Why Helen?

When I was about seventeen or eighteen, one of my classes at my all-girls Anglican high school was called Lifeskills.  Lifeskills was the senior version of Religious Education or Pastoral Care and we took mini courses on all kinds of things from cooking to women's health to coping with the grieving process.  One of the mini courses was called "Things Grandma should have taught you" and the idea of the class is that we'd learn how to change a tire and how to knit, that sort of thing.  One of the sessions boiled down to an open Q & A with the teacher and the direction it took turned to diet and health.  The teacher really wanted to emphasise to us how and why diets don't work and I remember her saying that if there was any one diet that did work there wouldn't be so many diet books on the shelves - it's a never ending market because people are always willing to try the next big diet, even if they've tried ten previously with no success.  "If you want to be rich," she said, "write a diet book."
It's an idea I entertained for a while.  I imagined myself writing up a diet book under a pseudonym in my free time at university and being set for life once I graduated.  It would be called the "Helen of Troy Diet" and would appeal to the notion that you could be as attractive as the most beautiful woman from mythology just by eating lots of fresh fruit and olives.  Of course, in real life my "free time" at university was taken up with working and partying and putting on musicals and I know now and did then that I could never publish something I didn't really believe in.  The ideas inspiring the diet itself however are something I can still get behind.

Even before paleo was a term anyone had heard of, I knew that going back to a more old-fashioned style of eating must be healthier.  This notion of eating like actual cavemen though, before the development of agriculture, has always seemed a bit fairytale to me.  And while I like the idea of eating lots of fresh vegetables, and limiting "carbs" and processed foods I don't understand the paleo obsession with saturated fat, it goes right against all my food instincts.  On the other hand the thought of eating like, say, the ancient civilizations - well, that's a little different, I mean, they had bread!  And wine! Plus, my mum spent a lot of time in Spain when she was young and we've always had olives and tapas platters as treat foods so it seems natural for me to have a more Mediterranean palate.  Once I got my head around all these thoughts - liking some of the principles of paleo but finding it overall counter intuitive, wanting to eat a mostly Mediterranean diet but not have to rule out cookies forever, I came to realise what I wanted out of my dietary lifestyle.  I don't want to be on the "Helen of Troy Diet", I don't want to be on a diet at all, I want to eat like Helen of Troy did.

I want to be realistic.  My inspiration for healthier eating comes from before the industrial revolution but I live in a time well beyond it, in which food has become a commercial product.  I want to eat naturally while remembering there are benefits to a modern diet.  Thanks to globalisation, I don't have to rely on the changing of the seasons to get variety and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups aren't the only great food to come from America - the Ancient Greeks didn't have foods like tomatoes, peppers or potatoes so there's no benefit in trying to eat "authentically".  My goals are to eat mindfully, for fuel and for enjoyment while channeling the dietary balance of ancient times.  And that is what I mean by eating like Helen, and that's why I've named my blog Eat Like Helen of Troy.


Further reading:
http://www.patient.co.uk/health/health-benefits-of-the-mediterranean-diet
http://www.patient.co.uk/health/how-to-follow-the-mediterranean-diet