Balanced you nutrition (2026)

20/11/2024

☀️ Warm Sunshine and Lentil Salad ☀️

Flicking through Happy Salads book yesterday, I was reminded of sunny Sicilian orange salads.

It feels like the coldest day of the year here, so today’s creation is a warm salad with lentils added in - an amazing food for keeping you feeling full across the day.

🎢 Perfect if you want to avoid those mid afternoon blood sugar dips that send you off looking for the biscuit tin.

This dish is also great for hormone and bone health, packed with protein, fibre, vitamin c and calcium.

An important mineral to keep an eye on, for prioritising your bone density...especially if you don’t consume cow’s milk.

Head to the link in my bio for the recipe.

Enjoy 🙂

Ingredients
400g cooked puy lentils, served warm
4 handfuls of pea shoots or rocket
3 medium oranges, peeled and cut into slices
150g Goats or Feta cheese
1 red onion, finely sliced
2tbsp capers (in vinegar)
2 tbsp pumpkin seeds
2tbsp extra virgin olive oil
3tbsp apple cider vinegar
2 tsp sumac
2tsp honey
1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
Salt and pepper to season the dressing

Method
🍊Mix the olive oil, apple cider vinegar, garlic, honey, salt & pepper & sumac together in a medium sized bowl
🍊 Add in the lentils & stir
🍊 Gently fold in the remaining ingredients
🍊 Serve

13/11/2024

🫐Blueberry Energy Balls - brilliant for your gut

These delicious little morsels make the perfect snack when dinner’s late or you are looking for a post exercise pick me up.

⭐️They also double up as super gut health food.

Rich in fibre and a good source of protein, they are loaded with natural ingredients to support a strong gut lining (to help prevent the development of food intolerances)

and with a generous serving of nuts and seeds, they are great for regulating bowel movements - perfect if you have a constipated picture.💫

🫐 The wonderfully sweet blueberries add polyphenols to the mixture, a type of phytonutrient loved by the gut protecting bacteria akkermansia muciniphila.

Keeping akkermansia topped up with a daily supply of polyphenols stimulates the abundance of this species, which nourish the gut lining and are held to be a marker of a healthy gut microbiome. 💫

Head to the bio for the recipe.

Enjoy 🙂

12/11/2024

🍫 OK, so you’ve got the chocolate covered (make sure it’s dark though) …

but how many other top magnesium foods are you getting across the week?

This super mineral is one of your secret weapons for topping up your energy levels and keeping calm.

It also critical for bone health and can help to balance and prevent high blood pressure.

Signs of deficiency include
⭐️ Eye twitches (these are a dead give away
⭐️ Fatigue
⭐️ Poor sleep
⭐️ Headaches and migraines
⭐️ Tingling
⭐️ Muscle cramps
⭐️ Feeling stressed

If choosing a magnesium supplement, there are few forms to consider.

My favourite for stress and sleep is magnesium bisglycinate, but be sure to check out which form you need.

therapist

06/11/2024

☁️SAD (Seasonal affective disorder) according to the NHS is a type of seasonal depression

It’s mostly known for hitting us in the gloomy months of winter and can especially kick in when the clocks turn back.

Symptoms include:
👉Low mood
👉 Low motivation
👉 Lethargy
👉 Carbohydrate cravings
👉 Weight gain

To mitigate the lack of daylight & sunshine, getting out during daylight and spending time walking & exercising in nature is top of the list.

In fact, the Nordics have the name ‘friluftsliv’ for this, meaning open air living.

From a nutritional perspective 👉

Topping up your vitamin D levels is a priority, as it’s essential for regulating serotonin production, the neurotransmitter critical for our mood.

The NHS recommend a meagre 10mcg daily of vitamin D, but this won’t touch the sides for most people & getting vitamin D from foods alone e.g. oily fish, mushrooms & eggs is tricky.

So look to get your levels of this sunshine vitamin tested and establish your baseline.

Then consult with a nutritional therapist to get the dose you actually need, not the minimum amount to prevent a deficiency.

On top of this, add an array of fresh foods to your trolley,including colourful fruit and vegetables, wholegrains, lentils and pulses, chicken and fish where appropriate.

If you book a consultation in November, you’ll receive a free vitamin D spray to help you fight the winter blues. See the link in the bio.

29/10/2024

Hormone Balancing Salad 🥗

I’m conscious that I’ve been slacking on the phytoestrogen front.

So for lunch, I grabbed a jar of chickpeas, colourful veg, seeds & herbs from the fridge & chopped it all up for a family lunch.

It’s half term & preparing a big salad bumps up everyone’s plant intake up, whether they want phytoestrogens or not. 🙂

Phytoestrogens are found in plant foods such as beans, lentils, chickpeas, flax seeds, organic soy, garlic and parsley.

They have a similar structure to the hormone oestrogen & have an oestrogen like effect on the body.

Including these compounds in your diet can help to balance hormones, what’s not to like?

Head to my website for the recipe 🙂

17/10/2024

Client wins ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Maria and I have worked together for well over a year now.

She’s been amazingly focused and committed to her goals and deserves all the improvements that she’s seen.

If you’re wondering how nutrition can help you feel at your best, get in touch to organise a free discovery call.

You can DM me or check the link in the bio for my website.

15/10/2024

I love a book 📕

and the latest ‘Metabolism Repair for Women’ has made it onto my favourites list of easy to read health books.

It’s packed full of up to date info on metabolic health & weight loss, alongside great tips for making long term health changes.

I’ll be putting my new knowledge into action after my holiday, when my love affair with Cypriot food is sadly cut short☀️🙂☀️

13/10/2024

Whose vitamin D levels are dipping? 🥶

When there’s a distinct lack of sunlight ☁️ one of the simple things we can do to protect ourselves from colds & flu is to check in on our vitamin D levels.

🩸It’s an easy test to do at home, involving a finger prick, where you drop a droplet or two of blood onto a blood spot form.

I generally aim to keep my levels up around 100 nmol/L to maintain energy levels, bone health & hormone balance.

Our levels of this vital vitamin lower the further we move away from summer, so it’s a good idea to check in with a blood test in autumn.

DM me for details of this simple and cheap test.

vitamins

06/10/2024

The teenage years are time of flux 🌈🌈🌈 & of dynamic growth and change.

Teenagers require a unique approach to nutrition, different to that of children and adults, to take into account their growing independence and the many physiological and neurobehavioral changes at play. 🧠

💫 I’m passionate about working with teens and helping them to lay down the foundations of a diet, full of healthy foods to feed their brain and body.

✅ Some of the areas I support include:

Low energy & fatigue
Immune health
Skin health
Brain power
Digestion
Periods
Hormonal balance

💫 I also provide a diet reset for those teens without any obvious health needs, who want to up their game by building in key foods to thrive in every day life, sport, school etc.

🙂Do get in touch if you’d like to find out more. Email: karen@balancedyounutrition.com

29/09/2024

When short cuts save the day🤩⏱️🤩

On some days, life is just too busy to cook from scratch and I rely on a few key store cupboard staples to help create tasty and healthy meals, especially at lunchtime.

My favourite brand for this is

When their lentils, grains and quinoa are on offer at . I stock up on their sachets and fill my cupboard right up.

After seeing clients in clinic yesterday morning and discussing the merits of quinoa 🙂. I returned home to a very uninspiring fridge, so grabbed an emergency packet of Persian quinoa and lentils and went on to pimp it up with odds and sods from the vegetable tray to create the recipe below.

It was finished off with a dollop of houmous for a tasty alfresco lunch in the late autumn sunshine, with enough leftover to last me a couple of lunches.

Here’s can grab the recipe below 🌟

What are your favourite short cuts? ⏱️

Ingredients
1 packet of Merchant Gourmet Persian Quinoa and lentils
1 small onion, finely chopped.
2 tbsp of parsley, finely chopped
1/8 small cabbage, grated
1 orange pepper, finely chopped
1 small apple, grated
1 tbsp virgin olive oil
1.5 tbsp apple cider vinegar
1 tub of Sabra hummus

Method
Grate and chop the herbs and vegetables
Mix all ingredients together with the exception of the hummus
Make a well in the centre of the quinoa and add the hummus
Serve ✅

24/09/2024

The season of tissues, sniffles and sore throats is upon us.🤧😷🤧

To prepare, I’m doing the nutritional equivalent of buckling down the hatches.

Checking that we are eating fresh, balanced meals, trying to make sure the teens are getting plenty of sleep & enjoying daily swigs of elderberry syrup. ✅

I’m also stocking up on immune supporting supplements and getting vitamin D levels tested.

Having a vulnerable family member in the household means I have to be extra prepared for whatever viruses are hanging around school and sixth form college.

💫 Key supplements we have at the ready include:

Vitamin D
Vitamin C
Elderberry syrup
Echinacea
Beta glucans
Zinc
Selenium
Astralagus

🌟To help you prepare. I’m offering a free Vitamin D oral spray with every nutritional therapy programme booked & paid for on or before 1st October 2024.

See the link in my bio. 🙂

23/09/2024

It’s apple season and we have a tonne of fruit to put to good use🍎🍏🍎

I made a fresh slaw today (see the link to the recipe in the bio).

and over the next few weeks there’ll be stewed apple at breakfast, a crumble, butternut squash and apple soup, then apples hidden in smoothies and soup as I guess we’ll have apple fatigue by then.

➡️ And the health benefits of apples?

To begin, there plenty of pectin, a soluble fibre that feeds your friendly gut bacteria, to keep your stools regular and your gut happy.

Stewed apple in fact is a great food to eat when you have a constipated picture, as the fibre helps to push your stools through the digestive tract, at a more productive speed.

The stewing process also makes the fruit easier to digest making it a good choice of food if you are feeling unwell.

Apples also contain Glucaric acid to help with liver detoxification, aiding the removal of toxic substances from the body alongside hormones and medications.

Quercetin acts as a natural histamine and anti inflammatory agent to help support your immune system.

Then there’s vitamin C, perhaps the most famous antioxidant of all, which we need to keep topped up across the day.

It’s great to make the most of our seasonal fruit, it’s certainly tastier and more nutritious after just being picked, plus there’ll hopefully have been less chemicals used in the growing process.

Balanced you nutrition