Getting older can be a pain, but it beats the alternative.

My parents are in their 80s and 90s respectively, and my work brings me into close contact with people past retirement age.  This is teaching me some valuable lessons about how to get older.  One of these lessons is that it's not your age that matters, it's how much you enjoy life, and to what extent your physical state permits you to enjoy life.  I have "done" for people in their nineties who have dancing as their main hobby.  Equally well I have worked for people in their early seventies who are basically past their sell-by date.

I am in the second half of my fifties, and starting to look at my sixties as they zoom towards me at scary speed.  They don't worry me, so long as they bring optimism, pleasure, enjoyment and above all peace of mind with them.  They can't do that if I am spending my emotional energy worrying about my body and fighting increasingly poor health.

I'm starting to creak a bit, as it happens.  A knee that grumbles for a week or two from time to time.  A bit of eczema here and there.  Nothing major, fingers crossed, but warning signs that perhaps I have not looked after myself quite as much as I might.

I've not done too badly so far by the average British standard; I gave up smoking for the last time 15+ years ago, drink alcohol infrequently, take prescription drugs only when I really have to (every few years so far), and get mostly-regular exercise by walking my dogs almost every day.  I don't eat any animal products at all, but I can't claim to eat healthily apart from that.  I am one of those "mythical" creatures - a fat vegan.  The weight piled on when I stopped smoking and started eating and drinking for England, and although a fair chunk has disappeared over the last year or so, I still have about 4.5 stones to lose to be at my ideal weight.  I don't diet, because dieting is in part how I got so big in the first place, so any loss has to be through sensible eating, good exercise and the occasional (rare) stomach upset.

I've been lucky with my health - no hospitalisations, no regular medications, I didn't even have a blood test until I was 50 and bitten by a tick!  So I have rather taken my good health for granted over the decades, but I think that now is the time to make sure that it continues rather than just hoping that it does.

I am in no doubt whatever that the foundation of good health is good nutrition.  It's a shame that doctors receive so little training in this area, but it is as it is, and anyone who wants to do the best for their health needs to take responsibility for their nutrition and do some serious research.  Or - find a guru!

I have one of these, my friend the lovely lady K.  She has had her own health challenges and has handled them with grace, the help of her wonderful husband, and good nutrition.  She is now going to be my mentor and moral support while I try to regain and underpin my accustomed good health and retain it into my later years. 

This blog will be of no interest to anyone other than K and me, I suspect, but you are welcome here if I'm wrong.  It will report my food diary - for a while at least, and record my efforts and the success or failure thereof to source and enjoy organic products and dump (most of) the crap that I have been living on for the last few years.

From my amateur standpoint, I reckon there are two elements to nutrition - the stuff you consume and the stuff you don't.  You might be able to get away with a degree of bad habit in either one of those areas, but if you ignore both I think you're going to be in trouble with your health quite quickly.

I've done ok in terms of some of the bad stuff that I don't eat - anything from an animal.  We've been conditioned from birth, most of us, to think of animal products such as meat, milk and eggs as being the backbone of sound nutrition.  I now believe them to be not only unnecessary and cruel, but downright damaging to the human body.  I've not knowingly eaten anything from an animal since June 1999, and when I had my last blood tests something less than 5 years ago, everything was in good working order and no deficiencies reported.  Everything ok there then!

The area in which I fall down, badly, is the good stuff that I don't eat.  I'm a vegetarian who doesn't much like veg, or many fruits.  Well I kind of do like some of them, but they are a lot of effort and not terribly filling, and if there's one thing I like, it's feeling full!  Consequently I will bypass brussels that I have to peel and cook, and which are not filling but very healthy, and instead eat mushy peas from a tin which I don't, and which are, and which aren't.  And - important point this - which cost less.

I am not well off, and I help support a destitute dog rescuer in Romania, from whom I adopted my two young dogs.  I live simply in order that I can help her dogs to live at all, and I don't regret or begrudge that one bit.  But eating cheaply does mean far too much reliance on refined starch.  Cream crackers, white rice/pasta/noodles - all very cheap and on the face of it, filling.  Plus cheap and unhealthy tinned foods, with additives to make your hair curl (or possibly break and fall out, although mine hasn't so far).

A typical day's eating might go something like this:
Breakfast, 2 slices wholemeal toast with Lidl's peanut butter (containing salt and sugar).  Tea with soya milk
Lunch: Lidl's noodles with either half a tin of Lidl's mushy peas or Lidl's baked beans mixed in.
Dinner: a pack of Lidl's chilled sauteed potatoes with onion, oven baked, plus 3 Sainsbury's or Linda McC's sausages and Lidl's tomato ketchup.
Supper: a BIG handful of Lidl's cream crackers.

Cheap crap, with hardly a veg and no fruit in sight.  5 a day?  Lucky to get 5 a week sometimes.  And I know better, I really do.  So now, with K's help. I am going to DO better!

Watch this space.