Last year I was at a meeting in a large UK town. I was finished by 9am. I wanted some breakfast, a fresh snack and a good coffee. I walked up and down the main high street and all through its shopping centre. I could not find one establishment that sold something freshly baked or something cooked with fresh produce. It was either something that had come out of plastic packaging or was a processed form of breakfast. There wasn’t a fruit and veg store, a fresh food bakery – nada.

In a generation so much has changed. When my mum was a kid, processed food wasn’t even a thing. Bread was made from 3 ingredients, you only ate foods in season, plastic wrapping wasn’t used. Nowadays you are made to feel radical if you go processed free, try to eat locally sourced, in season food and want to avoid plastic. We have to go to extreme measures to do what a generation ago was normal.

Real food, Whole food, Organic Foods, Clean Food, Single Ingredient Food (e.g. an apple!), Farm Fresh food. We now have new vocab to describe what a generation ago was…..food.

Processed food manufacturers are happy for us to believe that fresh and real food is prohibitively expensive. Some most definitely are. But we have many options that are affordable (see our £1.19 challenge on Insta – for the price of a McDonalds burger you can get some great fresh options).

The catch usually isn’t cost, though it’s convenience.

Fast foods started slowly nudging their way in to our zeitgeist from the 50’s. Shrink-wrapped produce, home fridges and freezers all extended the time lines of food storage. This was a game changer to households. Daily trips to the shop were replaced by the weekly ‘Big Shop’, microwave meals became en vogue. Tempted by the dream of less prepping and cooking time, we were freed up. Allegedly. By the 1980s, the plastic-wrapped weekly shop we all recognise today was pretty much locked in.

And we now live in an era that doesn’t prioritise food prepping and cooking. Convenience is not only King but completely normalised. Prepping and cooking has been de-valued as a time resource, lost in the economy driven, time is money culture. But all those wonderful cooking and baking shows on TV show me that there must still be a great love of prepping, cooking and baking our own food – why would we happily watch others doing it for hours if there wasn’t an interest? So, how do we get from watching fab meals being cooked on TV to doing it ourselves in our kitchens? To start with we have to: Keep it Simple.

And annoying as it may be, particularly with food, planning is the only option.

So what do we actually plan around to reach those good health goals?

Having studied wellness and nutrition for decades, and seen trends come and go, the same simple things keep coming up. Whether it’s diet for heart health, anti-dementia, preventing diabetes, weight loss – these are the simple things that research keeps proving work:

1. Real food, little to no processed Shop at the edges of the supermarket, where the fridge, the veg and the actual food live; the middle aisles are mostly packaging with snacks inside. Cook once, eat twice: double the batch, tomorrow’s lunch sorts itself. A well-stocked cupboard (beans, eggs, frozen veg, decent olive oil) beats a takeaway on both speed and price.

2. Movement You don’t need a gym membership and lycra (unless you fancy it). You need to move often, not heroically. Get off the bus a stop early. Take the scenic route. Have your next catch-up as a walk instead of a coffee. Bodies were built to potter – so potter.

3. Socialise Research now shows loneliness is as bad for us as a fairly serious smoking habit, which is a horrifying fact and also brilliant news, because the “cure” is just… seeing people. Say yes to the thing. Make the plan. Ring your mate.

4. Managing stress Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between a sabre-toothed tiger and 47 unread emails, it just feels alarm. So give it the occasional break. Put the phone in another room for an hour (the twitch you feel is the point). Step outside. Breathe like you mean it. Boring, free, works.

5. Engagement / purpose The people who thrive into their 90s almost all have one thing in common: a reason to get up. A project, a garden, a grandchild, a cause, a choir. Purpose is protective. So guard the things that light you up like they’re medicine. Because, rather wonderfully, they are.

The above should not cost us more time or money or feel like another thing to do. Talk and walk with a friend and you’ve bagged movement, connection, stress relief and fresh air in one go. Buy one, get three free! Find those habits that pull double/triple duty. Being healthy and vital maybe hasn’t necessarily got harder but it is easier to pass by. The wins – Real food, moving about, your people, a calm-ish nervous system and something to care about. Simple. Not always easy but simple.

So, which one will you start with?

Originally published on Claire’s Substack here.