So you’ve heard that three’s a crowd and somehow you’ve allowed that saying to rule your choices on how many different vegetables you eat in any one day?

Well, I’m here to say I believe that three’s a minimum, not a crowd. The English used to have meat and three veg for dinner (back in the days when everybody ate vegies!). Let’s at least eat three veg at every meal. If you eat a decent meal including plant food twice a day, that makes six vegetables. If you add a fresh fruit and vegie smoothie to your day, you can easily bump it to nine.

Now that’s more like it.

Sometimes when I’ve had a great salad (including seeds and cottage cheese) for lunch I still want something else. Something sweet and sinful. Something chocolate, usually. So I have it. I don’t have the avocado and cacao mix with stevia and chia. I unwrap the naughty stuff and I enjoy it. Then I put the wrapper in the bin and I don’t worry about it, knowing I’m doing more for my health than I ever have before. I don’t want to be a freak who can’t eat a bar of chocolate without berating myself or talking about what it did to my blood sugar levels or insulin or how it’s set me back in my quest to perfect health or whatever.

When you’re eating more and more good stuff, the other makes up such a small proportion of your diet that I believe it truly won’t impact on your health. Is this a cop-out? Excusitis for sinning? Maybe. But I don’t want to be one of those people who reduces and reduces the ‘acceptable’ foods to ridiculous levels. I want to eat whatever I feel like eating. But I want to do that responsibly, so I concentrate my efforts on eating very, very well. And the rest, the other 20 per cent of the time, I can eat whatever I feel like. Nothing is out of bounds. Ever.