My Approach to Food, Protein and Gut Health
People often ask me what I actually eat, particularly now that I’m working more with women over 45 around fitness, strength and nutrition. The truth is that I don’t follow one particular diet. My way of eating has evolved over many years through studying Nutritional Healing, Ayurveda, alkaline approaches to eating and detoxification, but also simply through noticing what makes my own body feel good. I’m particularly interested in gut health, eating a really wide variety of plant foods and eating seasonally whenever I can.
Breakfast for me nearly always includes some protein. Sometimes I’ll make pancakes using gram flour, which is made from chickpeas, and I’ll often add seeds or other nutritious ingredients. Another favourite is overnight oats with chia seeds and milk. I love chia, flaxseed, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and walnuts, and they’re really easy to sprinkle onto breakfast or add to other meals. Nut butters are another staple in my kitchen, particularly peanut and almond butter.
Lunch is often very simple. I love homemade soups and salads, and soup is one of my favourite ways of getting lots of vegetables into one meal. I’ll make different combinations depending on what’s available and what’s in season. I don’t really want to eat exactly the same vegetables every day because I’m interested in variety. One of the things I particularly think about when I’m shopping or cooking is, how many different plants am I eating this week? Vegetables, fruit, herbs, beans, lentils, nuts, seeds and whole grains can all contribute to that variety.
Dinner is often plant-based. I love vegetable curries and meals based around lentils or chickpeas, but I also eat fish and eggs. Sardines and mackerel are favourites, as well as sea bass, and I’ll often have fish simply with lots of vegetables. I also eat goat’s yoghurt and use protein powders at times, particularly when I want an easy way of increasing the protein in a meal or smoothie.
Protein has become something I think about more deliberately as I’ve got older and become increasingly interested in strength training. If we’re asking our muscles to become stronger, we need to nourish them as well as train them. I like getting protein from a mixture of foods rather than relying on one source, so over the course of a week mine might come from fish, eggs, yoghurt, lentils, chickpeas, seeds, nuts, nut butters and protein powder.
But food for me is about much more than protein, carbohydrates and fats. I absolutely love the connection between food and the seasons. I’ve had two allotments in the past and there’s something incredibly satisfying about growing your own vegetables, picking them and then deciding what you’re going to cook. Even when I don’t have an allotment, I still love growing things and foraging.
Spring is one of my favourite times because wild garlic starts appearing and I can bring it home and use it in cooking. I also love finding watercress, and as we move through summer and into early autumn there are completely different things to look forward to blackberries, plums, elderflowers and elderberries, depending on the season and what’s growing locally. There’s something lovely about eating food at the point in the year when it naturally appears.
Foraging also makes me appreciate food differently. When you’ve actually walked somewhere, picked something yourself, brought it home and turned it into a meal, food doesn’t feel like another product you’ve pulled from a supermarket shelf. It connects you with where you live and with the changing seasons.
Gut health is another reason I love variety. Rather than becoming obsessed with one particular “superfood”, I prefer having lots of different plant foods appearing across my week. A handful of seeds here, some lentils in a curry, berries with breakfast, herbs in a salad, vegetables in a soup, nuts as a snack — all those little things add up.
My studies in Ayurveda have also influenced the way I think about food. I like the idea of noticing the individual rather than assuming everybody should eat exactly the same diet. I pay attention to how food makes me feel, my digestion, my energy and even the time of year. I don’t follow every Ayurvedic principle rigidly, but it has encouraged me to think about nourishment as something much broader than counting calories.
And that’s probably the most important thing about the way I eat.
I’m not trying to eat perfectly.
I want my food to be colourful, varied, nourishing and enjoyable. I want enough protein to support my muscles, plenty of different plants to support my overall health, and food that gives me the energy to exercise and live my life. I want curries and soups, fresh vegetables, beautiful fruit, herbs, seeds and good fish — and I also want the pleasure of picking a blackberry from a hedgerow or bringing home the first wild garlic of spring.
For me, healthy eating isn’t about deprivation.
It’s about nourishment, variety, colour, seasonality and enjoying real food.
And that’s what I really eat.
Selena
Personal Trainer, Yoga Teacher & Wellbeing Coach
In Flow Wellbeing Studio, Cheltenham
