If you’d love to make changes for a healthier lifestyle, Healthy Eating Week is the perfect opportunity to get started. From 10th June, the British Nutrition Foundation is encouraging us to give five eating, drinking and activity challenges a go, including:
- Get at least five fruit/veg portions a day
- Stay hydrated
- Move more
- Focus on fibre
- Reduce food waste
Helping our members to lead healthier, happier lives is at the heart of everything we do at Slimming World. Our Food Optimising eating plan is an easy-to-follow and enjoyable way to lose weight – and keep it off for life – without ever going hungry.
If you’d love to enjoy an easy week of delicious, healthy meals, sign up to our email newsletter below. You’ll receive a flexible seven-day eating plan, with breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack ideas that you can mix and match to make your own personal menu. You’ll also get our regular newsletter, packed with more Slimming World recipes, inspiring member transformations and exciting special offers.
Thank you for signing up. We just need you to verify your email address. Please check your inbox for a message from us and click on the verification link so we can keep you up to date with our latest menus, recipes and offers.
Failed captcha.
Please check your inbox for a message from us and click on the verification link so we can keep you up to date with our latest menus, recipes and offers.
Good news, you’re already on our email list. Look out for emails from us packed full of recipe inspiration.
Something went wrong.
We asked our head of nutrition, research and health, Carolyn Pallister, to share her expert pointers to help you ace seven days of healthy habits – that hopefully you’ll want to keep up!
Get at least five a day
Whether they’re fresh, frozen or canned, enjoying a wider variety of fruit and vegetables is a great way to brighten up your meals – and provide your body with a range of different nutrients. Many fruits and vegetables are high in fibre (especially if you eat the skin, too), and a fibre-rich diet is associated with a lower risk of developing conditions such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer. Plus, they’re typically low in calories and help to fill us up – which is why most fruit and vegetables are Free Foods on the Slimming World Food Optimising plan, meaning you can enjoy them freely with no weighing, measuring or counting.
Healthy hint: Serving up a stir-fry is great for packing plenty of veg into your meals – and our firecracker chicken is brimming with colourful produce.
Stay hydrated
Drinking plenty of water can help our concentration and support healthy digestion, and is great for our skin. It can also prevent hunger pangs (which are actually often a sign that we’re dehydrated). A useful tip is to drink before you feel thirsty to avoid the sluggishness and headaches that dehydration can cause, and to try to have at least six to eight drinks a day.
Here’s a few more ideas to help you stay topped up:
- Keep a reusable water bottle close to hand to sip throughout the day.
- Drink with your meals.
- Any fluid (other than alcohol, I’m afraid!) counts towards your six to eight glasses per day – mix it up to keep it interesting, with fruit teas, cold-water infuser bags or sugar-free squashes.
- Have plenty to drink before, during and after physical activity, and drink more on warmer days.
Healthy hint: Infusing water with your favourite fruits is a clever way to jazz up your H2O, and Slimming World members will find lots of inventive ideas in their local group and on the member website.
Move more
Being more active can give your health, fitness, wellbeing and weight loss a boost. If you’re new to exercise or you’re looking for some extra move-more motivation, our unique Body Magic activity programme helps you take steps towards a more active lifestyle, alongside eating a healthy, balanced diet. There’s something for every level of ability, too. If you’re just starting out, you can take it slow by adding gentle activity into your day; and if you feel like stretching yourself, you can take on a more vigorous form of exercise. Running, cycling, walking the dog… all activity counts.
Healthy hint: When you join Slimming World, you’ll get access to a raft of tools to help increase your activity levels, at your own pace – including more than 90 videos for at-home workouts and walking podcasts to keep you company on the go.
Focus on fibre
Eating more wholegrains is a great way to add more fibre into your diet, which is beneficial for our gut and heart health, and helps us feel fuller for longer. Wholegrains also provide essential vitamins and minerals, including B vitamins, to support our overall health, so it’s important to enjoy plenty of them as part of a balanced diet. Wholemeal bread, brown rice, wholewheat pasta, porridge oats and grains like quinoa and pearl barley all count as wholegrains.
Healthy hint: Mix it up at dinner time with our quinoa-filled vegetable quinotto, a vegan twist on risotto.
Reduce food waste
Minimising food waste is a positive for our pockets and the environment. Planning your menu for the week and shopping from a list will help prevent waste while also stopping those supermarket buys that could sneak into your trolley and sabotage your weight loss.
If you do find yourself with ingredients going spare, Slimming World soups, stir-fries and casseroles will level up your leftovers. You’ll find lots more ideas for cutting down waste without skimping on taste in our friendly Slimming World groups and on our member-exclusive websites.
Healthy hint: Sample a taste of our leftovers recipes here on the Slimming World blog
Are you ready to take on the challenge for Healthy Eating Week? You’ll get extra support to achieve your health and wellbeing goals in your local Slimming World group.