The Power of Gut-Healthy Foods: My Path to Better Nutrition with Nourished and Refuelled

My name is Tim and I’m the Director of Nourished and Refuelled Ltd which is a nutritious food catering business. I’m on a journey to live a better, healthier life, by eating more gut-healthy and nutritious food. Nourished and Refuelled’s mission is quite simply to help people, eat well, eat wise and eat nutritious food. As a keen runner and a chef, I understand how important it is to cook with well-sourced and good-quality whole foods. I feel that this is important to live the best possible life. My aim is to educate, demonstrate and provide people with nutritious and gut-healthy food and recipe ideas, through social media platforms. I want them to be able to follow me on my journey to get ideas to help them live a healthier life. The core of my business is to provide people with thoughtfully prepared nutritious breakfast bowls, buddha bowls, soups, hotpots, dips, snacks and energy bars and balls. All my food is vegan and gluten free which allows as many people to enjoy my nutritious food as possible. My food is also free of any seed oils or any extra preservatives you find in ultra-processed foods. My food is honest and clean allowing the body to enjoy and soak up all the right nutrients and will suit everyone who is looking for a better wellness lifestyle.

As the old saying goes you are what you eat. I think this is very true. Over the last few years, it is clear people have become very conscious about what they put in their bodies, and this is very much the case for me personally. I haven’t always been a clean eating health-conscious person but over the years and as I get older this has been very much at the forefront of my mind. Growing up my mum would always provide me with a well-balanced nutritious dinner which included meat or fish, veg and carbohydrates. So, the groundwork was there instilling that eating nutritious food was an important part of being fit and healthy.

However, as the teenage years and early 20s hit my own food choices came and peer pressure arrived. Seeing friends eating what seemed like better tasting but unhealthy foods like McDonald's, kebabs, chips, fried breakfasts, processed meats, sweets with e-numbers, the list goes on. As a young person this didn’t seem unusual and ‘it’s what everyone else was doing’ which even included drinking and smoking. I guess when you are young you think you are invincible, and you can eat and drink what you want, and you’ll be fine. However, there came a point when I hit a wall and realised this wasn’t the case and I realised I had become unfit, and my body could no longer cope with the junk I was putting inside my body. Hence you are what you eat. When I eat unhealthily, I become unhealthy, which leaves me feeling tired and sluggish and struggling with my mental health. In one very big life-changing moment I realised I needed to get fit again in order to battle and overcome issues with my mental health.

This didn’t start with food it started with running. After realising I had become overweight, I felt was not healthy I was determined to do something about this so I put my running shoes on and got out there in the fresh air. Before I knew it, I was entering 10ks, half marathons and then full marathons.

Along with taking up running, I started to look at nutrition. To achieve good results meant looking after my body and eating the right foods. This was a journey in itself.

Over the years I had always suffered bowel issues which had included a constant sore tummy and I had always put this down to a poor diet and the doctor put it in the general ‘IBS’ category rather than getting to the root of the issue and I was just given various tablets to help it keep it at bay. I always felt that there was something causing it but I didn’t know what. After taking more notice of what I was eating and trying to eat better I started to recognise how food made me feel and recognised that dairy was the issue, which all made sense because whenever I had large amounts of cheese or a bowl of macaroni cheese the results were not good! Once I started cutting dairy out things started to improve.

With one part of my dietary issues resolved, I started to take a lot more of an interest in what I was putting in my body and became aware that to maintain good fitness for running I needed to eat the right foods to fuel it. I believe good fitness and wellbeing are not just achieved by pounding the streets, pedalling along or lifting weights, it’s also achieved through eating the right things to help fuel the activity and help the recovery process so eating the right proteins, carbs and vitamins is crucial in all aspects of achieving the best results.

As time has gone on my diet has changed a lot most dramatically within the last 2 years which I guess has come with better understanding of gut and immune health and the loss of a family member to cancer. I now make sure that my weekly veg intake is sufficient in order to get enough fibre and vitamins into my diet, I include plenty of seeds into my diet to get the omega 3 my body needs, I am consuming a range of fermented foods including, kimchi, sourdough bread, kombucha and miso. Most importantly I no longer eat any ultra-processed foods or processed meat. I also try to limit the amount of seed oils I consume which can prove tricky when eating out, but I never use any in my own cooking. I also reflect all these habits into the food I cook for my business which I know all my customers appreciate.

On a final thought on my opening blog post, I feel we are living in a society where people are desperately trying to change their nutrition habits but just not quite there yet. It's not helped by the fact that there are so many products on the supermarket shelves that claim to be health foods but are in fact, just very misleading, i.e. the inclusion of seed oils and refined sugars and other hidden ingredients. It is my mission to educate as many people as possible that it is possible to have a well-balanced nutritious diet and investing in these so-called health foods is absolutely avoidable by simply making food from scratch at home or buying from trusted sources – like Nourished and Refuelled!

Tim Yeomans, Founder of Nourished and Refuelled

@nourishedandrefuelled
Nutritious Food Caterer
Healthy food blogger
Nutritious gut healthy recipes