Healthy Eating, Melbourne-Style

Whether you’re ready for it or not, there will come a day where you realise your adult body hates you. One moment you're a firm-assed, soft-skinned, occasional binge-drinking social chain smoker, and the next you’re dreading singlet top season, monitoring spider veins, nursing a caffeine addiction and kicking a nicotine dependency.

Thanks to your intimate relationship with the internet, this time of realisation will likely coincide with a plethora of advertisements for clean eating detox programs and organic fruit and vegetable delivery. In trying times like these, it’s important to remember that you cannot win, and what better time than the first week of 2014 to grow up, admit defeat and buy your very first bunch of organic kale? Find below the beginnings of a guide to health food trends in Melbourne.

Juices and Smoothies

Aunt Maggies

One health food trend to rule them all. It's infiltrated its way into the minds and bodies of regular, unassuming folks like you and I, and few managed to escape 2013 without subconsciously learning about green juices and smoothies. The Holy Grail for nourishment, Aunt Maggies is your one-stop shop for all things raw, organic, clean, or anything else you might find hashtagged on a fitspo Instagram account. This specialty grocery store is reppin’ in Malvern, St. Kilda and Fitzroy, and boasts an in-store juice bar with a range of offensively healthy beverages in a non-offensive environment, perfect for first-timers.

270-272 Carlisle Street, Balaclava; 188 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy; 72 Glenferrie Road, Malvern; www.auntmaggies.com.au

Pressed Juices

Popping up in areas of high yummy-mummy population like South Yarra, Brighton, Armadale and Hawthorn, the Pressed Juice stores are more at the intermediate to advanced levels on the scale of vegetable juice intensity. Apparently, their process of cold-pressing juice extracts up to five times more vitamins, minerals and enzymes than any other juicing method, and legend has it that upon consumption, the drinker instantly sheds their dead skin shell and emerges as a tanned, fit 18-year-old on the Lorne foreshore.

That last part might have been a slight exaggeration, but I maintain that specifically buying, transporting and preserving a Greens 5 juice (celery, cucumber, kale, lettuce, parsley, spinach, lemon, ginger, carrot) for the last morning of Meredith was the best decision I made in 2013.

1230 High Street, Armadale; 25 Carpenter Street, Brighton; 785 Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn; Shop 4, 286 Toorak Road, South Yarra; Shop 2, 15 Collins Street, Melbourne; www.pressedjuices.com.au

Health Food Stores

Terra Madre

One of Melbourne’s biggest and bestest health food stores is Northcote’s Terra Madre, boasting a huge range and providing the community with the greatest quality of organic foods at affordable prices, comparable to that of major supermarkets. Every morning organic fruit and vegetables are purchased fresh from the markets. Take that Woolies! Attached is also a wellness clinic providing treatments including massage, reiki, kinesiology and naturopathy. Some say that each time you enter Terra Madre your life expectancy extends by a day. Difficult to prove, but anything’s worth a shot at this stage — right?

103 High Street, Northcote; terramadre.com.au

The Staple Store

High praise of The Staple Store can be heard echoing through the corridors of Melbourne health food temples (ie south-eastern suburb yoga studios). Run by the incredibly affable naturopath Catie Gett, The Staple Store showcases the best wholefoods Gett can get. Along with the ability to locate any of the obscure ingredients popular in healthy recipe books, the Staple Store offers wonderful advice on how and why to eat and prepare their vast array of nutritious and delicious wholefoods. Take note that The Staple Store is entirely plastic-free, so BYO Tuppaware for take-home grains.

19 Glen Eira Road, Ripponlea

Eating Out

Yong Green Food

Despite the new life in your eyes and spring in your step from liquid spinach and chia seeds, sometimes all you want is a place where someone else will cook a meal for you. Unfortunately, thanks to your wonderful new lifestyle, health-conscious options for eating out seem limited to eating a bag of mixed lettuce at the bus stop outside Coles. But fear not! Heaven is a place on earth on Brunswick Street, where eating raw is the name of game and Yong Green Food is your big sister who always wins. The two Korean sisters who run this lovely little restaurant have a wonderful menu of raw/uncooked dishes including raw alternatives to lasagna, pad thai, burgers and sweet things.

421 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy

Silo by Joost

For the ultimate self-congratulatory pat on the back, Silo by Joost in Hardware Lane really is the final feather in your healthy lifestyle cap. A project established in 2013 by eco-advocate and artist Joost Bakker in collaboration with cafe veteran Danny Colls, Silo by Joost is an entirely no-waste cafe. Passionate about creating a wholesome eating experience with an emphasis on sustainable preparation and consumption, the thoughtful menu changes seasonally. There’s not even a waste bin here for crying out loud, with all food scraps and paper rubbish being turned into fertiliser in a waste dehydrator which then gets sent back to the cafe’s local suppliers. You won’t be able to wipe the smug smile off your face upon dining here.

123 Hardware Street, Melbourne; byjoost.com/silo