Each day of Raising Plates Week introduces a simple theme, reflection or action to help you rethink what’s on your plate.

You can take part in as much or as little as you like — even one small action counts.   The details of the reflections and resources for each theme can be found below…

Raising Plates is a new national campaign by RaisingNutrition. It’s about better food and healthier futures, one plate at a time — raising knowledge and encouraging simple changes to help shift habits, environments and food cultures.

This first Raising Plates Week marks the start of the wider campaign.

Taking Part

You don’t need any special preparation to take part in Raising Plates Week. Each theme includes a short explanation and a simple reflection or activity that takes just a few minutes.

Whether you’re joining as an individual, a team or an organisation, Raising Plates Week is designed to be flexible, inclusive and easy to fit into everyday routines.

• Takes 3–5 minutes a day
• Judgement-free
• Suitable for individuals and workplaces

For ‘Fuel Your Plate’, the goal is to reflect on how you fuel yourself currently and understand a little more about how this may be affecting your energy levels, mood and focus.   Begin to think about a way you could improve how you fuel yourself throughout the day.

Food plays a key role in our energy, mood and how we function, yet many of us rarely pause to notice the connection.

Today’s invitation is simple:

• Notice your energy patterns
• Reflect on how food may be supporting (or challenging) them
• Explore one small change that feels achievable that you can make to fuel your plate better

Explore the short and simple How do you fuel your plate? quiz, via the link below, to get thinking about your current eating  patterns, and the impact they may be having

Raising Plates is about building knowledge and starting where you are.

For Balance Your Plate, the goal is to reflect on whether your plates offer a balanced approach to better food.  It’s important for us to have nourishing, good quality sources of carbohydrates, proteins and fats; and eating a variety of whole, minimally processed foods can help ensure we are getting the right balance of nutrients.  Our busy lives can often make this feel difficult – be realistic and  focus on progress, not perfection.

Raising standards doesn’t mean getting everything right, it means finding balance that works in real life.

Today’s reflection encourages you to consider:

• What helps meals feel satisfying and balanced?
• Where could a small adjustment make a difference?
• Could adding something be easier than taking something away?
• Identify some simple strategies to help you to balance your plate better

Explore our ‘Balance Your Plate: The Great Plate Swap’ interactive slides, via the link below, to see some example simple lunch swaps. (Note: This works best on a laptop or desktop screen, rather than mobile)

For ‘Colour Your Plate’, the focus is on building knowledge around the benefits of eating a range of colourful fruits and vegetables.  The different colours in plants signify different ‘phytochemicals’ that help protect those plants, and offer benefits to us when we eat them too, including anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties, helping us to age better and reducing the risk of chronic diseases.

Eating a range of colourful fruit and vegetables is a simple way to encourage and enable a variety of micronutrients and nourishment, and adding in new colour can raise the quality of what’s on a plate.

Today’s focus:

• Noticing variety and different colours across meals
• Spotting what’s missing
• Explore easy ways to add different colours to your days

Take part in Colour Your Plate and download the PDF resource, via clicking on the button below, offering brief insights into the importance of each colour and a weekly checklist to make sure you are eating a rainbow.

Small changes regularly can make a big difference over time.

Food supports more than energy,  it provides the building blocks for our bodies and our brains; supporting growth, development recovery and how our body communicates with itself.  What we eat  and drink can significantly affect our mood,  focus, concentration and performance.

What we eat can affect how our brains function – on a daily basis and in the longer term.  If we want to perform well, whether that is physically, cognitively or both, eating the right types of foods and adding some brain-friendly nutrients into our meals can help.  What we drink can have a big impact too!

Today’s reflection invites you to think about:

• When you feel most focused
• What supports your brain on busy days
• How food fits into your performance and wellbeing
  

Watch our short video (5 mins) below to help you understand or refresh your thinking on some of the nutrients that can hekp to power your day, and foods they are in.

No time for a video, or want something you can print?  Download a PDF summary too..

This theme should follow Themes 1-4 , or a selection of these. 

The earlier activties and resources were designed to encourage thinking about current habits and approaches to food, provide new insights and/or knowledge refreshers around what is better food and what can we do to provide better balance – and to give some initial ideas on simple changes that can be made regularly to support better health, wellbeing and performace.   

Theme 5, the last theme, is focused on reflecting back on all of this, and asks you to identify a specific change or changes that are realistic and achievable for you.  We then ask you to pledge to make these changes openly. – if we tell people and write goals down, we are more likely to make the change! 

 This is a moment to pause and reflect:

• What stood out this week?
• What small change feels the most achievable?
• What’s one thing you’d like to put in place or continue?

Raising Plates is about raising standards over time, through knowledge, simple actions and shared responsibility.

Simply click the link below and press the green plus (+) button to add a pledge to the Raising Plates Wall of what you are going to do to build better plates and start healthier food habits.

This week is just the beginning…

Raising Plates Week is the starting point of the Raising Plates campaign, which will continue to grow over time. Following this week, more resources will be developed to support organisations and communities to build healthier food cultures. Please sign up to our newsletter above if you want to stay in touch on news about the campaign.

If you’re interested in sponsoring, partnering or learning more as the campaign develops, we’d love to hear from you.  Please email hello@raisingnutrition.org or use the ‘Get in Touch’ form at the bottom of the page.

Let’s raise what’s on our plates.

Join the movement. Share your plate. Raise your plate.

Please share your reflections, pledges and changes to your plates. 

#RaisingPlates