When I started this blog at the beginning of the year, I was full of ardent intent to create a simple and sensible guide to eating and living well. It started off as planned: alongside the blogging, I ate three sensible and delicious meals a day with the odd nutritious snack (almonds, an apple, a couple of dried apricots) thrown in for good measure. Generally, I felt light and happy.

But at some point between then and now, I became seduced, and utterly so, by the roguish promises of health food blogs. Admittedly, this fate is hard to avoid if you spend your evenings scouring the internet for interesting and nutritious recipes because most of these are on health blogs promoting (probably paid to promote) all sorts of faddish ingredients. Both my ongoing penchant for ‘clean’ foods and hard-to-shake-off habit of looking for magic-bullet foods had weakened my resistance.

Whatever – because, it came to be that I was in the vegan supermarket spending EUR 50 on five items and sprinkling (extortionately expensive) kale powder into my daily green smoothie, which obviously had chia seeds in too.

As always,  a few things came together – the disturbing increase in our weekly food bills;  my distaste for the impracticality of churning up normal food into baby food each morning; and a surprising extra kilo or two on the bathroom scales – to create a helpful inner cacophony of “you’re being absurd!”. It’s true; I was. A far cry indeed from this blog’s motto of “eating thoughtfully and effortlessly”.

The sage advice in Joanna Blythaman’s highly recommendable “What to Eat” joined in the chorus. This book should become a bible for all food lovers; full, as it is, of well-researched information about where our food comes from, ways to cook it, what health benefits (or not) it might have, and the environmental impact of its production and delivery to our supermarket shelves. A daily dose of pesticide-ridden Chilean blueberries, required by my (and most) green smoothie recipes, seemed suddenly grotesque.

So enough is enough. Expensive chia seeds (though rather nice) will become a weekly not daily affair. The blueberries can wait until summer. Almond butter should only ever be measured out by the spoonful, not the cup. A diet reliant on all these alluring ingredients is as mad and greedy as a BLT for breakfast, a chicken sandwich for lunch and a cheap steak for dinner.

With my conviction that the vast majority of health food blog writers do not eat what they preach strengthened still further (too many dates and coconut chia-seed energy balls make the thinnest of us fat and no-one should eat a trayful of sweet potato raw brownies … ), I resolve once again to become sensible. There is nothing wrong with a small bowl of unsweetened porridge topped by a sprinkling of walnuts, and a free range boiled egg for breakfast – indeed much right. What are shop-bought kale chips and sticky energy balls, if not yet more processed food, cloaked in healthy clothing – the unsalted baby carrot crisps for grown ups; in short, silly food. And it turns out most green smoothies – whatever the recipe- are an unappealing sludgy brown.