There is something addictive about listening to how other people ‘do’ health. As a member of FMTV, I view all kinds of videos by all kinds of experts … experts who sometimes have differing opinions right down to the basics.

It is a great service and I’m sure I have learned a lot. What I have not done is put it into practice. There is a seething morass of conflicting ideas swirling around my being.

I can spend hours looking up recipes, reading blogs by eminent doctors and nutritionists who, even if they’re not perfectly right (how can they all be?), really know their stuff.

But there comes a time when all this has to stop. When you have to put your available energy into the actual doing, rather than looking at it all as an outsider, albeit with the best of intentions. So for a little while I am calling a moratorium on new information, new recipes, new ideas. I don’t know it all, but for the moment I know enough. Enough to make a difference to my own health and that of  those I love. Enough to make a start and keep the momentum going. Enough to be going on with.

So I am going to resist the addictive behaviour of always looking for the expert who is perfectly right, the recipe that has all the right ingredients and will work to perfection every time, the information that will easily help me to make better decisions.

Sometimes it’s not all that easy. That’s why you have to put your new energy into it. I call it ‘new’ because the energy you need for some things is unadulterated, never-been-used-before stuff. Not watered down from reading other people’s thoughts and experiencing life secondhand through them.

I suppose that also means this is now not a weekly column because the bit of energy I put into talking about health here, I need to put into doing. Not so much talking, writing, wishing, wondering. Doing. Choosing the one verb with the most ability to help make vibrant health a reality. Doing that leads to being—a very powerful state.

I have read a lot. I have talked a lot. The information swirling around in my head will refine itself if I give it a rest from new input. Inside, I have all the knowledge I need—perhaps even considerably more than I truly require—and now it is time to allow it to settle and separate out into something that makes perfect sense to me. In doing so it will become powerful in a way that resonates deeply with me and changes both my inward and outward life.

I remember thinking once that I should write a book on simplifying. (Maybe it was going to help me to actually do it.) I was going to call it—wait for it—decomplication. I think that’s a sad reflection of both my state of mind and my sense of humour!

But the truth is, we do lead complicated lives. As the requirement for hunting and gathering food fades further and further into the mists of our past, we fill our lives with a great deal of complication. The tools we use, the way we prepare food, the sophisticated technology we employ in the name of being entertained. We are drowning in complication.

When mankind had to spend a bigger part of his day searching out food—and when a breadmaker didn’t knead dough for him or an oven ‘ping’ when the meal was cooked (we won’t even go into the fact that many people don’t even do that much anymore)—he was more grounded. We are a civilisation of distractions and we have largely lost the ability to stick to one task for a length of time. Back then, food preparation was simple but time consuming. Now, we have increasingly complex ways to save that same time. But we use our saved time on increasingly isolating activities—texting people instead of talking to them face to face, checking social media where other people lie about how great their lives are and make us feel failures because we don’t lie enough about our own. We bombard ourselves with more, yet increasingly trivial, information. Yes, we are living complicated but strangely unsatisfying lives.

I think that’s probably why I was keen on the idea of using the very complicated (and made-up) word, decomplication. The prefix gives us the key. We somehow need to remove or reverse that complication. Just saying, let’s simplify our lives, doesn’t give us any idea for how to start. Understanding that we need to deduct something makes us aware that we need to learn to edit our lives—sift out the extraneous, the dull, the uninspiring.

I often feel a bit of a failure for the things I can’t do. I feel I have to keep up, at least to some degree. How much simpler my life would be if I lived it according to well-thought-out values and didn’t let the increasingly inane noise of society affect my decisions.