It is so obvious to me that many of our health problems are from processed,unnatural foods. What’s not so obvious is when, when we discover this for ourselves, we don’t immediately put into practice more healthy eating habits.

Many so-called primitive communities, with their natural diets sourced locally and no doubt lacking some of the vitamins that we pop pills to get, still seem to be hugely more healthy than those of us on the Standard American Diet. Or Standard Australian Diet. SAD indeed.

So why don’t we go back to basics? Or in our case, forward to the basics! What exactly is stopping us? One thing is that we don’t take the time to educate ourselves. We’re too busy with our lives to worry about our health. (Now, how is that smart? If we don’t have good health we don’t have a life anyway.) Another is that junk food just tastes so good to our poor, mutilated tastebuds which have been bombarded with such an indulgence of salt and fat and sugar that they no longer recognise the deliciousness of clean, real foods. Yet another is that there is so much conflicting information out there and we’re not sure we’ll choose the right information.

The answer is, we need to just start somewhere. Eat a little fruit. Add vegetables to every single meal. Learn how to cook simple food superbly. Make a solemn promise to ourselves that from this day on we will put health first—our health and that of our families.

As for the conflicting information, perhaps there’s an easy way around that too. If you’re going to be vegan, be the best little vegan you can be. Buy GMO-free grains and top quality organic fruit and vegetables. Go heirloom rather than hybrid. Don’t buy processed almond milk and soy milk or other kinds of processed food. Eat as naturally as possible.

If you want to be paleo, source the very best grassfed beef and organic eggs in your district. Don’t fall into the trap of buying highly processed food just to have low-carb treats. If it’s not something you can do in your own kitchen without too much hassle, it’s probably not worth eating anyway.

The vegetarian scenario would be similar, with eggs from free-range chickens that are also free from hormones, unhomogenised whole milk, simple white cheeses, real butter and scads of vegetables and fruit.

If you favour a standard diet, find ways that you can incorporate natural foods into it. Just a few little changes here and there, when taken on permanently, can together add up to a big health benefit. And if it costs a little more for food, remember that down the track it will cost a lot less in misery, medications, doctor’s bills and hospital stays.

Our lives are our most precious resource. We are nothing without life. And good health is surely one of the essential keys to a good life.

I used to think that you had to totally give something up to be free of its clutches. But I am leaning towards a different, more gentle approach. A kind of drifting away, without the urgent call to arms and the purposeful girding of loins required for that ‘giving up’ mindset. To be free of an addiction is to not need that thing. It doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t have it ever again. (I know the jury’s still out on that one, but these are interesting thoughts to explore anyway.)

The whole feeling that you are missing out by not having something sets up a conflict inside your mind. Conflict is, in my opinion, never good. So I am making choices to eat more nutritious food. I am educating my tastebuds to love these foods alongside the crisps, crackers, chocolate and chardonnay that I haven’t been able to get enough of in recent years. My body might be getting more calories than it needs, but at least it’s getting good nutrients along with the empty calories of the ‘bad’ choices.

It’s a kind of crowding-out mentality. There’s a minimum of wholesome, healthy food that I will eat every day. Salads. Steamed vegetables. Good proteins. Good carbohydrates. Good fats. The naughty foods? I can have them too. Any of them. As long as I’ve already had the good stuff. But here’s a little piece of magic that works for me. Rather than a picking my naughties from a whole supermarket of crap foods, I choose to think carefully about the foods I love. I evaluate them and rank them to the 10 I like best. Then I pick from that reduced pile. I’m not missing out. I’m still having the things I like best. And truly, the rest can be ignored for the most part.

Feeling like something sweet? If it’s not going to be fresh or dried fruit I will choose from my list of chocolate, a peppermint sweet/lollipop, one kind of sweet biscuit (always the same kind) or a piece of homemade cake. Savoury? Pizza, crackers on their own or with cheese, cornchips or potato crisps. Alcohol? One type of wine. This also stops me from putting loads of junk into my shopping trolley. I have thought about it and have made my choice while I’m at home and while I’m actually thinking about my health. At the supermarket, my eyes can then be trained to look only for what’s on my list.

Today, that’s good enough for me.

Improving is an interesting word. On a personal level, I like to think of it as I’m proving. I’m proving I can do better. I’m proving that I can. Improving every day. A very positive way of thinking, don’t you think?

Words can be incredibly powerful. Martin Luther King had a dream for racial equality. Mahatma Gandhi preached the strength of non-violence to a nation ruled by others. Winston Churchill inspired people to never surrender. The words of Socrates, about the importance of examining your life, are still alive and potent more than 2500 years after his death.

Words have made nations rise and fall. Words can change the world. You just need to find the magic combination—the truth—that unlocks your heart, creates belief and inspires your actions. That’s why I keep doing this. If I can find the right words to inspire and motivate, to free my potential and overcome difficulties, I can change anything in my life.

Some of the words that have power are very small words. Simple words. Yes. Yet. Now. Can I have a better diet even though I’m addicted to all the wrong things? YES. When should I start? NOW. I’ve been really trying but I haven’t succeeded. YET.

Saying yes is a gesture of faith. Faith in yourself. The knowledge that you are worthy even if you don’t feel that way. And it’s okay if you’re not there yet, as long as you keep going. The magic is in doing something about it, no matter how little, and doing it now. So can I do this? Yes I can. And I can start now. Even if I don’t know everything I need to know. Yet.

I was thinking the other day about Christmas and gifts … and how our needs get less as we get older.

Then I realised that’s not precisely true. Right through life, we always have the same needs. We need air, water, food, shelter. To have a good life we also need sunshine, warmth, a bit of comfort and activities that interest us and expand our horizons.

The rest, as much as we love it, pretty much falls into the ‘wants’ category. Even chocolate. Sigh.

When I’m trying to eat healthier food, the worst thing I can do in a supermarket is to browse the aisles.

My solution for this is to stockpile certain foods so I can concentrate my weekly shopping on fruit and vegetables, whole milk and perhaps meat. For example, I don’t buy cheese and butter every week. I prefer to buy enough for a month or two. Butter freezes well, although to freeze cheese I find it’s best to grate first then lay out in trays to freeze before bagging up. (Cheese that has been frozen in blocks generally crumbles when it’s cut. If I grate it and bag it without laying out  it will generally clump into one virtually unuseable mass). Mostly I just keep my cheese in the fridge. I buy 1kg blocks and when I open each pack I immediately divide into three and wrap with clingwrap. I never lose a skerrick of cheese to mould that way. I also package meat into meal size servings before freezing and put bread and sometimes milk in the freezer. There’s absolutely no waste doing it this way.

Eggs come from a friend who has happy chooks that wander around outside all day scratching and pecking at whatever their hearts desire, so no need to buy the supermarket variety.

Breakfast supplies for the muesli eater in the house are a simple case of buying oats, processed bran and sultanas and combining them into a 9 litre lidded container. No need to go down the breakfast aisle again until supplies run low.

The pantry always has a stash of cans—tomatoes, chickpeas, butter beans, kidney beans, beetroot, mushrooms, pineapple. I’m a fan of single ingredient cans because it gives me more control over what I’m eating. If I want soup or stew, it’s easy enough to make with supplies on hand. Living up to this one idea of buying single ingredients makes my shopping life heaps easier, because I don’t feel the need to try every new incarnation of canned or packet meals that’s out there. In fact, it means a couple more aisles I don’t have to go down (or at least only for my occasional foray to stock up on single-ingredient items that may be in those aisles).

I keep a reasonable supply of herbs and spices, onion and garlic powder, liquid and powdered stock, pasta, rice, flour (plain wholemeal, normal flour and spelt flour), salt, yeast (it lasts for years kept in the fridge), olive oil, vinegar and naughty flavourings like Gravox, soy sauce, sugar and tomato sauce. It means I can easily create beautifully flavoured meals without resorting to a myriad of packets. I’m constantly surprised at how many packets of flavourings or ready-made dishes there are in supermarkets these days. Don’t people make simple things from scratch any more? I truly can’t believe white sauce, sweet and sour sauce, flavoured rice et cetera need to come out of a packet.

I do the same with the less-than-optimal food we eat. A big plastic container holds packets of biscuits so I don’t have to go down that aisle too often. I also find that when I am simply replenishing supplies rather than browsing, I buy the same kinds of biscuits each time. It saves being tempted by all those  chocolate-covered, caramel-infused packets of sin. The same thing works in the confectionery section. As long as I have some chocolate and maybe some peppermints or lollipops at home, it’s okay to ignore the rows and rows of sweet treats. Not buying this kind of food every week gives me a break from looking at huge displays of it and I think, will eventually free me from its clutches. Also, when I choose just one or two items (one kind of sweet biscuit and one style of cracker) and stick to my choices, I don’t have the feeling that I am missing out. I am simply choosing differently. The trick is to make these choices at home on a day when determination and passion are high. The second trick is to shop quickly, using a list and trying not to deviate too much.

This whole procedure of bulk shopping waxes and wanes a bit, but I find that when I do take the time to do this for non-perishables and for all our personal items, my regular shopping trips are even quicker and more disciplined. Overall, it means the whole household eats healthier food. 

In the past couple of decades, we have complexified our food to an unbelievable level. We must have scores of spices—or, even worse, packet foods with goodness knows what in them—to satisfy our appetite for ever-increasing depths of flavour.

This has become a treadmill which ties us to processed food because we don’t always feel we have the time to faff about with 10 little bottles of spices to get the flavour we require. (Plus we’re not all knowledgeable enough to do a good job at choosing which spices and flavourings go together.)

Something has to change. We need to simplify. One way to do that is to let single ingredients be the stars of their own dish. Cucumber with a dash of vinegar and sea salt. Tomatoes with a little oil. Sweet potatoes oiled, roasted and served. Beans topped, tailed and steamed to vivid green. We don’t always need to have the complex flavour of many ingredients tossed together. In fact, we need to be increasingly satisfied with simple tastes. Real tastes. Original tastes.

I know this flies in the face of the previous column which was all about getting lots of vegies into a meal, but sometimes totally different ends of the same spectrum still make sense.

Occasionally having simple meals that have few ingredients is not going to be a nutritional disaster for us. As long as the foods we choose are as fresh as we can get them and rich in nutrients, our wonderful bodies will do their best to assimilate all the fuel we require.

Remember Bo Derek and that Movie, 10? Well, here’s how I’m going to be a 10 in the health stakes: Make sure my fruit and vegetable intake reachs 10 every day.

That’s seven vegetables and three fruit a day. For fruitarian types it might mean five fruit and five vegetables. Vegeholics might prefer nine vegies and one fruit. Once anyone starts eating this way, it leaves a lot less room for garbage food. Also, it makes a game out of eating better. We can all count to 10, can’t we? What could be simpler? Whoever reaches 10 every day wins.

I’ve found that an easy way to do this is to prepare vegetable soup. I start with some vegetable stock and add onions (prefrying makes them yummiest), carrots, celery, capsicum, cabbage, kale, snow peas, corn, zucchini and pumpkin … or whatever vegetables that are in the fridge, really. I try to add something green near the end of the cooking period. Frozen peas, shredded kale or whole leaves of English spinach (for the English spinach, just add right at the end of the cooking period so it wilts.)

Throwing a pot of vegetable soup on the stove on Sunday means being sorted for lunches for at least part of the week or perfect for a soup starter every night before the main dish. Soup as an entree helps to control how much other food we eat for that meal.

If being a 10 sounds a bit too hard at the moment, maybe I could start by being a five and just gradually work my way up.

Next column, Let single ingredients shine. Sounds counterintuitive but I think it works.

When I’m feeling overwhelmed probably isn’t the time to try this. But when I’m in control and feeling fairly organised, I can make good decisions about what I can do to simplify my life. These decisions can then form actions that line up with my personal values.

Clear as mud? Let me give an example. Years ago, I made a decision to simplify the way I cleaned my hair. Most shampoos and conditioners are loaded with all sorts of weird chemicals and I wasn’t keen to keep putting them on my scalp, considering that the skin is the largest organ in the body and does soak up at least some of what’s put on it.

It did take some time to find exactly what worked for me. Many years before I’d washed my hair with a ‘green’ laundry gel I used to make. It had soap, washing soda and borax in it. Borax? Hmmmmm. Not this time. I was looking for something simpler this time. I tried washing with bicarbonate of soda then rinsing with watered-down lemon juice. It worked okay but didn’t really resonate with me. Eggs are a great conditioner, but a bit too messy to be an everyday go-to soution. Then I tried normal soap to clean the hair followed by a dessertspoon of white vinegar in a couple of cups of water as a rinse then letting the shower water run to wash out the vinegar.

After a week of washing my hair with normal soap and cheap-as-chips food-grade white vinegar (which is actually clear), I thought I had the perfect method for keeping my hair clean. Seven years later, I still think so. I’m grateful I spent that bit of time researching my options and working out something simple that would work for me. Every time I go to the supermarket I save myself all the angst (and expense) of looking at the evergrowing shelves of shampoos, conditioners, hair colours, mousses, clarifiers, waxes, gels and whatever else is around these days. Maybe once a year I venture to that aisle to hunt down some hairspray, which I do use occasionally on a windy day. Otherwise, with a sixpack of soap and a bottle of vinegar, I’m set for eons.

The vinegar lives in the pantry and I decant into a squeezy bottle that once held mayonnaise. The biggest addition to the bathroom is a cup for mixing water with the vinegar.

Soap and vinegar simplified how I wash my hair. But making the decision not to put the colouring chemical cocktail into my hair simplified my life even more. Every six weeks when my roots grow out, they’re the same gorgeous brown-silver combo as the rest of my hair so they never need hiding. I do exactly nothing. Nowadays you can get colours that don’t have quite the same awful chemicals in them, but there’s still the time you have to take to buy the products and do the dyeing.

What I did with my hair many years ago I am now doing with food. I’ve simplified flavourings down to some basics that I can mix and match. It’s an interesting exercise and it means that in some of those aisles where there are 6,000 different packet sauces I can walk by, confident that two or three single-ingredient products and general pantry staples can do a similar job. It may take a little research and a little extra time for my first effort. But this way, I know what goes into my food.

You can be time poor and yet still eat well. It’s a question of choice, of decision making and of timing.

Timing is essential. We pretty much all have time available somewhere in the week, but often it’s not at a time that suits us for going shopping or preparing food.

Having said that, food can be prepared at almost any time and if we can break free of conventional thinking and instead get part-meals ready in advance it can have a huge impact on how we live our lives.

If you already have the protein component of the meal ready, putting together a salad is the work of only minutes and even cooking a few vegetables doesn’t take that long, especially if you don’t mind using a microwave.

Lunching on leftovers is a grand standard for anybody. Some meals can be kept in a cooler and eaten cold and if you have the wherewithal at the office to heat food, you can eat almost anything you bring from home. A nourishing soup with a slice of the very best bread you can afford. Something with a bit of Mexican flair that segues easily from dinner to lunch.

If your idea of a good lunch is sandwiches and you’re not a morning person, there’s no reason you can’t make them when you’re in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner and refrigerating them overnight. Some people even do once-a-week preparation for lunchtime sandwiches using fillings like cheese and relish/meat and pickles/chicken and mayo. It just means popping in a ziplock baggie of salad makings when you’re packing your lunchbox.

Decide when you’re most time poor and look at your schedule for when you have time to spare. You can do anything if you’re organised enough to use your available time well.