Three Balanced Meals

Escaping nutritionism

Most people get stuck in nutritionism: zooming in on single nutrients — omega-3s, ketosis, glycaemic load, fat subtypes — until they can no longer see the food. Useful details, yes, but not a useful way to live.

Reality tends to fix this. When life gets busy (kids, work, stress, fatigue), the strategy that holds up stops being “optimal nutrients” and becomes reliable, repeatable food.

Babies do not eat nutrients. They eat real food. They do not follow diets. They eat what is natural and available — and they tend to stay healthy, energetic, and blissfully uninterested in calorie counting. The mechanism here is simple: natural food is what human physiology evolved to process.

Prefer video? The three balanced meals video walkthrough is available on the GNL YouTube channel.

Pollan’s rule that outlives every diet trend

If there is one food book worth reading, many people would point you to Michael Pollan’s Food Rules. It is not written by a nutritionist. It is written by someone with a strong grip on common sense. One conversation with your grandma probably covers 80% of it: meat and two veg is boring, reliable, and weirdly hard to beat.

You only need one line from Pollan:

If you want the longer version, these ten rules tend to be enough to retire every diet book you will ever see:

Simple messages — not easy to follow in the modern food environment, but worth holding as a compass.

Normal eating vs natural eating

This is where many people get quietly derailed, so it is worth defining terms.

Normal eating is consuming food based on marketing, trends, and whatever everyone else happens to be doing.

Natural eating is eating food that has not been heavily processed, has not had artificial ingredients added, and usually grows from the earth or runs on it.

When children follow “normal eating” without a protective home environment, they tend to drift towards the average modern outcome:

• overweight (or swinging between extremes),
• undernourished despite high calorie intake,
• always hungry for sweet food (the overeating switch from the hypoglycaemia page is relevant here),
• tired, constipated, low energy, and low resilience.

But when a home environment supports natural eating, children are far more likely to be:

• a healthy weight for height,
• well nourished and vibrant,
• rarely craving more sweet food,
• digesting normally, every day,
• grateful for food and connected to where it comes from.

This is not easy. The pressure to eat “normally” is relentless — TV, parties, school meals, takeaways, friends’ houses. Many families find they need a deliberate counter-environment at home.

Practical tips for eating naturally

1. Eat what is in the cupboards — so buy natural food and avoid storing ultra-processed options.
2. Cook with kids. Connection to food tends to work better than lectures about food.
3. Grow something. Even a small planter changes perspective.
4. Get grandparents and carers on the same page.
5. Take natural food with you. Many people find that outsourcing meals to the environment is where things go sideways.
6. Use herbs, spices, and seasonings as your only “additives”.

Can you ever eat processed food? Of course. But children learn via monkey see, monkey do. The food environment you model becomes their default.

A useful rule of thumb is 80:20: at least 80% natural food, 20% wiggle room for life. The other diabetes-specific benefit is consistency: the more repeatable the meal structure, the less frustration many people experience.

The base meal structures that reduce chaos

In the Mealtime Insulin Guide, you will find how to manage any style of meal (high-carb, high-fat, low-carb) using elements of Dynamic Glucose Management.

But if you choose either of these two meal structures as a base, they tend to protect health, stabilise glucose, and reduce diabetes distress:

Adults: three balanced meals

Children: three balanced meals plus a snack

What is a balanced meal?

A plate of natural food: half vegetables, the other half split evenly between carbs and protein.

Balanced-meal options (including higher-fat meals) are covered in the Mealtime Insulin Guide.

Still thinking “as long as I count carbs and match insulin, I can eat what I want”? These two graphics are worth considering: