A few weeks of lockdown has unravelled some interesting observations:
- There are many skilled bakers and competent cooks amongst us!
- Exotic recipes being dished out are totally instagrammable but the nutrition levels are questionable!
- Supermarket aisles with Chips, Cookies, and Junk food in general, are wiped out! So are shelves with refined flour, baking soda, and refined sugar!
It’s worthwhile to pause and think – what are we doing with our health during the lockdown! Sure, Lockdown is a difficult phase – work from home, homeschooling the kids, home chores without domestic help!
But let’s shift our perspective a bit, Lockdown is also a time where: there is no commute to the office, there’s no morning rush to make school packed lunches, there’s no rush to take the kids to extra classes.
So, can we utilise this time to review and upgrade our health? Eat better, Sleep better, exercise better?
‘Eating better’ begins with the right sourcing!
If our grocery trips come back with refined flour, onion, tomatoes, and potatoes or with bags of chips and sweet treats – we need to deep dive and see how we can do better. How can we include a variety of nutritious ingredients in our grocery bags?
Armed with the right ingredients, the next step is to think of how can we cook better. We may have spent the first few weeks of lockdown making foods that are convenient to make (save time, fewer dishes to wash, easy to eat). We have also, at times, made an effort to make exotic instagrammable food items. This is possibly to satisfy our food cravings and perhaps also due to the absence of other forms of entertainment.
Can we then pause and think: How can we make our food healthier?
The Nutri-Packed Grocery List!
Nutrition Experts at Curo Wellness suggest that for us to have a nutritious & well-balanced diet, our week’s meal plan should have 6 Food Groups covered (5/4 for those who follow a vegetarian/ plant-based diet):
- Foodgrains & Millets
- Pulses
- Veggies & Fruits
- Dairy
- Animal Products (Non-Vegetarian)
- Nuts, Seeds & Spices
Okay, so we already know that.. (we learnt that in elementary school, duh!)
But the real deal is how to upgrade your nutrition quotient by making healthier choices within those food groups!
Here’s a cheat sheet that you can refer to every time you make a grocery run. This sheet has a list of food items/ ingredients that you can choose from for each food-group to make your overall food intake more nutritious! For example, when you’re in the food grains aisle buying whole wheat flour, make sure you include Ragi or Jowar or Bajra in your cart too! Or pick up Nuts & Seeds for the in-between snacking instead of chips.
Okay so we bought these nutritious ingredients, now how do we incorporate these into our meals. Nutrition Experts at Curo Wellness have drawn out some interesting recipe ideas using some of these healthy-choice ingredients:
Granola with pumpkin seeds & goji berries
More Nutritious recipe ideas on the Curo Wellness website.
Let’s leverage the lockdown period to review our lifestyle and turn this challenging period into an opportunity to upgrade our health!
