Forget the BBQ and beer-swiggin’ cliché, our friends in Oz are killing it in the wellness stakes. Here’s how to live healthy like some of the country’s biggest names in food, fitness and feeling good.
1. Make a meal out of breakfast
There are few things more decadent than making a total fuss over your first meal of the day. The Aussies have got the formula down, and we’re starting to wake up and smell the avocado-on-toast too; with Ex-Pat chef Bill Granger’s relaxed brunches at his London restaurant Granger & Co attracting round-the-block queues.
To do it DIY, lose the sugary pastries and the joyless post-indulgence calorie count of the Parisian offering. A Sydney-style brunch is low on refined sugar and starchy carbs and heavy on the good fats. For an edible two fingers up to the January blues, sautée kale in coconut oil (proven to up your levels of healthy HDL cholesterol in the blood) and serve with boiled eggs rolled in sesame seeds and smoked paprika.
2. Get a sunshine workout (without leaving your living room).
The weather outside is frightful, but that’s no excuse not get your body moving. Need a little motivation? Look no further than Kayla Itsines, the 23-year-old fitness trainer from Adelaide, whose Bikini Body Training Guide has earned her over 1.9 million followers on Instagram: @kayla_itsines. Thanks to the power of Google Hangout, Healthy powered through one of her super efficient HIIT sessions, live from Australia, wearing Lorna Jane fitness wear; the sweat-in brand de rigeur for healthies Down Under, which has just launched in House of Fraser.
Read more: Healthy’s HIIT workoutAfter just half an hour spent doing burpees, mountain climbers, jump squats, straight-leg sit ups, jackknives ab-bikes and tuckjumps, we were done, and shattered. Now it’s your turn! Click here to try Kayla’s workout for yourself.
3. Shift your perspective
Madeleine Shaw, nutritionist to the likes of Millie Mackintosh and author of feel-good foodie manual Get the Glow, which will be published in April 2015, told Healthy it was the approach to wellbeing she picked up whilst working in an Organic café in Sydney that helped her beat bulimia, and learn to accept herself.
‘Since school there was so much emphasis on being thin and I was convinced that would make me happy. When I moved to Sydney, I fell in love with the whole attitude that being healthy is a lifestyle, not a diet,’ she explains. ‘We’re so cruel to ourselves, always feeling like we’re not good enough – but there I learnt to stop giving myself a hard time, to chill out, and just enjoy life in the moment.’
Pre-order your copy of Get the Glow here.
4. Refresh your Instagram feed
Was cutting down on the sweet stuff one of your New Year’s resolutions? Keep on track by following author of the I Quit Sugar cookbooks, Sarah Wilson and her team @iquitsugar.
They serve up super-healthy foodie inspiration and loads of tips for living with less sugar. Like this one: ‘Bin the low fat products that manufacturers take the fat out of and then put sugar back into. Mayonnaise, for example – the low fat version is so much sweeter and more fattening than the regular one.’
Read More: Sarah Wilson’s guide to beating your sugar cravings5. Pinch a paleo principle
Don’t worry, we don’t think you need to end your love affair with lentils to eat a nutritious, balanced diet; but some tenets of the paleoithic or ‘caveman’ diet – which is huge Down Under – are worth listening to.
‘Eat food which can speak for itself,’ says chef, TV presenter and bestselling author of Paleo Every Day (Macmillan, £12) Pete Evans, himself a convert to the high-protein, high-veg, grain-few diet. ‘You cook a piece of fish, and straight away it has a beautiful flavour; same for broccoli, or a Brussel’s sprout. Compare that to oats, pasta or bread, which without anything added, are the most boring foods in the world. It’s much easier to eat a cleaner, nutritious diet when it’s based on stuff that actually tastes good!’
Can’t argue with that…
Who’s your favourite Aussie health hero? Tweet and tell us @healthymag
Photography from Lorna Jane Activewear