We all start from different places along the continuum of health. If you’re asked to count how many different fruits and vegetables you eat in any one day and you have to include potato chips and tomato sauce (also known as fries and ketchup) to get any kind of reasonable number (well, any reasonable number over two!), the bad news is that you’re being very naughty. The good news, though, is that a few small changes will add up to a huge improvement.

And, as anything that’s simple is easier to implement than complex solutions, a good starting place is to go to the supermarket and look around the fruit and vegetable department. Pick four fruits that you can eat exactly as they come (apples, mandarines, bananas, pears, grapes) or ones that need a knife to peel or cut (oranges, melons, kiwifruit, pineapple). Decide to eat fruit for breakfast. If you’re always on the run in the morning, choose the easy options for fruit you can take with you and munch on the way. If you have a steadier pace, you can sit and cut your fruit as you eat it.

You might want to still have the kind of breakfast you’ve been eating up until now. Easy. Have a piece of fruit first and then a little less of whatever it is that you usually eat.

That’s the fruit sorted. For the vegetables, it depends on how much cooking you do. If you don’t like to cook, even a simple salad can add a whole heap of vegetables to your day (lettuce, cucumber, grated carrot and a couple of favourite salad fruits thrown in like avocado, tomato and lush grapes). You can add different vegetables to the mix as you become more adventurous. Try it this week. Wherever you’re starting from, add a few more fruit and vegetables to your day.

Starting can be the biggest challenge for any of our undertakings. We think about it, we talk about it, but sometimes we simply don’t do much. Yet overcoming this inertia is much easier than we might think. The secret is to change something that’s part of our inbuilt day-to-day living. The next question is: What should I change first? The answer: The easiest thing.

For you, that might be simply drinking more water. Put the amount of water you want to drink that day into a container (or more than one if you need to) and plan to drink as much as you can as early in the day as possible. If I’m not more than halfway through my water by morning tea time I find it a real struggle to consume my planned quota. My way of dealing with that is to drink water first thing in the morning. Sometimes I have a cup of tea first, but often the first glass of water is drunk even before I’m properly awake. A mug of hot water instead of tea some time during the day is another way to get the pure water down.

Or if you decide you want to eat more fruit, perhaps you’ll decide to have a piece of fruit instead of baked goods with morning tea. Morning tea then becomes the trigger for eating fruit.

Decide what you’re going to change first and do the one thing that’s required before the action can take place. If it’s to drink more water, find your container now, fill it and put it in a designated place that will remind you to do some serious slurping during the day. If it’s taking fruit to work, pack it in your bag or make a trip to the store to buy a supply.

Doing the simple things to set yourself up for putting your decision into action makes the action itself easier and more intuitive. Simple changes can be powerful. So it comes down to three steps: Commit, prepare, act. And of course, start now.

In some ways, it was hard to start from where I am today. It was a difficult decision that there would be no quick diet—no diet at all!—to regain the svelte body shape my rational brain insisted I needed to have before I even thought about creating this website. So at this moment I’m nowhere near perfect. Every day I eat something that’s not on my list of great foods. I drink wine. Occasionally I polish off a piece of chocolate (sort of inhale the whole block, actually). That makes me somewhat less than a great role model for a healthy lifestyle. So, how dare I even think of writing about the subject? When I’m not exactly the best advertisement in the world? When I don’t really look the part?

Because this isn’t about what we look like. This is about what we are made of. Good quality plant food and some protein versus calorie-charged, nutrition-poor rubbish. This is about making better choices, and we can do that from whatever spot we’re presently residing on along the health continuum. Eventually we will look better. Weight will stabilise. Skin will improve. The mind will start to work without brain fog. Physical energy will return.

This isn’t about looking up to people who know it all and who have it all under control. This is about being real humans who are changing the way they eat for the better, one bite at a time. Mostly this is for the ones who’ve gone astray, like me. Anyone who’s made it, yay, you’re perfect. Go away. You don’t need this.

The thing is, I’ve had this knowledge for years. But you know what? Knowledge without action is pointless. So this site is a call to action. The knowledge isn’t hard to come by, once you peel back the many layers of self-interested businesses, clueless governments and well meaning but wrong practitioners. Really, it’s pretty intuitive.

Eat more vegetables. Eat less rubbish. (Rubbish doesn’t really need defining. Deep down, we all know what’s good and what’s not.) If you do that every single day, even the smallest change at a time, you can start from the worst place in the world and pretty soon you’ll have fantastic eating habits.

How hard is that, really? You just have to keep your eye on the ball, and the ball is … vegetables. Fruit.  Real food from real plants. Fresh vegetables, simply prepared. Easy to shop for. No reading miniscule small print. No agonising over different brands, sugar and sodium content. No agonising at all, really.

When I get home from shopping and I unpack chocolate and lollipops (how did they get in my trolley?) as well as my bags of fruit and vegetables, seeds, meat and dairy, I know I’m not perfect and my diet isn’t either. But I comfort myself with the knowledge that I came from a place far, far worse and now, at least, vegetables make up a huge proportion of what I eat.