This One Easy Meal Prep Will Save You Time, Stress And Curb Your Work From Home Sugar Cravings
Image courtesy of Lauren Gayfer - You Are Nourished
This month I talk to Lauren Gayfer - nutritional therapist and head honcho of You Are Nourished. I’ve known Lauren a few years now and love her common sense approach to healthy eating and wellbeing. As someone who has worked from home for years, I’m guilty of reaching for way too many unhealthy snacks when i’m busy or stressed. I know I’m not alone. There are a lot of busy women out there, frantically juggling work with home schooling and preparing endless meals for their families all day. It’s time consuming, stressful and dare I say it - boring! So, when I heard about Lauren’s 7 Meals In an Hour - Meal Prep Workshop, I just had to share it with you! Read on to find out more and I hope it helps you save time, stress and curbs those sugar cravings with ready prepped nutritious meals for the family.
Image courtesy of Lauren Gayfer - You Are Nourished
What inspired you to train as a nutritional therapist?
I was working as a high-flying media professional in London, which involved a lot of long lunches, socialising and having lots of fun. This coupled with a stressful job meant that my health really suffered and I was diagnosed with stress-related IBS. I went to see a nutritionist and discovered that my work hard, play hard lifestyle was making me ill. That’s where I began my own journey of discovery. I became really passionate about nutrition, so I quit my job and retrained as a nutritional therapist. I took control of my health and developed an eating plan that healed my body and helped other women too.
How much of a role does stress and anxiety play in our behaviour around food?
It plays a massive role. When we're stressed and anxious, we're not necessarily making sensible choices. Our food intake and wellbeing falls to the bottom of our to-do list and that's when we reach for sugary snacks and convenience foods. Because we're stressed, even the thought of having to prepare a healthy meal is overwhelming. It just adds to our mental load.
From a physiological perspective, stress puts us in a constant state of fight or flight. Our bodies actually increase our blood sugar to get us prepared for this response, which is why we crave sugar. Thing is, we end up blaming ourselves for being weak and lacking willpower, when actually, that's not the case at all. When we're stressed and anxious, we don’t sleep properly either. This can also affect our blood sugar during the day, causing our adrenal glands to work overtime, so it’s like a vicious circle of stress and sugar cravings. I wanted to put this workshop together to try and alleviate some of that overwhelm that work from home mums are experiencing right now.
Image courtesy of Lauren Gayfer - You Are Nourished
Every year the dieting industry tells us to get fit and shift those extra pounds. How damaging is this rhetoric and how can we reframe this conversation to be more about healthy eating?
Over the last forty years or so, the dieting industry has done so much damage by promoting the idea that being skinny is healthy. Just because you're skinny doesn't mean you're healthy. In fact there's a lot of skinny women out there who are not healthy at all in body or mind. The problem is the pressure women are putting on themselves to lose weight because of society's ideals. It’s very damaging to our self worth and self-esteem and does nothing but reinforce negative behaviours.
Dieting is simply not sustainable. When we're stressed, our bodies are not interested in losing weight - they're interested in survival. That’s actually what makes you hold on to extra pounds. Dieting, calorie restriction and any kind of deprivation over a long period of time, on and off, will actually slow down your metabolism. Dieting makes your body think it's in a state of famine, so it holds on to fat and stops you from losing weight, simply because it's doing its job to help you survive. I work with so many women who have been stuck in this cycle and feel terribly guilty about their food choices. It would be far healthier for us to have a more positive body image, embrace our curves and not worry about what everybody else thinks.
Image courtesy of Lauren Gayfer - You Are Nourished
What top tips could you give to our readers about managing their cravings?
Eating regularly and eating when your hungry is so important. We shouldn’t ignore our hunger cues. You wouldn’t deny yourself water if you were thirsty, so why do we feel guilty about eating when we’re hungry. There are two food groups we should be eating to balance our blood sugar and manage cravings - protein and healthy fats. Fats actually fill you up and stop you from reaching for high sugar foods. Healthy fats in the form of avocados, nuts, seeds, nut butters and olive oil help to fill us up as they are released much more slowly into our bloodstream. That way we don't get those cravings all day. We also need to get enough protein from things like eggs, nuts and good quality meats. If we're vegetarian or vegan then things like hummus, beans, legumes and lentils, are the kinds of foods that are slow release.
Do you think we beat ourselves up too much when it comes to food?
Absolutely! I think dietary habits have a lot to answer for here. A lot of the women I work with spend their entire lives, either feeling guilty about their food choices or trying to restrict their intake of food. There's no happy medium. We've lost the joy around actually eating delicious food that does us good. So we're either trying to resist food or we end up overeating. I help women to appreciate that all foods have a place in our diet and yes that includes biscuits, ice cream and cake! When we start to eat nutritious filling foods that do us good, we can let go of a lot of that guilt and obsession around food.
Tell us about the 7 meals in an hour meal prep plan
I’ll be running a live workshop called 7 Meals in an Hour on the 26th and 28th of February. I show you how to meal prep seven different meals in around an hour. You can either cook along with me or watch the replay and go at your own pace. I'm going to show you some really nifty meal prep tips and hacks using foods from your freezer and store cupboard. This workshop will teach you how to whip up a healthy tasty meal with just a few simple ingredients in no time at all. You get an E-book with all the recipes, shopping lists and the prep dishes. At the end of it, you'll come away with seven different meals, a mixture of breakfasts, main meals and snacks that you can have on hand for the upcoming week or keep in your freezer. The fridge ones will keep for a few days, so that you can wake up in the morning and know that your breakfast, lunch and dinner is sorted. There are vegetarian alternatives too so it’s really versatile.
What do you love about your business?
So many things! I love the fact that it's flexible and I work from home. I'm passionate about nutrition and recently trained as a mindset coach, so that I can help women adopt a healthier mindset around food. It's not just what you eat, it's what you think about yourself and about your relationship with food. I get to call the shots, be creative, I get to wake up in the morning and make money doing what I love. I've helped thousands of women over the last five years, with online challenges and within my membership, to have a healthier relationship with food and that's pretty satisfying.
Do you think trends can have a negative or positive effect on getting people to adapt to a healthy lifestyle?
I stay away from trends because anything that's a trend in nutrition has to be a fad! One week it’s superfoods and the next week it's celery juice. People get hung up on this sort of diet mentality and wrap it up in a parcel of nutrition and healthy eating. I don't think nutrition or health needs to be complicated. I think it just needs to be about simple, nourishing wholesome food that you eat, most of the time.
When things get back to normal where's the one place you'd like to go?
Ibiza! Before lockdown, I’d been going there for the last five years with my girlfriends. I really miss it. It's just my little heaven on earth and I absolutely adore the food and lifestyle. The whole vibe of the place takes me back to 20’s! Lounging around in a beach club, sipping cocktails all day is my idea of heaven and I can’t wait to go back!