I Want the Dessert. I Also Want to Live to 90. Surely We Can Negotiate.

I have an issue with the phrase “guilt-free dessert.”

If the cake hasn’t committed a crime, why are we involving guilt?

I ordered tiramisu.

I didn’t commit tax fraud.

Yet somewhere along the way, eating became strangely moral.

Salad is good.

Cake is bad.

You were good today because you skipped dessert.

You were naughty because you ate a croissant.

It’s a croissant.

Calm down.

I say this as someone who would quite like to remain alive for a long time.

I want decent blood pressure. Functional knees. A heart that continues doing its little job well into old age.

I also want the cheesecake.

Surely modern medicine can find some middle ground here.

Apparently lunch has KPIs now

Being interested in nutrition online is exhausting.

Protein.

Fibre.

Calories.

Macros.

Micronutrients.

Blood glucose.

Eating windows.

Gut health.

Ultra-processed foods.

Omega ratios.

Someone on Instagram is currently furious that I haven’t mentioned seed oils yet.

A plate of food used to ask one main question:

Are you hungry?

Now I’m expected to look at pasta like an analyst reviewing quarterly performance.

Where’s the protein?

What’s the fibre?

How will this affect glucose?

Could we replace the pasta with courgette?

No.

That last suggestion has crossed a line.

I wanted pasta.

I don’t want health advice from someone who appears frightened of a banana

This is where nutrition culture occasionally loses me.

There is always somebody online explaining why an extremely normal food is secretly destroying you.

Fruit has sugar.

Bread has carbs.

Cheese has saturated fat.

Coffee affects cortisol.

Rice spikes glucose.

Chocolate is obviously having the time of its life ruining everything.

Follow enough nutrition accounts and eventually the safest dinner appears to be a glass of water eaten with twelve almonds in complete silence.

Then six months later, someone publishes a video explaining why almonds are problematic.

Wonderful.

I’ll photosynthesise.

But “everything in moderation” is also annoyingly convenient

Here’s where I have to betray my fellow dessert people.

We love the word moderation because it can mean absolutely anything.

“I eat cake in moderation.”

How often?

“Moderately often.”

That’s not a number.

And no, eating vegetables on Wednesday doesn’t create nutritional credit you can exchange for unlimited cheesecake on Saturday.

Bodies are irritatingly unimpressed by our accounting systems.

Health does matter.

What we repeatedly eat matters.

How much we eat matters.

Movement matters.

Sleep matters.

All the boring things remain boringly true.

But there’s an important word in there:

repeatedly.

Maybe we should judge diets more like playlists

One terrible song doesn’t make a terrible playlist.

One brilliant song doesn’t make a brilliant one either.

It’s what you keep playing.

Food seems similar.

The salad you reluctantly ate once isn’t going to transform your health.

The chocolate cake you enthusiastically demolished at your friend’s birthday probably isn’t going to destroy it either.

The interesting question is what ordinary Tuesday looks like.

That’s where most of life happens.

If Tuesday usually contains vegetables, fruit, decent protein, enough fibre and food that resembles what it originally was, I’m considerably less interested in interrogating Saturday night’s sticky toffee pudding.

Eat it.

Preferably warm.

Ice cream on the side.

This is not medical advice. This is excellent logistical advice.

Food has another job we keep forgetting

Food keeps us alive.

Obviously important.

But humans have spent thousands of years making food unnecessarily delicious.

We could have stopped at nutrition.

We did not.

We invented dumplings.

Biryani.

Fresh bread.

Tacos.

Tiramisu.

Mangoes with chilli.

Cheese in quantities that suggest somebody was going through something.

Entire cultures are partially held together by the question:

“Have you eaten?”

Food is birthdays and first dates and weddings and Sunday lunches and recipes your mother doesn’t measure because apparently measurements are a sign of weakness.

Reducing all of that to calories feels technically correct and completely incomplete.

A meal can be nutritionally imperfect and still be very good for your life.

So yes, I’ll have dessert

Not every night.

Not because I “earned” it.

Not because tomorrow I’ll punish myself with a salad.

And definitely not because it’s my “cheat meal,” a phrase that makes dinner sound like I’m having an affair with chocolate.

I’ll have it because sometimes dessert is part of a good evening.

Then tomorrow I’ll eat normally.

That’s the negotiation.

Not health versus pleasure.

Not broccoli versus cake in some ridiculous nutritional cage fight.

Just a life where most of what I eat helps my body stay around for a long time…

and some of what I eat makes staying around for a long time feel particularly worthwhile.

If I make it to 90, I’d quite like someone to bring cake.

And please don’t make it sugar-free.

At that point, I’ve waited long enough.