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This Roasted Pumpkin Soup is a hearty, warming and healthy meal option for those chilly winter nights ahead. Ladle into bowls, sprinkle on some roasted pumpkin seeds and serve with my lovely courgette bread.

Serves 2 For the falafel: 1 x 400g can cooked chickpeas, drained and rinsed 1 small red onion finely chopped 2 tsp ground cumin ½ teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon coconut oil or rapeseed oil 1 tablespoons finely chopped parsley 1 tablespoon chopped fresh coriander or...

…so it can therefore be tricky for us as parents to remember what a sensitive subject weight gain and obesity can be for school age children. What do we do? Do we talk about it, ignore it? Leave healthy eating leaflets in their school bag? Join chat rooms, forums, the queue at the GP, stalk netmums, ban biscuits, invite skinny children for tea? What?

If you’ve been working late, partying hard or just had a rough night with the kids, the following day can be a challenge in terms of healthy eating. As you struggle through a day punctuated by yawns and wooziness, you find yourself craving foods which you can usually resist. Your brain goes into overdrive to try and keep you awake, and it finds help in the form of Tryptophan.

This is a bit of a dry blog. You know… informative… but heavily lacking in jokes and frivolity… so apologies in advance. It’s an at-a-glance look at how best we can protect ourselves (and our family) from the sun and minimise the ‘sun-drenched lined’ look. I’m going right to the heart of the matter and starting at the very beginning (as they say in the Sound of Music…).

One of the wonderful things about running the 21 Day BLAST Plan is hearing people’s discoveries about their own body. As they get to grips with the Blast eating plan and embrace its wholesomeness, the changes to their daily lives take them by surprise.

Recently I joined my sister Gill and her husband for a few days walking in the Lake District. Flipping long way to drive but it was so worth it. Those hills! The landscape was like nothing I had seen before… I almost felt like I was on the moon. They had hired a cottage and as my sister is not one to pay through the nose for dodgy pub food, she brings half the house with her. To my benefit! She’s a very good cook and this was a dish she served up one evening after a particularly gruelling days’s walking.

If you’re a habitual dieter and love nothing better than to beat yourself up by stepping on the scales, then the number you see rising or decreasing may have nothing to do with fat levels. It could be your body is holding onto more water than it should.

Cortisol is a hormone and is produced by the adrenal glands and it influences and regulates many of the changes which occur in the body in response to stress. It also soothes the path for some other important hormones to get sorted (testosterone, oestrogen, insulin). So when cortisol production is controlled and steady, then the others can be tickety-boo too.

Summer is coming and we are going to be baring more flesh. Hence, there is a tendency amongst all of us to aim for less wobble and more tone. It is the defined torso which seems to be the mark of success – it reeks discipline, focus, sweat and ‘treat deprivation’. No-one looks at legs. It’s the ‘ripped’, ‘shredded’ and ‘super lean’ abs, not thighs, that are all over Instagram.

In our early forties, our once lovely breasts start to lose their roundness, their fullness and their ‘have me, I’m yours’-ness. This is in part due to our  breast tissue starting to become less glandular and more fatty which makes them feel less firm. Declining oestrogen levels at the onset of the menopause can make breast tissue dehydrated and less elastic. Hence it’s less of the perky and more of the murky.

Having a place on the 21 Day BLAST Plan means you follow the BLAST eating plan. And yes… you do some workouts too. Short and sweet. Anything between 20-30 minutes long.

I didn’t want to make a run of the mill salad. No. I wanted to create a tasty, heart-warming, get-stuck-in salad. An offering to surprise and delight the family which is nutritious but not too worthy. Moreish and not goody-two-shoes. And here it is. Lets fill our boots.

No. Sorry to disappoint. This isn’t going to be about curry. More about one special ingredient – the health benefits of turmeric. From my research it looks like turmeric is THE ingredient to include in our daily, yes – daily, eating routine. It has major benefits for body and brain. Almost too good to be true, in fact. Move over antibiotics, let the orange sunshine spice strut its stuff.