Sensible Stress Free Nutrition & Healthy Eating

Nutrition is complicated, and trying to eat healthily has become a minefield of advice that changes daily!

But it really doesn’t need to be this difficult 🙂

You can pretty much sum up healthy eating in one short sentence: Eat a broad range of fresh foods.

If you genuinely just do that then you’re far ahead of a lot of people. Because that simple phrase encompasses quite a lot in a few short words:-

  • Fresh food means avoiding processed foods. And it’s hard to eat too much sugar (or even any refined sugar) if you’re not eating processed foods.
  • A broad range means you’re eating lots of different types of vegetables, fruit, dairy, pulses, beans, fish and meat. If you genuinely eat a broad range it’s hard to get too much or not enough of anything!
  • It’s also wonderfully uncomplicated.

And we know this simplicity works. It’s easy to understand, and hard to forget. Simple rules. And it can shown benefits in every area of your health from skin health (age spots and acne marks) through to brain function and energy levels.

Information Overload

This is probably the biggest problem with healthy eating. There is way too much advice, coming from way too many different directions.

Should we eat more or less protein? What sources are good or bad? Are nuts better than whey protein? Is detoxing a good thing? What should we eat to detox? Should we sleep more or less? What about superfoods – are they real? Are there healthy sources of fat for vegetarians?

I think the best way to overcome all this confusion is to choose your sources very carefully.

The first thing you can cull for sure is the daily media. Newspapers and news programs thrive on bite-size headline driven advice – they will happily giev you new food advice every day if it sounds interesting.”The new berry that keeps you looking younger” – “Eat this weird algae and keep cancer at bay” – “Can this incredible jellyfish toxin really stop arthritis” – you know the kind of stuff!

But they really don’t care about the real story or the deeper analysis. Their researchers have spent 5 minutes reading the summary of a new research paper – they haven’t read the details of it to really understand any of it, or any other studies that may even contradict the advice.

These are the same people responsible for the advice to drink 8 glasses of water a day. They didn’t bother to read the study properly to discover that what the research really said was 8 glasses including what you get from food! Which makes up about half of that.

The daily media are really not interested in our health, just whatever keeps our attention long enough to see the adverts. That’s it. Drop them as the unreliable sensationalists that they have demonstrated themselves to be 🙂

Facebook has become a very similar story. Unless you very carefully choose which pages to follow, you can end up with a stream of shallow headline based information that is highly misleading. Vote with your feet and unfollow those pages that care more about being sensational than informative.

Forget The Fads

The latest ‘fad’ is rarely a good way to go. Today it might be low carb, paleo or coffee with butter in it. But not so long ago it was all low fat and calorie counting. Instead we could just ditch all this confusion and “eat a broad range of fresh foods”. If we’d been doing that all along, life would have been much simpler and the advice wouldn’t keep changing.

Some Fun Recipes

So all in the name of eating a broader range of foods, try some of these:-

These are all recipes that I would consider ‘healthy’. Some even border on ‘trendy’ – but they are born out of the idea of nothing more than just eating a broad range of fresh food. Sometimes life really can be that simple.

Some More Interesting Stuff