Healthy eating?

The fact that the concept of 'healthy eating' is always in flux drives me insane. When I was a pre-teen in the early 2000s, I started on low-carbohydrate diets because that's what my mother was doing at the time. When my mum was young, low-fat diets were in vogue. Right now we're witnessing the rise of high-fat no-sugar diets. Then there are the people who cut out gluten, flour, dairy, red meat when they don't need to, according to whatever the fad of the day is. This is spurred on by food fads, with protein powder, avocado, sweet potato, and kale this year's drug of choice for many self-proclaimed 'clean eaters'.

As a result, 'healthy eating' always seems to have a vague kind of morality attached to it. There has been much written on the virtuosity of discipline as a reason for why thin and toned is glorified in our culture and in many others, so I won't repeat it here. Fat is lazy, slovenly, and less successful, etc etc. Thin is in control and sexualised, etc etc. These stereotypes are baseless so we should all just get on with the show, etc etc.

Despite knowing all this, I still find myself in knots over the concept of what a healthy, balanced diet should look like. Confession: I hate side salads. I am enamoured of many dishes filled to the brim with vegetables, from stirfries and stews to roasts and salad sandwiches, but when I am eating a meal that does not in itself have many vegetables in it, I dislike having to add a bit of shredded cabbage or tomato on the side to up the health levels. Yet without that bit of green or orange or purple, I feel that my meal is unhealthy and unbalanced and I may as well have eaten a burger with chips.

Part of this kind of all-or-nothing thinking is a remnant from the old diet mentality. Salad is a meal that I forced myself to eat on a string of diets, usually low-carb ones, and right now I blanch at the idea of having to eat ANY kind of salad. It's also partially the fact that I don't like the taste of lettuce, something I didn't accept for a long time because I don't think of myself as a fussy eater. However, thinking back to when I was a kid, even then most salads seemed like an annoying parent-mandated distraction from the main event, like putting on sunscreen at the beach and having to wait 20 minutes before you can go in the water.

(Oddly enough, there is a visual aspect to it too. Last night I ate banh xeo, which is basically a meat-stuffed pancake with some bean sprouts and onion, but because there was a bit of green spring onion in the batter that I could see, I felt like I was eating vegetables. Uh, no.)

Both my therapist and my nutritionist have given me generalised meal plans that suggest that vegetables should constitute 1/3 to 1/2 of lunch and dinner.  But intuitively, I wouldn't eat that amount of vegetables. Fruit, sure, I am a fruit junkie (though since I did 'low sugar' last year I've stopped eating as much, which is sad). So do I try to change what my intuition tells me in the name of health? I know that when I don't eat veggies for a while I do crave them, just not that much! Also, I had to actively learn about nutrition after moving out of home almost five years ago, so it's definitely a skill rather than something natural to us.

I think there are really three problems here: a) the guilt I experience when I don't eat the recommended amount of vegetables --> 'unhealthy' --> 'bad' --> 'failure'; b) trying to understand what my body truly needs, which is difficult when 'health' is such a loaded concept; and c) being scared of salad because I associate it so deeply with dieting.

Just another thing to keep in mind. Sigh.