Nutritionist Claire Turnbull wants to finally take the overwhelm out of wellbeing – here she talks us through her new hub with the Cancer Society, and the small, no-guilt changes to nutrition, snacking and sleep that actually stick.
Capsule x Cancer Society
Claire Turnbull has been in and around the health and wellbeing industry since she was 15 – first as a health aide, later as a dietitian, and these days running her team at Mission Nutrition. Cancer has touched her life the way it has for so many of us, and her dad is on his own journey with it right now over in the UK, so she’s doing her best to support him from afar.
It’s part of the reason why she’s glad to be working with the Cancer Society – but if you’re bracing yourself for a lecture, don’t. What Claire is interested in is the opposite of fear and extremes – it’s the small, doable, genuinely sustainable stuff: the everyday wellbeing that helps you feel better, have more energy and look after yourself without turning your whole life upside down. That’s the thinking behind Everyday Wellbeing Made Simple, the campaign and online hub she’s created with the Cancer Society. We sat down to talk through what “simple” actually looks like.
Kia ora, Claire! “Everyday Wellbeing Made Simple” is a lovely promise, because wellbeing can feel like anything but. What does that phrase mean to you?
Wellbeing often seems really extreme, and expensive, and like it’s only about nutrition and exercising a lot. But complete wellbeing has lots of different aspects: your sleep, how you eat, how you move, managing stress, connection, and having a sense of meaning and purpose. My first video actually talks through those six aspects (see below). It’s so easy to get lost in the weeds of it all and feel paralysed, and then do nothing. This campaign is about finding small things you can actually maintain, because there’s no point doing something for six weeks or three months. When you do something that lasts, that’s when you get better results, and you feel better.
Progress over perfection feels like the thread running through all of this then, right?
Exactly. We’re human beings, and you don’t have to get things perfect to have good wellbeing. So much of the podcast and sciencey stuff out there is really granular, all protocols and optimisation, and we lose the fact that everything needs to be in balance. You can be healthy and still have the odd chocolate bar, and eat out with your friends. Movement needs to be enjoyable. It’s about what you do most of the time.
Part of that is eating more plant-based foods at home and improving the quality of your snacks – there’s actually recent research estimating that around a quarter of our calories come from snacks, so about a quarter of what we eat is between meals! People really underestimate that. When they’re trying to eat better, they get fixated on their meals, “I’ll just have salad and tuna for lunch,” but they forget about what they have in between.
So what does a “good enough” day of eating actually look like for a busy woman who isn’t going to spend her Sunday meal-prepping?
Having five or six servings of vegetables is the absolute priority, and protein at as many of your meals and snacks as you can. And, also, giving yourself permission to eat. One of the challenges for women is that we’ve been taught we need to eat less, that we can’t eat too much, so acknowledge your appetite and that it changes, particularly across the month. It’s not about less, it’s about adding more of the nourishing foods: the vegetables, the protein, the less-processed carbohydrates. The high-volume, less-processed foods that actually fill you up.
Lots of us fall off track, then feel too guilty to start again, so we wait for a Monday that never quite comes. How do you get back on the horse without the guilt spiral?
I’m a big believer that there is no wagon. We have this idea of having “done well enough” or not, but what even is that? Every day is a new opportunity to balance out your eating. Some days are easier than others, but the biggest thing is managing your environment so that eating well is as easy as possible and having the food in your house that supports your goals. I’m a nutritionist and I sometimes eat ice cream and desserts, but I don’t do that most of the time at home. That’s for when I go out for dinner, or I’m on holiday, or at a birthday party and I really feel like it. At home we just don’t have those foods sitting there really easy and accessible at five o’clock every night. Your environment supports your choices.
You’ve pulled all of this together into an online hub with the Cancer Society. What was the goal, and what will people find there?
The goal was to make it really simple to make some changes to your wellbeing that have the biggest impact. It’s wellbeing information that’s practical and takes cost into consideration. It’s a huge part of my mission to make wellbeing affordable and accessible to everybody, because it shouldn’t be something only for people who have a lot of money. And it’s about highlighting the key things that are really going to move the needle, the changes that will work for everybody.
It focuses on three things: simple snacks, eating well on a budget, and rethinking alcohol. What made those the priorities, when you could have filled encyclopaedias?
For me, having done this for 26 years, these are simply the biggest areas people struggle with. Snacking, like I said, is about a quarter of what people eat. With alcohol, a lot of people don’t know what the other choices are beyond water or a fizzy drink, which options are better and which aren’t, so they get confused. And finances are such a barrier, especially the last couple of years, so that’s just where it has to start.
Then, alongside those, there are the six aspects of wellbeing, helping people understand it’s so much more than how you eat and move. Sleep is critical, particularly if you want to eat well, because sleep influences your appetite and the decisions you make around food and exercise, so it has to come first. There’s also a short webinar on the hub about managing fatigue, because when I ask people how they are, the most common answer is “I’m really tired.” It’s practical tips around sleep, and the nutrition to focus on if you’re feeling really tired.
Eating well can feel expensive right now. What are a few of your affordable hero ingredients, the ones you always have on hand?
Eggs and oats are big ones, and pulses: lentils, chickpeas, kidney beans. Frozen vegetables too, I always have them, you can do so much with them. And the resources give you ideas for how to use it all!
The hub has so many ideas in it. How would you suggest people actually approach it, without feeling overwhelmed all over again?
Guilt doesn’t drive positive change at all. What I’d really encourage is working on one thing at a time. The hub has all sorts of ideas, but in the same way you don’t learn to drive in a day, you can’t overhaul the way you’ve learned to eat overnight. Eating well is knowledge, but it’s also a skill, something you practise until it becomes part of who you are. That’s the missing piece, really. The perception is that knowledge creates change, but knowledge is just the first step. It’s the practice that embeds it, so it starts to happen without you even thinking about it.
You can explore Claire’s full set of practical, no-extremes resources, including her short videos on snacking, eating well on a budget and rethinking alcohol, plus the webinar on managing fatigue, at the Everyday Wellbeing Made Simple hub. Head to cancersocietywellbeing.org.nz to find the one small change you could start with this week.