Working out in cooler weather is easy, but when summer sets in, the heat, at times, can discourage even the most motivated fitness buff.
Luckily, you can always head indoors to your favourite gym to stick to your exercise routine in order to keep yourself in trim.
But fitness isn’t necessarily just about visiting the gym or being active; diet and what goes into the body you are trying to look after is just as important.
Right Bite are based in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and pride themselves on being a “specialised centre for expert nutritional consultation”, offering gourmet healthy meals and promoting sensible eating in the UAE.
Nathalie Haddad, the founder and managing director of Right Bite, is a dietician who has been working in the UAE for 12 years. She speaks to Sport360° about the benefits of leading a healthier lifestyle.
Tell us about Right Bite…
Right Bite is a healthy nutrition and catering company that was established in Dubai in 2004. We focus on personalised nutrition programmes for individuals based on their requirements.
We prepare the food fresh in our kitchen daily and deliver it fresh to individuals based on their requirements and lifestyles, so at their home, office, wherever they want. We design programmes to suit people’s needs. FuelUp is one of the many programmes that we have under our umbrella.
It is designed specifically for those people that excercise and are athletes. It has a higher market protein with moderate carbohydrates to give them the requirements they need while exercising. We personalise the programmes for whether they want to lose weight or maintain or increase muscle mass.
What foods do you think people need to eat in order to train?
Depending on how much you train, whether it’s three times a week or six times a week, then your req-uirements will change in terms of the amount of protein and calories you need. Obviously, a well balanced diet and not deferring from a healthy diet. In terms of the variety of food it’s just being in line with a healthy, well balanced diet with lean proteins, complex carbohydrates, vegetables and fibre.
Where do you think people exercising go wrong with their choice of food?
People overestimate how much food they need for the amount of training they’re doing. So people go for an hour and think that allows them to overeat because they train so much. Yet that one hour of activity is not actually that much. Especially in an environment like Dubai where, other than that one activity, they’re not really that active. It’s not really a walking city. People especially overestimate how much protein they need. They eat far too much meat.
What are the ideal foods to eat in the hot weather?
The main thing, obviously, is to keep hydrated. Eating a lot more fresh vegetables, fruit, salads is good but the main thing is to keep well hydrated. Drink fresh water. The main thing to watch out for in the summer is the high sugar drinks. Many people try to cool off with juice or energy drinks and all these high caloric beverages. Try to avoid those.
Whether you’re eating a big meal a few hours before or a small snack right before your training session, what would you recommend?
It has to be a well balanced meal, so if you’re having a meal, it should be a source of lean proteins, complex carbohydrates and vegetables. Grilled fish with steamed brown or mixed rice with vegetables or grilled salmon with vegetables and rice. If it’s a snack it has to have protein and carbohydrates. It could be a yoghurt or a piece of fruit, or raw almonds and fruit.
You design customised meal packages. What are some of the most popular options?
Honestly, we have so many different choices. On our menus you have a choice of four items for breakfast, five items for a morning snack, five items for lunch, five items for dinner and they change every single day.
Our menus only repeat for a month and cater to people’s taste buds. You’ll find all types of cuisine on our menus. European, Italian, Emirati, Arabic, Asian etc. There’s an endless selection.
Right Bite’s existed for 10 years. What prompted you to start?
There was a lot of demand in the people I used to see as clients. They would say to us ‘OK, you tell us what to eat and eat healthy but I don’t have time to prepare it, I don’t know what to eat’. Hence there was a demand for us and we were the first such company to start in the region.
The Middle East has the highest prevalence of diabetes in the world, accounting for four of the worst 10 countries. The country also reportedly spends Dh25 billion a year on fighting diabetes… how big a problem is this?
Yes, it’s a big problem. We’re a team of five dieticians that counsel people and we deal a lot with diabetes. We encounter a lot of Type 2 diabetes in children due to lifestyle factors relating to diet and exercise. We see a lot more diabetes in children and of course prevention is key. You have to make sure you’re eating properly and exercising.
You’ve just broken new ground in opening a Right Bite restaurant in Dubai….
We’ve just launched the restaurant a month ago, based in JLT Cluster J. We deliver on demand which is a selection of our favourite dishes.
We have a specific menu where you can call and order a meal but you don’t have to go on the programme. You can just get the meal, breakfast, lunch, dinner or a snack in the afternoon.
It’s a delivery service and you have all the nutrition information on the menu, which shows you how much calories, protein and carbohydrates each meal contains.
The feedback’s been very good. It gives individuals an option to trial our meals and then they can either continue ordering from the menu or if they want the wider variety, the pre-planned options and the customisation, they can go on to the programmes. Or vice versa. If you get bored of the programme but want to keep eating healthily, you have the option of ordering in a healthy meal any time of day.
Will you open more restaurants in the future?
Yes, that’s our plan. The one right now caters to the area around JLT but we deliver all the way to Mall of the Emirates or Ibn Battuta Mall. Now we’re looking to open up other hubs later down the line elsewhere.
To learn more visit www.right-bite.com, or follow them on facebook.com/MyRightBite.
Right Bite is offering a sizzling-hot deal this summer with its FuelUp programme.
