Apart from a desire to lose weight, a lack of energy is one of the top complaints I hear in my practice on a daily basis. Whether the person sitting in front of me is a mom who doesn't have time for herself, or an executive with mountains of responsibility, or anyone in between, energy levels are a daily concern.

Read More…

Tags: Energy, Fatigue, balanced meal, balanced diet

Let's do lunch! For most of us, that is not something we say all that often, except maybe on weekends. But we all need to eat lunch everyday. Which means that we need to have a plan and lunch foods available in the kitchen.

Read More…

Tags: Lunchbox, Lunch, balanced meal

It is a pity that this is not a travel blog. I have nothing but good things to say about The Panorama Route in Mpumalanga, South Africa. We were busy for 4 days, visiting view sites and waterfalls and rock pools. We even went panning for gold in Pilgrim's Rest. In a nut shell… Fun!

But this is not a travel blog. It is a food and nutrition blog. So, I thought I would share our camping menu with you.
Was it 100% healthy? …No
Was it 100% practical? …I would say almost
Did we eat well? …Yes
Did we enjoy our food? …Yes!

Camping breakfast

Growing up, my Dad was the cook when we went camping. He is well known for his amazing camping breakfasts. They are not fancy. In fact they are as simple as breakfast comes.
Eggs, bacon, tomato, maybe some mushrooms and of course… fried toast!
Nothing beats a simple egg breakfast when you are sitting outside in the fresh air, cooking on your gas cooker and trying to keep everything warm. It just tastes better with a dose of good clean air. We will snack on fruit while we are waiting for the eggs to cook.

This typical breakfast fry up is a MUST when you are camping. It wakes you up, warms you up and gets the day off to the best possible start. Yes, there is too much fat, but we only live once and if you can't enjoy a fry up when you crawl out of your sleeping bag on a camping trip, then when can you?

Of course, you should probably skip the bacon, and add more veggies, and boil or poach your eggs, but where's the fun in that. We were camping after all! I needed some creature comfort.

Camping lunch

I always seem to over estimate how much food we need for lunch. Most often we have some leftover meat from the night before, so that what I had planned is just too much. So, for this trip, I simply planned to eat the left over meat and top off the meal with some cheese and biscuits and some baby carrots, cherry tomatoes and cucumber. It worked tremendously! We still had too much food, but I don't have a problem with bringing home the left over cheese and using it in the meals for the next week.

Camping supper

Here is an opportunity to get creative. Looking on Pinterest before planning my menu last week, I came across some fantastic ideas. But they mostly needed a bit of preparation. I really didn't have much time, so I stuck with the basics. A balanced meal of protein, carbohydrate and salad. We grilled our meat on the braai. We wrapped our baby potatoes and mielies in foil and placed them on the coals. I chopped up the salad ingredients (no lettuce because it always freezes and becomes soggy and useless!). And voila! We had satisfying meals that kept us all happy.

Camping snacks

This is where the wheels really fell off! We ate far too many potato crisps and pretzels and not enough fruit. We were pretty good about the chocolate on this trip… We brought most of it home!

Snacks I would recommend (as a dietician) would be: fruit, nuts, lean biltong, and raw veggies with hummus. That wouldn't have been well received by my boys, though. So I put the professional side of me away for a few days and indulged!

It was a fabulous weekend. The view was spectacular. The weather was perfect. And the food was delicious.
All in all… A great success!

Tags: Camping, Holiday, Camping breakfast, balanced meal, Camping snacks