My Food Bag: My First Meal Of The Day

Over the course of the day, you typically eat three meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner. Add in a mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack and you would expect you would have enough energy-sufficient food to last you the day. However, this theory doesn’t always work for me. Sometimes I find myself hungry before the allocated times at school, for these meals or snacks. I put this down to the complexity of my first meal of the day, the preparation that goes into making my meals and snacks and how much time I have to achieve this, whether it be morning or night. Our eating habits can be influenced by cost, time, nutrition information, the art of cooking and the influence of statistics. These can play a part in how we determine whether the food we’re

For a busy New Zealand family, where both parents work and the children go to school, it is hard to have a meal prepared in time. This is where most families resort to last-minute takeaways. The phrase ‘why do it yourself when you can pay someone else to do it for you’ is common among many New Zealand households. The art of cooking has taken a tumble and more and more people are going by this saying, due to busy schedules. Bargain Box and My Food Bag are great options for people who haven’t got enough time to shop for groceries. Both companies gather numerous ingredients for 5-7 meals and put them in a box, which is then delivered to your door. Within New Zealand and Australia, approximately 35,000 households use My Food Bag and the company has a 120% annual growth rate. Money also plays a large part in what people eat. With the price of organic foods and produce on the rise, it is harder to make a hearty and healthy meal, even if we have the time, thus resulting in meals that aren’t beneficial and are very likely to cost more. However, there is a contradiction to not having enough time, that is laziness. In the three years it’s been around, approximately 80,000 customers are using Countdowns ‘click & collect’ or ‘delivery’ service. This allows for 10 minutes to be spent in front of the computer ordering groceries that are delivered to your

In a 2015/2016 survey of New Zealanders, it was shown that approximately 1 in 3 adults (15 years and over) are obese. We can put this stint down to what we’re eating and the exercise regime we do or do not go through. New Zealand is well known for its ‘clean, green and healthy’ image, but what most people don’t realise is that New Zealand has the third highest obesity levels in the world with 29% of the country being obese, following behind the US (36.5%) and Mexico (32%). As the world gets fatter, we become more informed about nutrition information and what foods to eat that will be most beneficial to us. Doctor Libby Weaver, a nutritional biochemist, 7-time bestselling author and an international speaker, states in her recent book, “A great question to ask yourself before you make a food choice is ‘will this nourish me?’” She poses this question to help us understand that foods are not categorised as ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ but whether they are nourishing or not. The foods you eat 100% affect your physical, mental and social health. Coordination, strength and endurance are just some of the physical factors that are influenced by the foods you eat to enable your body to keep up throughout the day. Eating healthy foods, ensures your body can complete the day-to-day tasks with ease, where as a fatty, unhealthy diet can cause each activity, whether it be simply getting