Is it impossible to find a healthy restaurant in Scotland?

For about a month, I didn’t even glance at a vegetable, though I could see a putrified cucumber eyeing me accusingly from the neglected bottom tray of the fridge.

Over the holidays, I imbibed a youth hostel dorm room’s worth of pigs in blankets.

I realised it was going to be hard to get back to normal when I started stock-piling half-price chocolate selection boxes.

Thus, I’ve promised to pull my socks up this January. So far, it’s going okay, and I’m beginning to shed the panic that I’m halfway along the path to type two diabetes.

My main problem isn’t confined to my household diet, but involves eating out. When it comes to casual but healthy dining, there is hardly anywhere to go.

I’ve had to pause my usual lunch and dinner habits.

I used to eat out at least three times a week, but not any longer. That’s brilliant for my depleted wallet, but I don’t necessarily want to eat a la casa all the time.

It wouldn’t be fair on my husband, who does all the cooking, and I know when his mood starts to deteriorate and go more Ramsay than Lawson. It suddenly gets a lot more smash-y, crashy and sweary in the kitchen. He gets aggro with inanimate objects, like the shonky potato peeler. If it had feelings, it’d be weeping into the drawer and asking the wooden spoon for hugs.

That behaviour indicates that he needs a break from pan rattling, and I don’t think he’d be tempted by anything that I could throw together.

My creations would give him ‘the boak’, as we say in Scotland.

However, I’m not being tempted out by any destinations that would suit my current virtuous 2025 mindset.

I want to be inspired, but I feel like healthy food just isn’t trendy at the moment. It’s become harder to track down.

It’d be nice to find a place that offered more than the usual token wholesome menu option. I’ve found that, if I do order that, it tends to also be a downsized portion, when I still want to be well fed.

Even avo on toast seems to have had its day. That’s fair enough, I suppose. After all, it’s the stubbornly evil reptilian fruit that refuses to ripen for 12 weeks, before it turns to blackened mulch in a millisecond. That feels like my ageing process, too.

Anyway, it seems that nobody can get enough of fast casual crowd-pleasers like burgers, pulled pork or waffles, noodles, mac’n’cheese and fish and chips.

You can have lard every second of the day. In Edinburgh, we seem to have a new branch of Pepe’s peri-peri chicken on every corner.

However, this kind of stuff doesn’t really work as comfort food, should you start worrying about your cholesterol or the recent rise in early onset cancers, which may be linked to lifestyle.

I get it, eating out should be a treat, but I often choose these things and just think, meh. They have a taste of MSG and nihilism.

This January, and hopefully beyond, I want Ottolenghi-esque zing and spice, crunch and snap, without the postprandial sensation of sliding into a food coma.

This may change, come February, but the cravings are strong.

The more that I see heavy beige and brown food everywhere I go, the more I miss places like Edinburgh’s Californian restaurant, Redwood, which closed down some years ago.

They knew what to do with a lentil. Or, my most beloved Baked Potato Shop - now shut - where they served taters that had the same girth as Haggis, Edinburgh Zoo’s newly famous baby pygmy hippo.

I get wistful over Susie’s, which was once on Nicolson Street and where they served vast veggie feasts. They opened a smaller branch a couple of years ago, but it sadly closed down recently. See. Sign of the times.

If I’m eating out at this time of year, I often find myself opting for sushi, because it’s comparatively healthy and at least I’m getting my omegas.

The last inventively healthy-ish thing I ate out was on the tailend of the festive season, when I was at the wonderful Baern, at Bowhouse in Fife. I opted for a red onion soup with pickled apples bobbing on top, and it was absolutely beautiful.

However, seeing something like that on a menu seems a relative rarity.

It’s not the chefs’ fault. Veggies are expensive. Also, their job isn’t to look after your heart, and body. That’s down to you.

The cook’s role is to make the food taste delicious, and that usually means adding copious amounts of butter, cream and salt.

Not that I’m aiming for weight loss, when it comes to this health kick. I don’t believe in diets, and I’m very grateful that in Scotland we don’t have to display calories on menus, like they do at larger premises in England. That’s the greatest buzzkill.

Instead, I’m currently on an eat-the-rainbow tip.

I want to be more of an omnivore, and do nuts, seeds, all the grains that I can’t pronounce, neon-stemmed chard, pongy sauerkraut and kimchi, dates, rye bread, berries, shiitake, turmeric, ginger, lime and all the other often neglected geegaws that could be heaped together to make the greatest salad of all time.

Those ingredients are better than fried chicken, in my book, but you rarely see most of them on actual menus.

I suppose, for now, I’m just going to have to eat whatever the sweary pan rattler is cooking indoors.

I’ll get him a new potato peeler first.