Happy New Year - The Gym Kitchen

 Apologies for the very late Happy New Year message. Had a really bad chest infection, which left me really poorly unfortunately. I am now fully on the mend, and thought that my post for this week should be about getting back to the swing of things again. 

Now that we are in the year 2022 this is a great opportunity to try new things, take on new challenges, especially with getting back on the healthy lifestyle. As I was sick last week I was really struggling to cook hardly any food at all. I quickly went to the supermarket and bought like 5 boxes of ready meals from the same brand, which I am going to discuss further here. It was on offer for 4 for £10. This is great if you are single, however if there are more people in the household then this is something I do not recommend, as this is not cost effective method for a meal. I will be doing quick, and easy meals for the month to show how easy this can be. Going back to my topic I bought these, as I was poorly to cook for that week. The meals that I bought, as I mentioned before were all from the same brand called the Gym Kitchen. I love the pictures, logos and anything that draws me to the product. I felt drawn to this, as I liked the pictures of people in their exercise gear, all from different shapes, sizes. The people in particular were from different minority backgrounds, which is a huge plus from me. 

On their aisles there was a range of different products, including Peri Peri chicken, Harissa Chicken, as well as beef chilli. I then started looking at the nutritional label for each of the products. The picture I have attached below was for the beef chilli. I first of all looked at the ingredients list at the back of the product.  The first few ingredients are mainly rice and a variety of vegetables. This is great because this can be classed as 1 of your five a day, which would be the broccoli. I would also count the sweetcorn as well , that would be another 1 of your five fruit and vegetables a day. I would like to comment as well that the rice is brown rice. Brown rice contains a higher amount of Fibre than white rice, and is a better alternative to have. I then looked at the front of the packet. It states that it is high in protein. That is right because of the beef, beef contains a high amount of protein. It then stated that it contains 2 portions of fruit and vegetables a day, as I have explained before there is enough broccoli and sweetcorn to confirm that there is a high amount of these two vegetables, to state that claim. Finally on the traffic light system it states that for the nutrients for fat, saturated fat and sugar, the colours were all green. Green means that the nutrient contains a low amount of that product. This is a great point, as excess amounts of fat, especially saturated fat can affect our heart health.  For salt however the colour was amber. This means that the amount of salt was not low enough but it was also not high. The reason for this was because of the beef, as the beef would have pushed the amount of salt to the colour amber. The product was also perfect, it did not completely pack the container, I felt full, but at the same I was not stuffed, which is definitely a bonus. To feel stuffed is not ideal either, as this can put pressure on our stomachs to digest our food, and this can also be a sign that we have overeaten. When we overeat we consume extra calories that we need to, which then converts to fat. 

I really enjoyed the meals, it was tasty, it did not take long to cook in the microwave, and all the vegetables tasted nice.  I will be trying other meals in the range to explore other options. I have had a quick look at their Instagram page, and website. It really has some great positive messages , have a read on their about us section. I have put their links below. 

The Gym Kitchen

Instagram