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A Healthy Take on the Takeaway

By Hannah Louise Murphy

Parents, carers, couples, professionals, commuters. Whatever your situation, we're all juggling busy lives and finding that the work/leisure balance is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve.

Planning, shopping and cooking fresh meals is no exception. Often supermarket ready meals, meal kits and fast food takeaways are the grab and go solution but we know that the additives and preservatives that go into these foods are not good for our long term health.

Buying convenience foods is expensive compared to using fresh ingredients to make meals from scratch. The quality of supermarket ready meals is often an issue too - if you were making a fresh lasagne at home, you wouldn't use artificial food colourings, sodium nitrate, artificial sweeteners and sodium benzoate. Would you?

Constraints due to work and family commitments mean that many of us lack the time and motivation to cook fresh meals that are nutritionally balanced from scratch. There is also confusion about what ingredients we should be buying to maintain our dietary needs and goals - high/low carbohydrates, protein and fat. So we find ourselves visiting the supermarket frequently for 'basket shops' on top of our weekly shop. We end up grabbing other items that are not planned for; savoury snacks, biscuits and cakes and we try to ignore the increasing spending, food waste and packaging that is blowing our already tight food budgets.

The Benefits of a Meal Delivery Service

If you had a broken washing machine, stained carpets or problems with your heating, you would use a service to help if you were too busy or lacked the skill to do it yourself. Using a local company to deliver home-style, fresh meals is helping you in the same way.

"The Food Spa is an affordable home service that gives you a bit of 'time out' from your busy week by giving you a night or two off from cooking."

Working mum of two, East Sussex

Even experienced cooks need a break once in a while. Having meals delivered to your home takes the stress out of planning, shopping and putting away too. The Food Spa has all the classic foodie favourites to choose from including a wide range of vegetarian and vegan friendly dishes. Our meals are labelled with basic nutritional information and also indicate whether the dish has a high or low carbohydrate/protein/calorie content so that you can tailor your choices to specific health and fitness needs.

All meals are freshly prepared and chilled to enable you to control whether you want to eat them, save them or freeze them for another time. The service can also save you money too. One client was astounded by how much her weekly food spending decreased when she ordered family sized meals for five nights. The amount of food waste and packaging also reduces as meals are portioned in accordance to industry guidelines and arrive in simple oven or microwave ready packaging that can be re-used.

Who Uses the Service?

Some of our clients use The Food Spa because they look after elderly and disabled relatives. They find that the service not only helps them to regain precious 'me time' but also gives them peace of mind that their loved ones are eating balanced meals that use quality, locally sourced meat, fish and vegetables.

Richard is a Barrister and his partner David is a financial advisor for a bank in the city. Both commute daily and don't get home until late in the week. They regularly bulk order meals that will tide them over for a week or more and love the fact that the meals are a million miles better that supermarket ready meals because they are fresh, clean and tasty. Both Richard and David confess that they are not great cooks and often lack the energy and enthusiasm to start a meal from scratch. They love the fact that The Food Spa meals are hand-prepared and have that home-cooked taste.

The Food Spa also has weekly meal packages for people who are fitness training. Again, combining work with visits to the gym often means that time is limited to prepare and cook fresh, healthy meals that target specific dietary needs according to your fitness regime. Our Fit Dish range includes meals that are suitable for pre or post training. We also have some hand-prepared snacks to choose from that can boost energy levels mid-afternoon.

Takeaways are a treat - whether it is Indian, Chinese, Thai, Turkish, fish & chips.

We get takeaway food because it saves us cooking food, it saves us washing up and having tasty meals delivered means that you can spend more time enjoying yourself with friends and family.

So what if your concept of 'takeaway' extends to healthy, additive and preservative free home-style meals too?

A healthy take on the takeaway? Now there is an idea.

For more information about our home meal delivery service, please visit our website: www.thefoodspa.co.uk or call us direct on: 01892 670248 | 07500901437