LOTL has a new foodie in town and she will be bringing us an array of incredibly healthy and very , very tasty recipes which have been tested by the team at LOTL!
We will be featuring Radha's recipes regulalry at LOTL in our food section. These receipes are truly amazing and have to be tasted to be believed
Hi there! Thanks for stopping by! My name is Radha and I just love to share the healthy-foodie love.
What I want to bring you in my recipes here at LOTL and on my Healtherella blog is a culmination of my food journey surrounding a search for nourishing whole food. Growing up in country NSW, food was a central part of my family life and with a mother who was a naturopath and yoga teacher and a father with Italian heritage, I always ate healthy delicious food. Eating a meal was a special time to be shared together in our family and I still take this with me in life. There really is something special about sharing a meal with someone and I feel sad that many families are loosing this experience.
My interest in food intensified when I finished school to start my chef apprenticeship in top fine dining restaurants in Sydney, Australia. After 2 years, however, I became disenchanted with the unhealthy lifestyle of the profession and the over manipulation of the food in fine dining. This was hard for me to accept as I had wanted to be a chef since I was 12! So with much angst I decided that the chef’s life was not for me and I left the industry. But what was I to do?
As many people who need a direction do, I went to university! I competed 2 degrees (B.A. Sociology and Gender Studies and B.Ed. (early childhood) ), worked as a teacher for a few years and now I am a teaching director of a community preschool in Sydney, Australia. I love my job and am very passionate about the importance of the early years for forming the foundations of life. Since leaving my apprenticeship though my passion for food has stayed strong and cooking has always been my escape and way of connecting to myself and others. I am always spreading my passion for food and health to children and families!
Food has always been a constant in my life, but it has also given me problems too. In my early 20′s I was dealing with a borderline eating disorder, which I dealt with through counselling and meal plans but then latter anxiety and constant stomach bloating reared their ugly heads. Hippocrates is well know for saying that food can be the best medicine or the worst poison and for a while there it was being my poison. I knew this wasn’t right and that food should be helping me not hindering me. So, I further questioned the food that we commonly eat and went to my doctor for help. Unfortunately all he said was to eat bran! And I was to anxious to tell him about my anxiety! So I had to find out for myself!
This led me on a search for wholistic approaches to food and lifestyle choices that would nourish my mind, body and spirit. I started a variety of exercise and tried many different diets: gluten-free, low-carb, vegan, vegetarian, super-foods, macrobiotic, Paleo and sugar-free and from each of these I learnt how to listen to my body.This took me to investigate different foods and steered my cooking into more creative and interesting directions.
Fast forward a few years and I have found that a mostly Paleo, gluten-free diet works for me but with some dairy and the occasional grains added in. Along with some other discoveries this has cured my bloating and anxiety! My love for food has never been stronger, my cooking has improved ten fold and I feel the fittest I have ever been. Exercise also plays a huge part in my life and I don’t know where I would be without being able to spin around a pole (I have done pole dancing classes for 6 years), work my ass of at my gym or stretch, breath and be present in yoga and mediation. That is what makes me tick. So what about you?
I hope you enjoy my recipes and reading my blog Healtherella and that you have success with trying the recipes!
You can also find me and my food pursuits on instagram.com/healtherella and facebook.com/Thefeelgoodkitchen
In good health,
Radha xx