Author Archive: Lydia

Healthy Snacks for Insatiable Hunger

I’ve always loved food, ever since I was a baby.

Apparently I devoured so many mashed carrots when I was a young one that my skin colour turned a shade of orange due to the amount of carotene I was ingesting!

The pediatrician had seen it before, my parents could relax knowing it was nothing serious and I would return to my normal shade of skin colour, but they were to stop feeding me such copious amounts of carrots!

I decided I wanted to breastfeed before I had my baby.

I’ve been very lucky with my baby as she took to breastfeeding straight away. What I didn’t know was that breastfeeding would zap so much energy from me and leave me absolutely ravenous for food.

Breastfeeding and nutritious food have been the best things for my post-pregnancy weight loss (and the hours of pram walking we do)!

When you’re breastfeeding your baby it’s so easy to just jump straight for pre-packaged foods to satisfy your rumbling stomach (e.g. crisps, chocolate bars, cakes). You are, after all, sat on your behind for hours as your baby suckles away. You eat these foods and you still feel hungry 5 minutes later. What was the point of that? And you haven’t provided your body with good nutrition, if any nutrition, for you or your breastfeeding baby.

Here are some of the healthy, quick and easy things I eat to provide me with a steady release of energy and to maximise the nutrients I’m putting in to my body:

• Low-fat cottage cheese on wholegrain bread
• Carrot sticks with hummus (or cottage cheese)
• Celery sticks with cottage cheese (or hummus)
• Scrambled eggs (just melt a little butter in a pan, crack 2 eggs into the pan and stir whilst cooking until fluffy) with wholegrain toast

So what do you need in your shopping bag for the above? The following ingredients can be bought for just over a fiver from your local supermarket, and will provide you with plenty of healthy and varied snacks:

1. Low-fat cottage cheese
2. Hummus
3. Carrots
4. Celery
5. Free-range eggs
6. Wholegrain bread
7. Butter (you probably already have this in the fridge)!