This blog exists for the purpose of sharing with you how easy it can be to create delicious, nutritious, healthy, REAL food in REAL time for yourself and those around you. Like most people reading this, I’m just an every-day person; a mum with real demands and pressures. The one thing I do have is a massive passion for providing healthy food for myself and for my family.
The journey to where you find me today began a few years ago as a quest to lose a bit of weight, it took me along a path of discovery and ended with me completely turning around the diet of our family – and changing careers. The results were blatantly clear to those around me – we looked good and we felt good! People wanted to know the secrets to our transformation and so ‘Fanny’s Real Food’ was born as a means to share the food I was making and the things I had learned.
Jump forward a few years and I’ve turned my passion into my career. I’m now a qualified nutrition coach, personal trainer and sports massage therapist and I continue to share the delicious and healthy food I make with my clients and whoever else cares to read my little blog!
So, what can you find here? One thing you should know about me is that I don’t do diets!! I don’t count calories or follow ridiculous fads. I adore food and I believe that the ultimate enjoyment in food comes from eating good quality, REAL food. You will find wholesome, nutritious REAL, home-cooked foods which will fill, sustain and nourish your bodies. My recipes are kept as simple as possible as they need to be squeezed in around a busy life. We eat a predominantly gluten and dairy free diet because they don’t sit too well with us. We avoid sugar and processed food as much as possible and limit our animal products. Instead fill ourselves up with good quality, vegetables, legumes, grains and a little meat and fish. If this sounds like something you could live with, then please read on and keep checking us out from time to time.
If you are someone starting out on your health food journey I want you to know that change is possible and that it can be enjoyable too! The way you find me here is not the way I have always been and I’m certainly not one of those sickening people who naturally maintains a slim physique – I need to work at it! As a life-long lover of food, I didn’t always make the right choices. I was the child who would rather be watching telly and eating biscuits than playing sport so I’ve always had a tendency to carry just a few more pounds than was ideal. In my teens I started to attend fitness classes and gyms in an attempt to keep the weight gain at bay. Throughout my twenties, as my diet got worse and my booze consumption increased, so did my need to exercise, until eventually I was competing in triathlons, but still eating and drinking without control. It wasn’t until I had my first child, when exercising wasn’t as easy to fit in around mother-hood, that the pounds really started to pile on and eventually I came to realise that it was my diet that needed to change.
Through learning about how to eat I have lost weight, I feel so much better, I have more energy, I look better (albeit older!!), I have eliminated intolerance symptoms such as bloating, gas, indigestion, sneezing, a runny nose and bad skin. I’m also thankfully reducing my chances of developing many chronic diseases and teaching my kids how to do the same. And the best bit? It wasn’t hard, it didn’t involve starving myself or going without, it has simply been about switching or limiting the bad food I was eating in preference for better food! If you met the old me you would most likely find me tucking into sugary juices, cereals and snacks, sandwiches, burgers, pizzas, lots and lots of pasta and very few vegetables. These days I enjoy a diet full of vegetables, meat and fish, high protein breakfasts, delicious salads and home cooked meals. And because my diet is 90% great I can enjoy the odd treat – a slice of cake or a glass or two of wine – without causing too much damage or feeling too much guilt!!
I still exercise avidly – if food is my first passion then being fit and healthy is my second. It’s my goal to stay fit and healthy for as long as I can and this further boosts my desire to put good food into my body and the bodies of my children.
My family now consists of my hubby and my three kids currently 7, 9 and 11 years old.
All of my children experienced quite severe intolerances to dairy and gluten when they were babies. It’s difficult to know whether they still have adverse reactions now, so rather than second guess whether every other little thing they suffer from could be caused by the dairy and gluten that caused them so much discomfort when they were tiny, I find it easier to exclude them from their diet in the most part (although you can occasionally find them tucking into pizza!). (Side note: it is really important to ensure anybody – particularly kids – who is omitting certain foods from their diet is getting a varied and complete diet from other sources.)
My food is inspired from my mum’s wonderful home cooking when I was growing up, from recipe books, magazines and online and of course from eating out and getting ideas from the people I talk to. I hope you like what you see and continue to check in. Please share what you see with your friends and family to help grow my little blog.
Oh and why ‘Fanny’? Well it’s the name that was affectionately given to me by my friends in my younger years and well, it’s just a bit more memorable than ‘Stef’ isn’t it??
If you are interested in seeking assistance with weight loss or gain, increasing health or improving fitness then get in touch.
