Learning to cook for yourself has to be up there with some of the most important skills on the planet, like vegetable gardening, the ability to think and problem solve, literacy and inventiveness.

Being able to prepare your own food from scratch means that you can wrest back the power from the manufacturers who supply the supermarkets. Suddenly you have complete control over the ingredient list of the foods you’re eating because you are using mostly single ingredients to create your individual style of cuisine.

In the old days, women knew how to cook. They learned it at their mothers’ knees. Food was often simple, even rustic, but filled with goodness and prepared with that special blend of time and caring that I believe is missing from many of the products we eat today.

Today we have a number of interesting challenges. Genetically modified produce is one of the biggies. Farming practices are vastly different to days gone by. Many of us are food snobs … and the menus of restaurants reflect that, with their ever-more-maddening descriptions of food. Talk about obfuscation!

One of the greatest advantages of our time, though, is ready access to information. In a few minutes we can find out how to make our own sweet and sour sauce to go with lightly cooked Asian vegetables. We can do curries from scratch. We can learn to prepare a myriad of dishes from YouTube clips and recipe sites. We do not need to be slaves of bottled simmer sauces and packet pastas. We can discover that pasta making only involves egg, flour, salt and water. Or even simpler, semolina flour, salt and water. We can make our own artisan bread with just flour, yeast and water—then refrigerate and let time do the rest of the work right up until the time when we pull out a bit of dough and bake it. This is rustic indeed, but delicious and fun.

So we have the power. What we often don’t have is the time. But everyone is blessed with the same 24 hours in a day and the way we use those 24 hours is about choices. Ah, the crux of the matter. We must choose to cook from scratch. We must schedule time for buying produce, making sure we have the right kitchen utensils for the task. We must commit to cooking for ourselves.

Preparing food is a procedure that requires some effort a number of times a day. There are ways to streamline the process—cooking a number of meals at once and freezing or combining the ingredients for future slow cooker meals and freezing them until the night before you want to cook them, for example. Or getting your shopping delivered to the door is an option for some people. That said, even the most efficient kitchen requires considerable time spent on meal preparation. The effort is amply repaid by the quality of food on the table.

Not doing your own meal preparation doesn’t mean you’re too busy or too important for the task. It means you haven’t thought through your priorities. The health of you and your family needs to be number 1—and the food you eat plays a big role in that.

There’s an easy way to eat more vegetables. Just add vegetables to nearly everything you eat. Making mince? Grate carrot and zucchini and perhaps onion into it plus have a heap of steamed vegies on the side. Spaghetti bolognaise sauce? Puree cooked vegetables and slip them in with the tomatoes. Don’t eat the spaghetti as a meal in itself. Put half as much as usual on your plate and fill the other half with greens. 

Eat vegetables for breakfast. We are the product of our conditioning, but we can break out. Who actually said you couldn’t have a plate of veggies for breakfast? The cereal companies that want you to eat their less-than-healthy, sugar-in-a-box? 

You just have to have cake? Zucchini  works in some recipes, pumpkin makes a moist cake and beetroot can go into chocolate cake.

One of the easiest ways I’ve found to add more raw vegetables to my diet is to combine cooked and raw food. While I often have salad for lunch, I also often fry some mushroom and eggplant in coconut oil to stir through the salad and warm it a little. That works perfectly in winter when salads seem too cold. But of course the reverse is possible as well. While I have a meal cooking I often chop up raw vegetables to put in at the last moment before serving. Some vegetables that add crunch to the softer cooked foods include celery, chinese cabbage and any other kind of cabbage, snow peas and diced cauliflower.

I also grab the box grater and hold it over my pot of cooked food and grate in a little carrot and zucchini. I might cut a couple of raw tomatoes into a certain dish or pop in some mushrooms for another. English spinach works perfectly in so many dishes. Capsicum can add a splash of colour as well as crunch—red, green or yellow. It’s simply a case of deciding to do it then experimenting a little.

Vegetables rule!

Today I looked back to see how far I had come; to see what my diet looks like in relation to what it was a year ago, and it’s quite amazing how many changes I have managed to seamlessly incorporate into my day-to-day eating habits. A big advantage of how gradual this process has been is that I have managed to take my little family along for the ride as well, without any sign of mutiny on the horizon. Of course, this means I haven’t stopped anyone—including myself—from having the beloved but naughty foods. I have just added and added and added all the good ones. We still eat all the wrong stuff, but the percentage has gone down dramatically because there is so much good food in our diet now.

What’s most amazing to me is that this has happened without any difficulty at all. Adding new foods has been an adventure. I find myself with a different mindset in the kitchen. Food preparation is now a chance to make new dishes, to experiment, to learn how to cook many different vegetables that I really hadn’t tried before. It’s also a chance to streamline some meals so that I don’t feel a slave to the kitchen. I have an arsenal of simple ideas for meals. I do some wicked one-pot meals when we’re having cooked fare. And we don’t always have dishes that have a name. Sometimes we just eat meat and five or six veg, with the vegetables prepared in one pot, starting with the ones that take the longest to cook (potato, carrot, sweet potato) and adding others to the top half way through (broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini et cetera). I can make a salad in five minutes with lettuce, tomato, cucumber, avocado, nuts and seeds. Or that can be my starting point and I’ll add English spinach, Chinese cabbage, grated carrot, grated zucchini, celery, capsicum and whatever else I have in the fridge. It’s all done with a wooden board, a sharp knife and an old-fashioned box grater, so there’s not too much washing up later. I might put a bit of sweet fruit in occasonally – diced apple or mandarine segments or slivers of pear. Sometimes I have a salad dressed with a bit of olive oil and balsamic vinegar; sometimes I leave it fairly plain.

Or I pull out the frying pan, throw in a generous amount of coconut oil and fry up eggplant and mushrooms (at the least), throw in a few pinches of himalayan salt then stir all that through the salad for a warming effect on colder days. With one meal a day I have added a huge range of vegetables, and it has been so easy to do. And if I’ve made too much, good. I love leftovers for breakfast.

What I’ve found is that starting simple is the key. I started with salads that had ham and cheese, with bread and butter on the side, then gradually moved to nuts and seeds for the protein and fat content of the salad. The ham and cheese aren’t gone forever – they have a showing occasionally, but they’re not on my plate every day. I’ve changed the quality of bread to the very best I can afford (sprouted bread from the health food shop whenever my pockets are lined with gold!) and have a slice occasionally with pure butter. Whenever I feel like it, really.

The psychological benefit of this kind of formula is immense. When I feel that I’m adding to my diet rather than taking away, I know I’m not missing out on anything. There is no sense of conflict, no feeling that “I should” or “I shouldn’t”, no need of willpower to stick to a diet. I can eat anything I want. I simply choose to eat more vegetables, seeds, nuts and fruit. The rest, it seems, happens by osmosis.

The only thing I’ve found it doesn’t work for is alcohol. But that’s a subject for another day.

Going on holidays can seriously derail your attempts to eat well. We were lucky because we took our own accommodation so had fridge, stove and lots of good fruit and vegetables at our disposal. Still, we were more likely to have salad sandwiches than salad with bread available on the side (my preferred way of serving lunch). We had a few meals out, which was a pleasant change to the constant food preparation which seems to be my life. Still, there were days when I looked back on the food we’d consumed and thought I could have done much better.

Never mind, being home makes it easy to pick up on the good habits again. It’s just a case of starting as you mean to go on. I admit I’ve already eaten crackers for morning tea instead of a piece of fruit or a few nuts and seeds. But that’s already in the past and the next meal is an opportunity to delight in nutrient-dense goodies from nature’s cornucopia. No waiting for tomorrow to do better. Do better the very next time you eat—that’s my mantra.

In this life, we often feel discomfort … or we would if we didn’t have so many coping mechanisms to hide from it. One more glass of wine to dull the edges and forget about that nagging feeling that there is something out of balance. One more packet of sweeties to numb yourself with a sugar fix.

But if we could sit down and simply be when we had these strange feelings; if we could accept and really look at whatever it is we’re hiding from now, how bad could it be?

I mean, really. How bad could it be? Would it kill us? No? Then it’s not that bad. Would it scar us for life? Probably not. Would it make us uncomfortable? Possibly. Probably. Almost certainly.

Is discomfort such a scary thing that we have to keep stuffing our mouths or drowning our sorrows? Is the cure worse than the disease? Yes it is, if it’s keeping us locked in self-defeating behaviours and habits.

So next time when reaching for a packet of crisps or an extra glass of wine—or whatever the sin de jour—sit down quietly and listen to your body, your thoughts, your being. What’s it saying? Where’s the discomfort?

And that, not a problem with food or alcohol, is what you have to deal with.

How did we get to the stage where there are more products than produce in our trolleys? What if we changed that and bought mostly produce and decided that we would produce the rest ourselves?

It could make a great impact on our health if we decided that if a product had an ingredient list of more than two, we would eschew the packet in the supermarket and get busy in the kitchen with some simple ingredients instead. Imagine how that would affect our consumption and make us really think about our choices. Want cake? Then bake. And use the very, very best ingredients you can afford. Think about the quality of flour. The sugar. The fat. The eggs. What fruit or vegetable can be added? Zucchini, pumpkin, carrot, apple, orange, blueberry and many others can go into cakes and muffins.

Marinated meat? Buy fresh meat and whip up the marinade at home. Choose tip-top ingredients. In this era when every other website seems to have recipes, it’s not hard to find the information on how to make things yourself. Why have we given away our power to others? It is so simple to make these products ourselves and to know exactly what goes into them. I’ve found that when I take the time to do it myself, it makes a difference not only to the quality of the fare but also the amount I use. I’ve made  my own tomato sauce—also known as ketchup—a few times and it is quite a time-consuming exercise. It certainly made me think about how much I was using each time I reached for the container.

Of course, every meal doesn’t have to be a marathon. It takes less than 10 minutes to throw together a delicious salad, and that’s something we should do at least once every day. We should eat produce. Some fruit every day and vegetables including a whole host of greens. Raw. Steamed. Roasted. Raw nuts and seeds. If we want them salted and roasted, we do that ourselves—and use the best macrobiotic or Himalayan salt for the job.

Why shouldn’t we take the time to do these things ourselves? Food is nourishment, and food preparation is an important part of the process. We are grounded when we prepare our own food and we are even more in touch with our food and the earth if we grow it ourselves. Making our meals from single ingredients can be a time of creativity and satisfaction. We can set the table beautifully and have a true dining experience—unhurried, enjoyable, nurturing.

If we’re so busy we have to buy takeaway, we need to rethink the quality of our lives and make a conscious decision to slow down.  Food is a necessity but also a pleasure. Our homes should revolve around the kitchen, as they did in ages past. Not around the TV room.

I have it on good authority that when I was a baby learning to crawl then learning to walk, I didn’t give up at the first obstacle.The fact that I couldn’t do it right straight away apparently didn’t phase me. Not being perfect the first time I tried wasn’t an issue. And then I wasn’t perfect the second time I tried. Or the seventy-second time, I suppose. (Well, maybe I got it right a few times in between. I’m not that slow a learner!)

So when I do things less than perfectly now or I have a major fall from grace, the lesson is clear. I need to let go of my learned behaviours and revert to the attitudes of my babyhood, when what I had to do was clear in my mind and there was never any question that I was going to keep trying until I got it right.

If I can regain that steadfast focus I had as a child, a fall will simply be the trigger for renewed determination. It will not be a failure—just a fall.  As old Winston Churchill said, “Never give up.” Or to put it in American author Maya Angelou’s words, “We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.”

That’s why, although I’m less than perfect every day, I keep showing up, thinking about my health and trying until I get it right. Making new habits with food takes time. It may take many falls. I think it really is a case of get over it, get up and get on with it.

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.