The longer I live, the more I become a firm believer that many of us are taking some huge strides in the wrong direction with food.

I love food. I love it so much I toy with the idea of becoming vegan just to play with vegan dishes, to be paleo so I can try some of their more outrageous ideas for desserts, to be anything other than what I am so I can live in a different skin, even just for the time I’m reading their fabulous, sometimes preposterous recipes.

But as I have aged I have come to the stunning realisation that although I love my chia and maca, my inca inchi and camu camu, and as full of some essential fatty acid or trace element or protein or vitamin that they may be, none of this eminently fashionable, specialist stuff is actually going to help us much in the long run unless we have a truly balanced diet.

Balance. Just the word smacks of tipping points and unexpected dives when the status quo is not maintained. Yet when you think of it, balance is something that we all must accomplish. We should admire it. We should passionately pursue it.

Think, for a moment, of balance in this way: A balanced viewpoint. That’s when someone has carefully weighed the pros and cons, They’ve educated themselves on the subject. They’ve thought deeply about it. Now consider a balance beam. Four inches of death-defying horizontal hardness where gymnasts can do amazing feats as long as they comply with the laws of gravity and respect the unforgiving nature of the beam.

It seems to me that balance is what many of us lack. We don’t have a balanced viewpoint with regard to our food.

I’ve read of former paleo eaters who have become vegans. I’ve also read of strict vegans who because of health isssues have later embraced a more paleo lifestyle. To me, that doesn’t mean that they’ve changed sides to be with the winning team—just that they weren’t balanced enough in the first place.

I am absolutely sure that we as a human race can survive just fine if we embrace the more natural aspects of a paleo diet. I’m also sure we could do quite well on mostly vegan fare. But I believe we will thrive, not by denying ourselves any food group but by making better choices within every food group.

And I say this, not as a guru or a teacher or as someone who in any way sets themself above others. I say this with the benefit of imbibing a chocolate bar and a glass of wine most days. I believe that if you include a lot of what does you good, you should be able to also include some of those things that might not be particularly healthy but do make you happy.

It seems there’s nothing sexy about the moderate approach. If you’re not vegan or paleo or at least left wing or right wing in the food stakes (pun!), you’re not interesting and you’re definitely not trying hard enough.

I disagree. If you eat nutritionally rich foods and you ‘do’ moderate well enough, you can get away with a few diet sins for the whole of your life. Your healthy life.

When I started searching for what might be the ideal diet, I looked at a broad spectrum of diets with as open a mind as I could manage. (I know we all have deeply seated beliefs that are hard to budge, but I tried.) I would read about others’ experiences and wonder if theirs was the optimal approach even though a lot of the food that they proposed wasn’t exactly food as our forefathers had known it. I don’t know how they thought neanderthal man actually survived (yes, even thrived) on the only choices he had available.

And lest you paleo types get too much pleasure from that last sentence, neanderthal man didn’t have protein shakes, supplements, clarified butter or the hundred and one non-natural things that you seem to think makes up a paleo lifestyle. Hello, neanderthal man. Have you even HEARD of some of the things that your latter-day brethren are consuming?

I aspire to be a moderationist. As a bit of a gourmand, I aspire especially to be moderate in the amount I eat. And not to swing too far to the left or the right, but to eat the highest quality food from all food groups. As I said, I love reading vegan and paleo ideas of what food should encompass. But I believe that by taking the best and most natural recipes from both camps rather than embracing either, I’ll be waaaaay ahead. Thanks guys.

Imagine a fantasy window. As you look through the clear panes you see a world of clarity, of brilliant colours, of happiness. The window magically becomes larger and lower and in that exact nanosecond you could simply pass through it to embrace this new world. Then, just for a moment, you look back. To see how far you’ve come. Perhaps to say goodbye to the world you’ve known. And when you turn again, the window is fading, getting smaller and drifting further away.

You don’t have to believe in magic to believe in windows of opportunity. They might not have physical form but there is no doubt that they exist. There is a time when a certain action is going to succeed. There is an idea whose time has come. There is a product that is perfect for the world at that particular moment.

Many people find that these strategic windows work for sleeping. When you have reached a certain point of tiredness, if you go to bed straight away you will sleep like a baby. If you wait up any longer, it could take hours after you go to bed to fall asleep.

This surely is also the situation with making better health choices. There is a time when you are excited about making a change, when you feel powerful and you are totally in the moment. Fresh. The idea has its own life, its own energy. That is the time to effect change. Not days or weeks later when your supply of chips runs out, you’ve used up the last packet of cigarettes or your alcohol stores are diminished. The idea of not seizing the moment because you don’t want to waste this stuff is ludicrous. It’s garbage and it would be better if it were consigned to the rubbish bin right away.

These little windows of opportunity are when the action following the thought seems easy, doable, right. It’s like you’re in a breezeway with the wind behind you. But once the moment is gone, the window is no longer wide open and every step is so much harder. Suddenly you’re battling against a headwind.

So when one of these moments of rightness comes along, it can be powerful enough to help you make even the most momentous change. Grab the magic with both hands and an attitude of gratitude as you enjoy the power-assisted ride. And be diligent. These moments don’t appear all that often.

Back to the 80/20 Theory, with a different take on it. Last time it was 80 per cent good food and 20 per cent all the other stuff. This time, let’s consider 80/20 from the plant food perspective, or even more specifically, from the vegetable/fruit perspective.

If we could eat 80 per cent of our food as vegetables and fruit (in that order, I’m thinking)—and consumed the very best quality we could afford—the remaining 20 per cent would be made up of such foods as seeds and nuts, legumes, meat, selected grains and dairy. So we can pretty much sidestep the whole vegan versus non-vegan question as we’d all be at least 80 per cent vegan anyway. (Of course, I’m talking about health and not animal rights here. Also, it must be remembered that a vegan diet isn’t necessarily a healthy one. You can be vegan and eat all sorts of packet and canned rubbish.) Our health, if we stuck to vegetables and fruit for the majority of our food, would blossom—no matter what combination of food we ate the other 20 per cent of the time.

I don’t subscribe to the idea that eating this kind of diet is hugely more expensive than the regular diet of the vast majority. I think if you have cut out crappy fast food, bakery goods, alcohol, carbonated drinks, sugary treats and the like, you will find you have quite sufficient money to buy all that you could need in the line of vegetables and fruit. The seeds and nuts, grassfed meat and ancient grains are a different story, but they’re only 20 per cent of the diet and they’re worth paying more for, in my opinion.

Money saving measures also come in handy. If you buy your fruit and vegetables in season you save more and arguably your body will thank you for giving you the right foods at the right time. If you are happy to cook and freeze in bulk, glut periods for fruit and vegetables become a great opportunity to stock up on food when prices are down. Growing your own is another way to save money and of course have control over what is or isn’t sprayed on your food.

If the large majority of our diet came from fresh, wholesome food that started life above the ground or under it rather than in a manufacturing plant and if our food still looked like it did when first picked off the tree or plucked from the bush or dug from the ground, I believe we would have an incredibly healthier population. Many of the diseases that plague the developed world would cease to be such a threat to our health. And we would feel better. Less dragging ourselves through life with myriad aches and pains, let alone life-sapping chronic conditions, and more feeling strong, healthy and a whole lot happier because of it.