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.

Simple can be difficult. There’s no doubt about it, we have complicated lives these days. We all seem to do so much—and then fill our lives to overflowing with distractions—that we don’t have the time for the truly important things. What is really important in our lives? Surely health must be up there near number 1, as it impacts on our every moment. How did our thinking get so screwed up that we don’t take time to research what will make us healthy and then as a matter of priority, implement that in our lives?

This is the one thing we should get right before bothering about all the rest, yet it’s something that we mostly ignore.

Some of us don’t cook at all. We allow ourselves to eat things prepared by others who surely don’t have our best interests at heart. Others make dishes so complicated and flavoursome that cooking becomes a huge imposition on time, effort and purse. But talk about getting back to simple foods and people think you’re mad.

I’m a great fan of wonderful tasting food, but I also believe that some foods that are probably quite bland by today’s standards should still make up a great part of our diet. Fresh fruit, eaten unadulterated. Vegetables steamed and eaten as is. I’m even a believer in bread and butter. Dense, farmhouse style bread that you make at home with spelt flour then top with the very best quality butter you can find. If you need more flavouring, add a ripe tomato dusted with a little salt and pepper. Or for an even better option, what about Ezekial bread?

Why do we find this so difficult? Steve Jobs said that “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

I’m not here to move mountains. I’m here to move towards vibrant health. And if I can get my eating clean and make it simple, I’m winning the game.

Life is all about balance. Let’s try some word association to prove the point. Night and …? Good and …? Joy and …? Yin and …? Sweet and …? See how the opposites balance each other?

Now for some fun. What if we took the two most opposite dietary stances, veganism and paleo, and put them on the balancing scales? Then if we used the very best concepts from each and applied them to our diets we would have, I believe, a wonderfully balanced diet filled with all the nutrients we need to thrive.

The diet might look something like this: All fruit and vegetables, nuts and seeds plus a small amount of the very best grains (think Ezekial bread and quinoa), grassfed beef, organic chicken and free-range eggs.

Many different diets have sustained people throughout the world for millennia. The healthiest diets, whether they include meat or are totally vegetarian, seem to have in common one element—most of the food is natural. We in the so-called civilised world need to ditch a lot of what we’re eating now and get back to basics. We should be aiming for the best quality real food that we can afford.

Not allowed. Don’t eat. Exclude. That’s why diets don’t work. They’re too negative and they take us out of our comfort zone. I believe, rather, that we need a mindset that expands our options, that gives a positive spin on food.

Everybody can benefit greatly from the spirit of inclusion. This is not saying you can’t have. It’s saying, start with these extra foods. Add this to your diet.

I just keep adding good foods to the foods I already eat. Putting cake out on the table now means putting bananas and grapes out as well. Eating a simple salad is made more nutrient dense with chia seeds, pepitas and macadamia nuts or cashews or almonds. I drink a green smoothie made of fruit, leafy vegies and seeds for my ‘first’ breakfast then have something else later if I feel like it. While I’m preparing food I munch on cucumber. I cut about four inches off a cucumber then chop it lengthwise into quarters and crunch away.

This is very liberating. It’s a delicious, expansive way of living. It stops me falling into the trap that I must embrace some kind of diet (ranging from veganism to paleo eating) to be healthy. I don’t have to become a crank who has an ever-limited range of food that is ‘acceptable’. I simply include more. I have more salad vegetables at lunchtime. I always add chia and pepita seeds. Sometimes I make up a quinoa salad as well, sometimes cottage cheese, sometimes haloumi cheese that I pan-fry dry or in a little coconut oil. Sometimes a piece of bread and butter. I still eat chocolate afterwards. At night I cook meat and vegies as normal, but these days I prepare more vegetables.

Losing weight is no longer the issue. Eating more nutritionally is the grand consideration. I don’t need to ban bread, never eat cake again or eschew the delicious crunch of chips. There are so many wonderful vegetables out there (including sea vegetables), so many interesting fruits, seeds and nuts.

And if, horror of all horrors, I put on weight at first, what does it matter? My poor fat, starved body will at last be getting the nutrients to needs to stabilise, to heal and to work properly in my service for a long and healthy life. That’s how it’s happening for me, anyway.

It’s not enough to simply know something. I know what foods are good for me, but unless I eat them, my knowledge doesn’t accomplish much. It’s not enough to do it sometimes. To make a permanent change, it must become ingrained and automatic.

Relying on emotion is a recipe for disaster. If I waited to do things until I felt like it, I’d probably seldom get round to any of them. So I need to keep my feelings out of the equation. The real question is, how do I make this thing that I want to do regular and virtually automatic?

One of the secrets of successful habit creation is something that kids love—an activity called piggybacking.

You choose an activity you do already on a daily basis and team up your desired new habit with it. After a short time, it becomes something you don’t have to think about. It’s just the way things happen.

When you wake up you put on your running shoes while you drink your first glass of water.

As you reach into the fridge for something you always pull out during your breakfast ritual, you reach for some green smoothie ingredients as well.

When you turn on your computer, you get yourself a glass of water. Or you sit perfectly straight, close your eyes and mini-meditate for the moments it takes the computer to boot up.

Of course you could overwhelm yourself by trying to pair every little automatic habit with a new one, and that would accomplish exactly nothing. But just one thing? That’s doable.

The strength of this way of adding good habits is that you don’t have to feel like doing it. Whoever decides on a daily basis that they feel like brushing their teeth? We all just do it because it’s part of our procedure.

Make it simple to remember your paired activity. When you shut down your computer, put your water glass in front of the keyboard. Lay out your gym clothes the night before. Have the blender on the kitchen bench and most of your smoothie ingredients in a container in the fridge.

Let’s make this as easy as possible for ourselves. If it’s easy, we’ll do it.

It’s strange, but when I immerse myself totally in reading about health and healthy diets I always seem to have this craving for chocolate. And I think I’ve worked out why. I need balance. When I saturate myself with the subject, I am in danger of overthinking everything. Thinking about food for hours on end is counterproductive. It should, rather, be something you consider quite carefully then make as informed a decision as you can. After that, it’s simply a case of acting upon the perceived solution rather than always going back to the problem.

For example, say the problem is a lack of Omega 3 or an imbalance because of too much Omega 6 in the diet (most of us have this problem, by the way). The solution is to find foods that will help everything from the alpha to the omega, if you will pardon my little Greek pun. Then you simply add in a little more Omega 3 in the form of chia seeds, flaxseeds, walnuts, oily fish or algae supplements (and whatever the experts tell us next) and tweak the rest of your diet so you’re not consuming so much Omega 6. Eating meat from animals that have been grassfed is a big help. Having a less grain-based diet yourself will help, too. Steering towards wild rice, quinoa, black beans and kidney beans might be a good idea too.

Ban the cheap vegetable oils from your shopping list altogether. Go easy on the olive oil. Use coconut oil—saturated fat that don’t oxidise easily—for cooking. (Another option is ghee, which is clarified butter and which has a higher smoke point than butter). Keep away from corn, canola and soy, which means keeping away from lots of packaged products. The best advice I think anyone could give would be to keep away from packaged foods as much as possible. Learn to cook your own versions and take control of what you put on your plate.

And have a piece of chocolate because you want to, not because you’re going cross-eyed reading what all the experts say about health.

So, it’s March already. The busiest part of the year is behind me and I am sitting here thinking about that March resolution that I talked about earlier. A new high-speed blender is making the task of eating better quality food so much easier. I’ve been doing my study on different flavours that seem to go together well and am becoming slightly more accomplished at flying by the seat of my pants when it comes to what I put in my smoothies. So who needs recipes? Pfffft!

Finding something that is easy and that works is exciting. The biggest thing to remember is to stock up on the right raw foods to feed my new blender habit. Not all my incarnations are equally delicious, but they’re all packed with nutrients and that is what I believe the modern consumer needs above all. Forget the only paleo, only vegan or only mooncheese diets. If we aim to increase our nutrient intake rather than worry about calories, I am sure our health will come bounding back.

A lot of people only think about their health when they’ve lost it or have had a bad scare. It’s incumbent on us to not be so casual with our most precious commodity. We need to act in a way that constantly improves our lives, not drags us down. We spend so much of our time being reactive, but the most valuable things we do are when we take control and act before it’s an imperative. We must decide our values then set our heads in that direction rather than being swayed by convenience, misinformation or the belief that it’s all too hard.

The longer I live, the more I realise I have been foolish about many things for many years. I continue to be so, but I also understand that by considering and examining life as it is being lived today I have within my grasp the tools to fix almost any problem.

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.

I’ve never really been one for making new year’s resolutions. An unrealistic list and an arbitrary date seem to me the ingredients for almost instant failure. Lose weight. Stop smoking, drinking,  procrastinating—whatever. Get a degree. Fly to the moon.

Rather, the idea of life resolutions is appealing to me. Deciding who you are and tailoring your day-to-day decisions to your higher values.

But last year I was in the mood to be a lemming and jump off the same cliff as everyone else. The only thing is, January is already a busy month for me. Why add to my stress levels starting something that I’d probably drop within the first fortnight? So I decided to make my resolution actionable in March. When thoughts of my resolution crossed my mind in January and February, I could simply think about what it was I wanted to accomplish.

I like the idea of March. My schedule is a lot freer and even the month’s name makes you think of energy and resolve. March. Quick March!

Last year my resolution (I decided to have only one even though of course I had other accomplishments planned for other avenues of my life) was to start going to a gym regularly. I would give it a year and see how I went, with a view to keeping the activity as part of my life for the foreseeable future—until I was an old, old lady at least! In January and February, I was happy simply to think about it. Was I serious? When would be the best time of day to go? How much would it cost? Could I afford it for the whole year? Did I need some kind of schedule or plan so I would I stick to it? What was the first thing I needed to do that would start the process of making this happen? (It was simple—make a phone call and book an appointment.) Thinking and questioning consolidated in my mind that I did want to do it and highlighted some of the possible problems I might have sticking to my resolution.

I’m coming up to 12 months and can see how wise it was, for me at least, to limit my resolve to just one commitment. It doesn’t mean I haven’t done myriad other things in the year, just that this one was a promise to myself that I wanted to keep for the sake of my health. It wasn’t to pump so much iron by such-and-such a date or lose x amount of weight or any other competition with myself—or anyone else, for that matter. The goal wasn’t to get a specific result. It was simply to go to gym regularly. I immediately succeeded in my goal (nice feeling!) and after that the process pretty much took over. The goal had done its job and could sink slowly in the west. I am now the kind of person who does a little gym circuit three times a week. And I feel good about that.

Now again in January, I’ve made my one resolve for the coming year. I can plan, dream, take tiny steps toward and psychologically prepare myself from now to March. My resolution is to start having considerably more raw, natural foods. I want to take my health to a new level. A nice broad resolution, but how do I make it specific? What are the ‘doing’ steps? I’m going to buy a high-powered blender, a fairly costly exercise which I’m looking at as an investment in my health. Whenever I think about it, I can gather another healthy recipe that I can use when March 1 comes around (or try it out with my existing blender). I can find out where to buy certain foods that I want to add to my intake—seeds, fruit and vegetables that I may not eat raw much now. I’ll plan where I’m going to put the machine, as it will be staying out on the kitchen bench. I’ll work out where in the fridge and pantry I’m going to store the different foods I’ll be buying. When am I going to use it? Breakfast smoothies? For making vegan sauces to go with dinner? Either? Both? Daily?

This is the dreaming stage. Why hurry it? It’s very pleasurable. But I believe it also trains my mind along a certain trail so that when I do undertake the change it will seem totally natural. I will have prepared my mind and my home space for something that will be a permanent part of life from now on. It’s a seamless approach where the doing just grows out of the thinking. And a beautiful thing has happened without any effort from me. The magic date is still in the future but I am already doing extra small, daily actions that are created almost automatically because my subconscious has started working for me and my chosen starting point. I am becoming the person I want to be, even before I really start.

I admit there is a danger in this plan. Dreaming without ever doing is delusion. Sometimes when you’ve stumbled across an idea, the time needs to be now—while the idea has power—not a couple of months down the road. Ideas have energy but the longer you wait the less energy they have. They seem to develop from full blown enthusiasm … to half life to … nah, not that interested after all. So we all need to recognise which path is right for our particular situation at that particular time. The delayed start programme will definitely not seem sexy enough for some or satisfy those who want to make sweeping changes now. Still, with this in my mind it’s amazing the resources I’m finding and the enthusiasm I’m feeling. It’s a kind of building up. Excitement’s too rich a word but I’m sure you get my drift. A rocket can’t take off until the motor has been on for a while and it’s absolutely ready to roar.

For me, this time, it’s not about having a specific goal past the very broad one of getting healthier. It’s about creating an achievable process. Success is in the doing, every day—not some far-fetched result in the future.

So my original January thought might be that I want to lose weight. I might start out number crunching how much weight I need to lose or how many calories I should eat and put a date on when I want to to have successfully accomplished my goal. But by the time I’ve spent a little time and allowed more clarity into my thinking, that original idea has been turned virtually inside out. I choose a date to start, not finish. And weight loss is the byproduct, not the goal. What I’m actually striving for is healthier eating on a daily basis. It’s a process of being, now—not achieving some time in the future. And once I’ve done my bit of dreaming and I start actualising my resolution, I have already succeeded—today, not a date somewhere in the future.