How to stay healthy while living rurally?

Do you find it hard to make healthy meals while living an hour or even hours from your local supermarket? There’s no opportunity to quickly duck to the supermarket if you’ve run out of apples or have a craving for something but that’s ok, we can still eat healthy and nutritious meals while living rurally and I’m here to tell you how I do it.

I am a qualified Naturopath and Nutritionist who lives on a sheep and cropping farm in Western Victoria. I understand that eating healthy can be hard but I’m here to make it easy, to help you from my experiences and mistake, to ensure your meals are delicious, nutritious and not boring.

I like to be organised and prepared for the week or even 2 weeks ahead. I’m currently lucky that I only live 45 minutes from the supermarket but when we lived in Western Australia we did groceries every two weeks as it was just too far away and we still followed these basicsteps. I will sit down and organise what we are doing for the coming week or two, then see how many meals we will be at home for and start planning our meals from there.

“When planning I like to follow these basic principles to ensure I am eating a well-balanced meal.”

The basic principles of what I tell my clients is to ensure at each meal you are consuming

2 cups of veggies

2 serves of good quality fats

1 serve of protein

If you are following these principles, you will be getting a nutrient dense meal but it will also ensure you are staying full and stabilising your blood sugars so you looking for those pesky sugary treats at 3pm.

Once I’ve planned my meals, written my list and the grocery shopping is done, here comes the meal prepping. Some of the meals that I have planned will be meals that can be made and frozen. The idea behind cooking and using the freezer is it will not only save time throughout the week but you will also be able to use the vegetables when they are at their freshest so you can get the most nutrients out of the vegetables. It also allows you to have something for the end of the week when supplies are running low. Meals I like to cook for the freezer are casseroles, stir fry’s, curries, soups and stews as they freeze and defrost well. For the rest of my meal planning, I may make a batch of savoury muffins, eggs and bacon pies, or bliss balls to have for healthy snack options when required.

For my other dinners, I generally cook fresh and they are usually pretty quick and easy. Most nights we would have lean meat and vegetables or salad. When I am speaking to clients in rural areas and we are talking about what they eat they get really nervous when they say ‘just meat and veggies’. It’s not a bad meal option it’s just about ensuring we have the right ratio of veggies to meat and about incorporating some good quality fats in our meals as well. I also suggest that we need to have some more fish and white meats in our weekly routine instead of only eating red meats and eat a wide variety of non-starchy vegetables so look at mixing the vegetables up and eating what’s in season.

For the rest of the week, I just live and eat fairly basically. For breakfast, it might be a smoothie with frozen fruit or eggs fresh from the chooks. Lunch is generally leftovers from the night before and I snack on some of the snacks that I prepared when I meal prepped or fruit.

I hope this has helped you know that eating healthy rurally can be achieved and it doesn’t have to be difficult or boring. If you would like more information you can find more at The Rural Naturopath on Instagram and Facebook or via my website.