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While staying with friends recently, I was treated to some good old-fashioned homegrown veggies. Nothing quite beats the freshness, taste and goodness of vegetables grown in your own backyard.

While this backyard was much larger than your average size house block, it shows what is possible without using chemicals. Rain water irrigation and food scrap mulching contributes to these super healthy spinach, beetroot and silverbeets.
And the scent of fresh vegetables can’t be beaten, as you walk through the garden you experience natures bouquet, something that is missing from the supermarket fruit and vegetable department.

With the summer crop of corn, broccoli and tomatoes just finishing, my friends were kept busy preserving any excess vegetables.

It harks back to our grandparent’s era when they enjoyed a less hectic lifestyle and had more time to spend gardening, which apart from producing great food also has other benefits such as stress relief, physical exercise, leaving a smaller carbon imprint and self sufficiency.

There is a sense of immense satisfaction knowing that the food on the table is produced from your very own garden plus it taste super yummy. This spinach, parsley and parmesan cheese was easy to prepare, very healthy and best of all it’s from the garden.

Feeling inspired? If you need some help building your own vegetable garden, Sustainable Gardening Australia have some great step by step instructions on getting started.

It’s the simple things that help weight loss, today’ tip is about resisting the temptation to buy all the energy rich, fatty food that tastes yummy but is hard to resist.

I was talking to a Fitmate who lacked the self control and discipline when it came to chocolate and ice cream. Actually I’d say a lot of people have a weakness, especially the home made variety. Rather than rationing the chocolate over a few weeks or even a month it became a competitive eating event to finish off the sweets as soon as possible. Every hour of every day, the temptation was too strong to resist, whether you are eating for emotional reasons, for comfort or enjoyment it’s these re-occurring thought patterns that take over.

The simple solution is too remove the temptation all together by simply not buying the sweets in the first place. I’m not saying to go cold turkey and remove the fun food from your life but key strategies need to be adopted until the thought patterns leading to chocolate eating feasts are changed.

Like anything is life, if you can get through the cold turkey period of withdrawals, in time your body will no longer crave these sugary, fatty treats. Belive it or not, your body can adapt to change.

We all know that home cooking is a healthier options yet with parents under stress from longer working hours, the humble home cooked meal is becoming an extinct animal.

With people renovating there kitchens every 5 years, buying all the latest kitchen gadgets and watching restaurant TV and cooking shows, we spend more time contemplating than doing. The consumption of take away food is growing substantially every year.

With Australia’s obesity levels at epidemic levels, are we contributing to the problem by placing our reliance on fatty, sugary low nutritional value takeaway as a cheap and fast alternative?
It disturbing to see an advertisement about giving mum/dad a break from cooking by getting a “Family Dinner Box” from McDonalds.
Geez, getting a bunch of burgers and fries must be better for the family nutritionally than steamed vegies, brown rice and grilled chicken. Mmmm, I don’t know about that, there website saying “spend less time in the kitchen and more time with the family”, well nice premise but what is actually happening, kids glued to there computer screen or mobile, parents watching TV or cable or just chilling out after a stressful day at the office, worrying about being able to meet the next mortgage payment.

So promoting the consumption of energy dense, fatty food the only way to free up the parents time in the evening?

Secondly how much time is actually involved in cooking a healthy meal, try cooking something special, why not get the kids involved in the process of cooking and cleaning up.

It’s scary that McDonalds promotes the process of cooking a home meal negatively with there website showing words associated with cooking such as “Cook, clean up, wash dishes, rush, prepare, scrub, burn”, well if people were so concerned about the preparation and cleaning process why are home coffee expresso machines so popular, you could use the same words as mentioned above when making a coffee yet it doesn’t stop people from preparing there own home cappuccino.

The modern supermarket is full of “just add water”, “ready in 5 minutes, just place in microwave”

With the recent explosion of Gluten free products on the market, a recent study has found that quinoa and buckwheat is a better alternative to the traditional gluten free options of corn, potato wheat, rice flour and xanthan.

The gluten-free food market is now worth a staggering $1.6bn with the annual growth at 28%, according to Packaged Facts.

Traditionally going gluten free was the only option available to sufferers of coeliac disease but with the growing body of information on the effects of wheat and gluten in the diet, many people are adopting the gluten free lifestyle.

Unfortunately there are some concerns that in a bid to find an alternative to flour based products, the current alternatives may lack the nutritional depth of conventional wheat based products.

Currently corn, potato wheat, rice flour and xanthan had lower levels of antioxidants and polyphenol than quinoa and buckwheat.

Most importantly the study found that using other grains such as quinoa and buckwheat improved the bodies absorption of protein, iron, calcium and fibre.

Source: Trends in Food Science & Technology (2010, Vol. 21, pp 106-113)

With more and more people turning to soy as an alternative to dairy, for allergies, health reasons or general well being, there is a lot of confusion about this humble legume.

It’d great to see that most cafe’s know have a soy milk option with most supermarkets stocking this juice, it’s not technically a milk product, rather than a juice extracted from masticating soy beans.

There are great ways to introduce soy into your current diet, be it alternative products such as butter, tofu, cheese, yes cheese, custard and soy linseed bread.

Starting it’s life in Northern China and being part of the asian diet for centuries, only now are the benefits of soy really being understood by western society in the areas of:
1.Cholesterol & heart health
2.Breast cancer
3.Menopausal symptoms
4.Osteoporosis
5.Soy based infant formula

While soy isn’t the answer to the world’s nutritional problems, it does offer a host of great benefits.