Here at The Weekly, we’ve long understood that many of our readers are busy women. They’re working at paid jobs, they have husbands or partners, and they’re flat out all week, trying to get everything done.
They might try to relax and maybe get some exercise on weekends, there’s stuff to do around the house, including running the kids around.
It’s pretty easy for anyone to fall into an unhealthy lifestyle.
We all know we should be eating better, and it would be great to be able to cook good nutritious, delicious meals for the whole family every day, but we don’t always have time.
To that end, it was interesting to have a couple of people from the Eat Fit Food program pop into the office last week.
Eat Fit Food is an all-Australian company that delivers meals to your door. I’m not talking about frozen meals, or takeaways. Eat Fit Food provides fresh meals — oven-baked chicken with field mushrooms, a pea puree and lemon caper dressing, for example — most of which are free of wheat, gluten, red meat, unhealthy fats, refined sugar, and food chemicals.
The meals are delivered to your front door (if you live in a security building, or behind a locked gate, they need a key) in a cooler bag, with an ice brick, a couple of times a week.
The idea isn’t to stay on the program forever, but to give your body a bit of a re-boot, with a Five Day Cleanse, or a 20-Day Detox.
It’s not cheap: a five-day program normally costs $335 (that’s for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for five days, for one person).
The team from Eat Fit Food offered it to me for free (total value for the two adults in our family: $670)
So, how was it?
The food was every bit as nutritious and delicious — and filling — as they said it would be. Here’s an example, from a day taken at random:
Breakfast:
Orange, carrot, apple and lemon juice.
A gluten-free muesli with coconut yoghurt
Lunch:
A nicoise salad with lemon dressing
Afternoon snack:
Rice crackers and a spicy carrot dip
Dinner:
Oven baked ocean trout with field mushrooms and pea puree and asparagus and lemon caper dressing.
I don’t know about you, but if I don’t have the time to puree peas and spice up the carrots and clean up everything afterwards, so it was nice to have such things delivered to the door.
Of course, you could go out and have somebody cook for you, but that’s pretty expensive, and the Eat Fit Food meals were better than just about any restaurant meal you could get for the same price (around $20 per dish.)
Given that Eat Fit Food provided the Five Day Cleanse to my family for free, they naturally want to know if I’d recommend the program, and I definitely would, with some caveats.
My husband said he had more energy, and felt leaner by the end of it, and he’s stuck to some of the principles (eating smaller portions; choosing fresh, whole foods) but here are the caveats:
It’s not for everyone. The Weekly is a national magazine, and Eat Fit Food only delivers to the CBD in Sydney and Melbourne (and surrounding, mostly inner-city suburbs).
It’s fresh, delicious and healthy — but it’s expensive. A 20-day overhaul (breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, for one person) costs $1340. If you had to times that by four, for Mum, Dad and the kids, you could hire a chef for the week, or even go to Byron Bay and eat organic there.
There are a lot of plastic containers inside the cooler bags (one for breakfast, one for lunch, one for dinner, plus the drink bottles and the snack containers) and although they are recyclable, they make you feel guilty about the waste.
One of the things that Eat Fit Food’s customers rave about is not having to plan, shop and cook for a week. We probably didn’t see the real benefit of that, because we have hungry teenagers. Our meals were being delivered, but the kids still had to be fed, so I’m not sure how well the programs work for families.
That said, having fresh meals delivered daily to the door — especially knowing that every meal is perfectly balanced for your good health — was quite marvellous, and if you were single, with a good income, concerned about eating well, and keen to ditch some of the shopping-cooking-and-cleaning-up-afterwards that goes with preparing your meals, Eat Fit Food may well be for you.
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