Welcome to your 2024 Veggie Portal!

Want to mainline more veg? Without sacrificing your personality or your wallet?

Photographed by Jo Murphy

If New Year rezzies feel like chokeweed inching over your psyche, Taking the Hell out of Healthy is for you. Every month, we'll recruit badass healthy ingredients to rock your kitchen and your body in 2024. No penance. Just pleasure.

A healthy diet is not about restriction – it's about inclusion. Anyone notice that dieting doesn't seem to be a terribly effective route to losing excess weight? An industry does not grow into a €60 billion bonanza by permanently solving the problem it is designed to address.

If you're going to count something, count colours not calories. We now know that a diverse diet with a good spectrum of colourful ingredients strengthens our gut microbiome and ensures a good range of phytochemicals. I like recruiting those burly phytochemicals - think of them as Pacman of the bloodstream.

Photo by Sven Mieke on Unsplash

When you start including loads of new flavours and wholegrains into your kitchen, your health will begin to look after itself without the fight of a prohibitive diet. My only demand is that you have fun and baptise your kitchen with unadulterated giddiness. I want to awaken your inner Gwynnie (minus her wallet. And her yoni buckets).

Cooking for yourself goes beyond physical nourishment. Like any hobby, it offers emotional nourishment too. Cooking is how I show love and appreciation to the people around me. It is a form of self-respect and empowerment because eating well is not just about upgrading your food choices. It's about upgrading your life.

Yep. The stuff we eat and drink turns into us. Think about that. Every mineral, every fat, every fibre that we get from our meals is used by our bodies in some way to build or repair. Putting good stuff in means we increase our chances of living longer, fuller lives with rosier cheeks and tinglier toes.

So be good to your body. You're the one who has to live in it. As William Shakespeare almost once said, "Dude who spends little time on health, will one day spend much time on illness."

Photo Ruth Calder Potts