Please please tell me if this is stupid (blog)

[Catladytobe]

Looking for the wisdom of MN here as part of me thinks its stupid and self absorbed (hence the NC in case everyone agrees with this!)

I really want to start a blog or website , possibly with attached Instagram

It would be around the concept of cutting out ulta processed food for my kids sharing recipes etc. Based on my own experience and recipes

In my mind the points for starting it are:

. When I searched for similar content I could find nothing
. There is lots of current interest around UPFs
. I think I can write okish content and the recipes I've created seem to work

Points against:

. I've never done anything similar before and worry I would struggle with the technical side
. I worry that no one would actually be interested
. It sounds pretentious AF 😂

So please MN hivemind , either encourage me to actually do this (tips appreciated) or talk me down from the ledge

P.s I gave ADHD so know I can be impulsive, hence second and third guessing everything I do

I would read it!!! It’s something that a lot of people are getting interested in - I think if it’s done well and with recipes etc it would be really useful. Tried & tested on your kids, costs, why you have done it, some accessible science behind it and your rationale etc - it’s a great idea!
good luck! You could go viral and make millions!

Tested on my 1 kid but she's quite a discerning little madam 😂

I have been reading a lot around UPFs including lots of medical papers as I user to work in a somewhat related industry (chemicals that went into cosmetics instead of food chems)

The research is really concerning to me which is why I decided to make a change but I also found that a lot of the research would be very inaccessible to most parents which is something I would like to see change.

I would focus on the Instagram and reels and have the blog as an extra

You could go viral and make millions!

While I think that's highly unlikely I do think if it's something you want to do for yourself then you should go for it.
You need to think how you'll advertise your blog, how will people find you and what content will keep them engaged and coming back.
Can you take good pictures of the food you make? Visual content is extremely important as most people don't want to just read a wall of text.

Sounds good. I can’t advise on the marketing side, but for credibility it would be good to mention sources (e.g. just refer to it in the video/post with “sources posted in the description/comments”) so that it’s there, but doesn’t detract from the content.

Well it depends for your reasons for doing it, doesn't it?

Nobody is unreasonable to start a blog on a topic they are interested in, linking it to social media or whatever else. If you have fun writing it and find it useful to look back on, then great.

Approaching blogging with the idea that you're going to "go viral" and make an absolute fortune probably is unreasonable.

I also think there are lots of blogs that focus on clean eating, that would be the same sort of thing wouldn't it?

Do it for sure. It might be fun and what's the worst that could happen?

Focus on pushing the insta with the blog/recipes as a kind of extension. Nobody reads blogs any more.

There’s absolutely nothing to lose by starting a blog and doing a bit of writing if you’ve spare time on your hands, but the audience won’t come to you because you’ve posted some recipes up. You need to generate the audience, which is where all the work is. Being a lifestyle blogger is at least as much, if not more, about your PR, marketing and sales as it is writing.

You need to work out what the USP of your blog is. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs about healthy eating, cooking from scratch, cutting out processed foods, natural and plant based eating etc, and without anything in particular putting you to the front as stand-out different, your blog is just going to be another one of those. Some random woman with no particular background in food science or dietetics writing about what she’s learned recently from reading some articles and suggesting healthy UPF-free recipes isn’t going to captivate an audience.

Most successful bloggers, whatever ostensibly their blog is about, are essentially image-crafting a lifestyle. People read their blogs and scroll through their Instas for glimpses into that glossy lifestyle. So really, if your aim is to go viral, that’s what you’re ultimately going to be chasing an audience for.

I think that for me the main motivation would be that I feel unhappy about the amount of unhealthy food pushed on kids and would like there to be an easy and accessible place for parents to get information and make changes if they want to do that.

So while it's not about going viral I guess I would like it to prove useful to some people at least 😂

There's plenty of easy and accessible sites with recipes of easy healthy food for children.

BBC Good Food
Eating Well
Taste AU
Delish
Food Network

Then there's the blogs which are essentially taking the recipes from the food sites, adding some fluff and photos around it and recycling the content.

Do it if you think it will be fun, but be aware that this information is not inaccessible, hard to find nor uncommon.

Do it! If that's what you're interested in and you want to share what you've researched and discovered, there are lots of parents out there who would be very interested.

If you want to make money from it, you need a diifferent approach and need to think about marketing a website/blog

The thing with this when I searched for my own DC is that a lot of them contain UPFs as ingredients or short cuts. There's also not really any information of what ready made or quick snacks are UPFs and what aren't

It's partly because the definition of UFPs are so vague (which is why I've come up with my own common sense divisions based on working with chess and additives in another industry)

A lot of people seem to think it's the same as clean eating (eating only whole foods etc) or making everything from scratch but it's more about avoiding chemical additives or replicators that studies have proved to be harmful

I think it's great when anyone does anything with their creativity.

If nothing else, you'll get a sense of satisfaction from it.

The only thing I would dislike is if you publish false misleading pseudoscience. You can check anything you post against the NHS website as they have more concrete and high-standard evidence for anything they say that anywhere else. If they say a claim you're going to make is inaccurate then please don't include it.

There's plenty of non-flaky stuff you can post about.

To give an example of why a lot of recipe sites recipes aren't as healthy as they seem - an ingredient might just say coconut yogurt

So you go out and buy coconut yogurt

The recipe itself isn't going to tell you which brand to buy or weather the thickening agent within it is a chemical emulsifier or a naturally derived starch

2 different people could follow the same recipe and come up with totally different results in terms of how many additives were included

I want to try to make it more simple by either publishing recipes that don't contain potentially problematic ingredients or by telling parents what to look out for when choosing ingredients

To give a bit more background as to why I'm so interested in this, I myself have a chronic autoimmune health condition that diet can play an important factor in so I first heard of the potential risks and implications of UPFs from my NHS neurologist.

Following on from that I decided that when it cake time to wean my baby DD she was also going to have a UPF intake as low as possible.

This was over 18 months ago so it's almost second nature to me now to know what to buy, what to cook etc. And I didn't really think much of it until more recently when there has been a load more research published, national news coverage, BBC documentaries etc.

Maybe there is more information for parents out there than there was when I started looking for it but I assume there would also be a lot of parents that are worried or getting mixed messages

There are thousands of blogs out there. Quite a few are about healthy food. You can use it as your personal notebook. How do you intend to get famous? Also each country has different brands of things like coconut yogurt, how do you go global?

I started one when the kids went to Uni. They requested a recipe and rather than write the worlds longest text, I stuck it on the blog. It gets about ten hits a week and that is just fine.

I think it sounds interesting, the more conversations we have about upfs the better.

Not sure where you got going global or becoming famous from 😂i don't have the time or know how to even think that far into it and at no point did I say that's what I wanted to do

What did you use to host yours? I'm looking at options now but would prefer something pretty user friendly and easy to set up

@Catladytobe I use Weebly, it is free and very easy.

I'd think a bit more about your kids before you post anything.

How old are they & how will they feel in the future if you've disclosed personal information or used photos of them in your blog etc..?

I think it's fine for you to do it for yourself, but I hate seeing 'mummies' using their kids in this sort of content & find it abusive.

If you keep them anonymous that's different & good luck to you.

i Did this a couple of years ago op and it was great fun and I learnt lots of skills that I’ve since been paid to use.

I only ever write occasionally now, but I am so glad I did it. I say go for it! You can find out everything on Google and YouTube to set it up. It’s a lot of work, but really rewarding.

She's 2 so other than her thoughts and opinions on any food (I.e weather she actually eats it) there wouldn't be much call to feature her in anything currently.

I don't have her photos online at all (not even on my personal Facebook etc.) So I hadn't really given much thought to that aspect but it's very useful to bare in mind especially as she gets older

I agree with all of this.

No one is ever unreasonable to follow a passion in their spare time.

Website builders like Squarespace or Wix make it all super easy. Everyone is on Insta (or TikTok, if you can condense info that much) so focus there.

But have a think first. Do you want to feature your DC with a ‘family friendly’ focus? How much time do you have to create clicks & views? If you don’t get much engagement will you be discouraged? etc.

OP that's a brilliant idea - just start doing it! You sound very relatable already!!

What have you got to lose? I think you would be providing a really useful source of information.

Well done you!