I’ve just done two things in quick succession. I’ve demolished some chocolate and I’ve cleaned the top of the freezer. The confectionery I’m going to just admit to and let go. It’s the other that interests me at the moment.

I’ve known the top of the freezer has needed cleaning for some time. The freezer isn’t in the kitchen. It’s in the laundry where the washing machine would normally go (except that it’s more convenient in our home to have the washing machine in the en suite at the other end of the house). I don’t actually use the laundry much. It only houses a sink with a cabinet underneath and the freezer. It’s mostly used for cleaning really, really dirty hands when coming in from the outdoors. My hands don’t get really, really dirty (think grease, oil, and other grungy boys’ stuff) so most of the time I just give this room a cursory clean of floor and sink.

The point is, I had to get a chair, a wet sponge and a rag for drying. I had to move a couple of things so I could clean the top. And it took two minutes. Two minutes! For something I’ve been looking at for a couple of weeks and feeling an underlying guilt about. That is ridiculous. And so are many of the other decisions we make by not doing something right now, this moment, when we see that something needs to be done. We all usually have two minutes to spare. But what do we do? We have an internal conversation that goes something like this:
That needs doing.
I should do it.
But I can’t do it now
I’ll do it later …

Then come the excuses:
Because …
I’m too busy at the moment (I am so super busy that I don’t have two minutes to spare … wow, that is b-u-s-y!)
I don’t feel like doing it now (not worth the pain of doing two minutes’ cleaning to get it off my mental To Do list?)
It would take too long to get the supplies together to do it (yeah right, when I said two minutes, that included this step)

So it’s worth looking at the little things we usually let slip through the cracks. We often have a background discomfort about not doing them, and that guilt uses up a heap more energy than just getting in and doing the tiny chores would have.

There are two lessons to take away from from this.
Don’t leave chocolate lying around from the dinner party you held the night before.
Do little jobs when you see them the first time.

When you decide to do nothing, you’re still making a decision. And that goes for every solitary thing in life.

Some years ago, I succeeded at something that was very hard for me. I did it by unwittingly using the ‘overwhelming force’ technique.

I was so determined to succeed at this thing that I thought about it from many aspects. I prepared for it quite assiduously. I went to the library and learned about it. I committed to taking a whole load of vitamins that my reading had led me to believe would help. I wrote my reasons and my feelings of determination in my diary. I honoured myself and my decision by taking the challenge seriously.

I committed. Really, I probably overcommitted. But when the allocated day came around, I was instantly successful and my decision to do this thing stood firm. It was a big thing for me.

Looking back, it’s still a big thing. Bad habits can be very difficult to stamp out. Every time you try but don’t overcome the habit, the gloom of past failure can become a cloud hanging over the subject and make you less keen to undertake a future attempt.

Meeting your challenge – whatever it is – with overwhelming force means you have to be unstintingly generous with your personal resources. It requires passion, a desire to truly do something about your problem. You have to throw a heap of thought and energy into it. You need to acquire knowledge, to work on your mental fortitude and finally, to take action. And you must have a plan for dealing with any trigger moments that could otherwise derail your decision.

I didn’t talk about it to others. Nowadays people talk about accountability and use social media to trumpet their decisions and publicly journal their journey. For me, talking would have weakened my resolve. I had to keep it inside where I could nurture and strengthen it. I had to guard my thoughts so they could be channelled into actions that would work for me.

Plus, I was only trying to change one thing. It was a biggie, but it was only one. I think that’s a salutory lesson. Decide on the single most important thing, and exercise all your passion, time, thought and action into making it happen.

I have a theory that 80 per cent of our diet should come from fresh vegetables and fruit, prepared in any way we like.

As far as I’m concerned, the other 20 per cent can be whatever we want it to be. Meat, dairy, eggs, nuts and seeds, grains and legumes. Chocolate, wine, pizza …

Now should this theory work on volume, weight or some other measure? Raw or cooked? I think the easiest way is by volume and as 80 per cent is such a big figure, I also think it’s okay to test this theory out doing it entirely by eye. So I’m not going to be precious about it. For foods like rice that bulk out as you cook them, perhaps the 20 per cent could be for cooked volume, not raw. Still, as this is a personal theory, I’m going to be comfortable playing around with it and tweaking it as time goes by.

Say we eat three meals a day. That’s 21 meals a week. Seven of those meals are breakfast, and that’s the one meal where this idea is going to come unstuck the quickest. The only way to overcome the breakfast problem is to free ourselves from our conditioning.

I’ve always been a leftovers-are-great-for-breakfast kind of person, so dinner as breakfast works fine for me. As someone who grew up eating different food to the rest of the world (at least, that’s how it felt—we were lacto vegetarian and pretty much raw foodists waaaay back when it wasn’t heard of, let alone acceptable), I have found it fairly easy to overcome the cultural conditioning that you ‘should’ eat particular foods at particular times. But I don’t push this on my partner who pretty much eats traditional meals at traditional times.

Over the past few years, I’ve been leaning towards the conviction that we shouldn’t consider food in terms of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Rather than thinking of breakfast, we would then identify it simply as a meal. That means any combination of food that makes a meal is acceptable for the first meal of the day. (The next step would be not thinking in terms of meals but rather of hunger and food. But that’s a bit left of field and the subject I’m exploring here is how you could get this 80-20 theory to work in practice.) So within the parameters of three meals a day and a couple of snacks thrown in, what could eating look like?

If you love fruit, you’re sorted. Fruit for breakfast, salad or vegetable soup for lunch, apples or carrot sticks for snacks and a huge plate of vegetables with a small amount of meat for dinner. (See, back to breakfast, lunch and dinner already. The conditioning of a lifetime isn’t easy to escape, is it?)

But I’m more of a vegetablearian than a fruitarian. I try to do the fruit-as-snacks routine so that I will actually eat some fruit and so I make better choices when snacking. I also love cooked food which I guess means ingesting less nutrients than raw … but on the flip side, cooked vegetables are pretty easy to digest. I’ve found a way to easily abide by my decision to eat more raw fruit and vegetables. I eat salad for breakfast. If I have stew-type leftovers I put a couple of spoons of that in my salad to add softness to the crunch. It makes eating salad so much easier and tastier.

Is this strange? Am I weird? You tell me. But I can tell you this. At least by having it as my first meal of the day I am eating salad every day. It’s super easy to do the basics while I’m preparing meat/cheese-and-salad sandwiches for my partner because I have some salad vegetables on the bench anyway. I just chop extra lettuce, cucumber and tomato into a dish. I pour in a wee amount of sacha inchi oil (also known as inca inchi) or olive oil and massage it into the tomatoes. Then the dish goes into the fridge as I’m putting my salad box away. When I’m ready for breakfast, I usually add to those basics. Somehow, because some of the work is already done, it’s psychologically easy to do a few finishing touches, like sprinkling some seeds (pepita, sunflower, chia), adding home-cooked beet if I have some in the fridge, dicing an avocado, slicing a pear or grating some carrot over the dish and throwing in a few sultanas. English spinach, radicchio, capsicum, raw or cooked mushrooms, leftover roast pumpkin … you are limited only by your imagination.

As theories go, I quite like my 80-20 theory. It may not be perfectly balanced and it may not be workable in the long term. Perhaps it’s too hard for those days when I need to pack a sandwich for lunch and my partner wants pizza for dinner. But all is not lost; I have another theory. If I try to live up to the 80-20 theory, I might, just might, manage to make fresh fruit and vegetables half the food I eat on a daily basis. And you know, in the old days, 50 per cent was considered a pass.

My pantry is filled with all sorts of health foods. I have succumbed to the seductive call of chia seeds (both black and white), black sesame seeds, inca inchi powder and oil, macadamia oil to swap for my normal olive oil, plus a few health food store vitamins and minerals that I forget to take anyway.

But I do truly wonder about the benefits these products actually provide.

A TV program a while ago followed a number of people who were trying out different liver cleanser wonder products and saying how much better they felt after having been on the regime for a short time. A doctor pointed out that they were stressing their bodies and their ‘feeling better’ was actually from creating stress on the adrenals, which is a depleting and dangerous process for our ongoing health.

So some of the things that we think are doing us good could actually be accomplishing exactly the opposite. While I have succumbed, along with many others, to the marketing allure of these products, deep down I have a belief that health comes principally from fresh fruit and vegetables, with vastly smaller quantities of good quality meat protein and nuts, dairy, carbohydrate and fat to give a balance to the diet.

Of course, I can rationalise my use of any of my chosen superfood-type products but in the final analysis my rationalising only makes my belief stronger; it doesn’t actually change whether or not the foods are as good as I think they are. Placebo effect aside, they may be doing me no more good than my previous choices of pepitas, sunflower seeds, olive oil and plain ol’ Vitamin C powder with a bit of iodine tincture painted on a body part (usually the feet, as the tincture makes a yellow stain) from time to time. And when I remember it, some selenium.

And for those of us who believe that a nice variety of fruit and vegetables is the underlying key to health, what should we be doing? Buying better quality F&G, dehydrating them for snacks, and washing every piece so that we at least remove any pesticides and bacteria from the outside. The easiest way to do this seems to be putting fruit and vegetables in warm water with a couple of teaspoons of salt for five minutes before rinsing for the softer items, and scrubbing with a brush then rinsing for the more sturdy and waxed items. I get very lazy with this because a lot of the produce you buy is prewashed and looks clean. Time to pull my socks up.

Choices are great, right? They give us a feeling of expansion, of being able to have exactly what we want. When it comes to food we can go around the world—twice!—in seven days. Italian and other Mediterranean influences, Indian, Chinese, Thai, Mexican, French, Japanese … the list is as endless as the countries from which the dishes come.

We live in an era where the world is accessible—in real life or through the internet. We can be adventurous and experiment with the tastes of the planet. Heck, we can do it every day if we want. How good is that? Well, excuse me for putting a dampener on all this largesse, but I wonder if perhaps that’s part of our problem. We just have so much choice and our tastebuds now crave all those different experiences. We want sweet, sour, bitter, hot. Don’t get me wrong; I love many international dishes to the extent of being a little piggy for them.

I’m thinking, though, that our more sophisticated (well, not necessarily sophisticated, but more choice-orientated) tastes are now a big part of our obesity problem. We don’t seem to really ‘do’ bland any more. Could our almost inexhaustible desire for different foods and new flavours be pivotal to our rising obesity? If we limited ourselves to just one cuisine and concentrated on preparing delicious and nutritious food within the traditional parameters of that cuisine, would we be better off?

Not that long ago, we westerners thought Chinese fare was a special treat and that spaghetti bolognaise was quite exotic. It wasn’t that our diet was so great—white bread and white sugar were to be found as part of the daily staple for the vast majority—but we ate simpler food. The Scots had their oats for breakfast. It was meat and three veg at dinner most nights for those with an English background. They managed to thrive on it, too, even without the simmer sauces and flavour sachets that we seem to need nowadays.

So my thoughts on choice are beginning to change. We are eating more and more. The variety of foods and flavours we can access on a daily basis is nothing short of astounding. And what’s happening? We are getting fatter and unhealthier.

A better choice—a more considered decision—would be to eat less and to donate the money we save from doing so to people who don’t have a choice, and who are starving because of it.

We all start from different places along the continuum of health. If you’re asked to count how many different fruits and vegetables you eat in any one day and you have to include potato chips and tomato sauce (also known as fries and ketchup) to get any kind of reasonable number (well, any reasonable number over two!), the bad news is that you’re being very naughty. The good news, though, is that a few small changes will add up to a huge improvement.

And, as anything that’s simple is easier to implement than complex solutions, a good starting place is to go to the supermarket and look around the fruit and vegetable department. Pick four fruits that you can eat exactly as they come (apples, mandarines, bananas, pears, grapes) or ones that need a knife to peel or cut (oranges, melons, kiwifruit, pineapple). Decide to eat fruit for breakfast. If you’re always on the run in the morning, choose the easy options for fruit you can take with you and munch on the way. If you have a steadier pace, you can sit and cut your fruit as you eat it.

You might want to still have the kind of breakfast you’ve been eating up until now. Easy. Have a piece of fruit first and then a little less of whatever it is that you usually eat.

That’s the fruit sorted. For the vegetables, it depends on how much cooking you do. If you don’t like to cook, even a simple salad can add a whole heap of vegetables to your day (lettuce, cucumber, grated carrot and a couple of favourite salad fruits thrown in like avocado, tomato and lush grapes). You can add different vegetables to the mix as you become more adventurous. Try it this week. Wherever you’re starting from, add a few more fruit and vegetables to your day.

Starting can be the biggest challenge for any of our undertakings. We think about it, we talk about it, but sometimes we simply don’t do much. Yet overcoming this inertia is much easier than we might think. The secret is to change something that’s part of our inbuilt day-to-day living. The next question is: What should I change first? The answer: The easiest thing.

For you, that might be simply drinking more water. Put the amount of water you want to drink that day into a container (or more than one if you need to) and plan to drink as much as you can as early in the day as possible. If I’m not more than halfway through my water by morning tea time I find it a real struggle to consume my planned quota. My way of dealing with that is to drink water first thing in the morning. Sometimes I have a cup of tea first, but often the first glass of water is drunk even before I’m properly awake. A mug of hot water instead of tea some time during the day is another way to get the pure water down.

Or if you decide you want to eat more fruit, perhaps you’ll decide to have a piece of fruit instead of baked goods with morning tea. Morning tea then becomes the trigger for eating fruit.

Decide what you’re going to change first and do the one thing that’s required before the action can take place. If it’s to drink more water, find your container now, fill it and put it in a designated place that will remind you to do some serious slurping during the day. If it’s taking fruit to work, pack it in your bag or make a trip to the store to buy a supply.

Doing the simple things to set yourself up for putting your decision into action makes the action itself easier and more intuitive. Simple changes can be powerful. So it comes down to three steps: Commit, prepare, act. And of course, start now.

In some ways, it was hard to start from where I am today. It was a difficult decision that there would be no quick diet—no diet at all!—to regain the svelte body shape my rational brain insisted I needed to have before I even thought about creating this website. So at this moment I’m nowhere near perfect. Every day I eat something that’s not on my list of great foods. I drink wine. Occasionally I polish off a piece of chocolate (sort of inhale the whole block, actually). That makes me somewhat less than a great role model for a healthy lifestyle. So, how dare I even think of writing about the subject? When I’m not exactly the best advertisement in the world? When I don’t really look the part?

Because this isn’t about what we look like. This is about what we are made of. Good quality plant food and some protein versus calorie-charged, nutrition-poor rubbish. This is about making better choices, and we can do that from whatever spot we’re presently residing on along the health continuum. Eventually we will look better. Weight will stabilise. Skin will improve. The mind will start to work without brain fog. Physical energy will return.

This isn’t about looking up to people who know it all and who have it all under control. This is about being real humans who are changing the way they eat for the better, one bite at a time. Mostly this is for the ones who’ve gone astray, like me. Anyone who’s made it, yay, you’re perfect. Go away. You don’t need this.

The thing is, I’ve had this knowledge for years. But you know what? Knowledge without action is pointless. So this site is a call to action. The knowledge isn’t hard to come by, once you peel back the many layers of self-interested businesses, clueless governments and well meaning but wrong practitioners. Really, it’s pretty intuitive.

Eat more vegetables. Eat less rubbish. (Rubbish doesn’t really need defining. Deep down, we all know what’s good and what’s not.) If you do that every single day, even the smallest change at a time, you can start from the worst place in the world and pretty soon you’ll have fantastic eating habits.

How hard is that, really? You just have to keep your eye on the ball, and the ball is … vegetables. Fruit.  Real food from real plants. Fresh vegetables, simply prepared. Easy to shop for. No reading miniscule small print. No agonising over different brands, sugar and sodium content. No agonising at all, really.

When I get home from shopping and I unpack chocolate and lollipops (how did they get in my trolley?) as well as my bags of fruit and vegetables, seeds, meat and dairy, I know I’m not perfect and my diet isn’t either. But I comfort myself with the knowledge that I came from a place far, far worse and now, at least, vegetables make up a huge proportion of what I eat.