Bon appétit!
The BBC’s ‘Good Food’ website is a great first port-of-call for the new healthy chef as the site is bloated with new and exciting ways preparing delicious meals in healthy ways, and its huge – covering foods from cakes to steaks and everything between, with healthy takes on and alternatives to most.
The healthy section itself is split into groups of calorie count, time of day, seasonal, even iron content, so this site may be most useful to those who have a dietary plan and know what they need and want from their food. However, there is also a makeover section to help you transform the guilty pleasures like tarts and burgers into healthier, feel good meals in as little as 20 minutes – good to know you don’t have to leave them behind!
The NHS run site ‘Change 4 life’ is another fantastic resource for finding tasty and interesting ideas to maintain your healthy eating regimen. As well as a ‘Meal mixer’ app, which allows you to scroll through healthy meals in breakfast, lunch and dinner categories, the site features a fully stocked recipe resource for all the main meal groups, from salads and soups to pittas and wraps. What this site has over its competition is its formatting. It is incredibly easy to navigate and offers a range of ways to find the best healthy meals for you. With its huge menu, change4life should have something for everyone, for every meal, and maybe something healthy in between too.
Perhaps for the more adventurous, Quorn.co.uk is full of recipes. Most people reading this article are unlikely to have done much cooking with Quorn meat substitutes, but the fact is that Quorn is no longer an exclusively vegetarian product. Their range is broader than ever, and their website shows, through its wealth of recipes, what a diverse and healthy ingredient quorn can be – cutting down fat, calorie and cholesterol intakes on real meat products. The site contains a fantastic resource called the recipe finder, which allows the user to select from dropdown lists ingredients, cuisine type and cooking time, and then suggests recipes for you. Quorn just isn’t going to work for some people, but we would encourage everyone to give it a try!
If your dietary turnaround is geared more towards the organic side of healthy eating, take a look at ‘Rachel’s organic recipe’ website. Here, you can search for recipes by season, ingredient or ‘moment’ for the ideal all natural meal for almost any situation. The site is perhaps more elegant than the rest, containing some delicious meals, with simple instructions and helpful hints for creating something truly organic, and just a little bit special.
Finally, and certainly worth taking a look at if your goal goes a little further than cutting a few daily carbs, is ‘weight loss.com’. This is a fantastic site not only containing recipes and ideas to transform your diet, but also a library of exercise articles, workouts, diet plans and tools, weight loss tips and forums for support. On top of all this, the recipes themselves go into greater depth than many other sites, including nutritional information, alternative methods and links to other recommended recipes you may enjoy. Wightloss.com can therefore not only act as an innovative and inventive source of inspiration, information and support to help you prepare your next healthy meal, but if your goal goes further than revitalising your diet and into the realm of weight loss and exercise, this site can become an invaluable companion for the whole journey.
There are hundreds of sites out there that can help youtransform your kitchen and your diet – we’ve named just a few – and most of your favourite celebrity chefs and recipe writers will also have their own articles dedicated to healthier eating. However drastic a change you’re looking to make, the information is all out there to help you start living a healthier life, and the sites above really can make living healthy look and taste great.
This article was written by David Rendell who writes for the Confused.com life insurance quotes site.
