Be better at eating vegetables
Eat Better, Get Healthy Series: Part 1
If you missed the introduction to this 3 part series, check it out here. If you’re curious about cutting down your salt, check out part 2 of the series: 1 week to a low salt diet.
Vegetables. They’re maybe the one food group we don’t eat nearly enough of. And the vegetables we DO eat can be kind of sad.
Maybe they’re old when we buy them or we lose most of the nutrients when we prepare them. A lot of times, we basically just don’t eat enough kinds of vegetables. Sometimes we just pick the ones that have the lowest nutrient profiles.
When we don’t get our recommended 8-10 servings of vegetables (and fruit) a day, we end up missing most of the vitamins and minerals we need to really manage good quality healthy.
I’m all for taking a great multivitamin to get all the nutrients our bodies need. But a multivitamin will NEVER replace the benefits of eating whole foods. Especially if that’s the only thing you’re taking. Multivitamins can only bridge a gap between our needs and our ability to consume. It doesn’t replace that need.
As the author Mark Bittman once said: It’s not the beta-carotene, it’s the carrot.
What that means, is vegetables (ALL plants really – fruit, nuts and beans are included here too) are so much more than their parts. The plan is much more than the vitamins and minerals we can pull out of them and stuff into a multivitamin. When we eat vegetables, we are giving our body everything it needs to function at its best, as designed by nature.
We’ve been told for so long that protein is king and everything else is secondary on the food scale.
But the reality is, no one ever gained too much weight, or got high cholesterol, or saw their blood pressure go up from eating too many vegetables.
That’s why we’re starting at the beginning. With vegetables.
Your Challenge
Double the number of vegetables you eat this week
This week, you’re going to COMPLETELY change the way you think about eating vegetables in the day. Each day, pick something off this list and practice it along with what you did yesterday.
Put vegetables in everything.
It might seem strange at first, we’re so conditioned to add meat to everything. But this week, you’re going to be adding vegetables to everything. And the more you look for ways to add vegetables to the meals you’d eat anyway, the more vegetable you’ll end up eating.
That also means the more high fiber, nutrient dense vegetables you can add instead of meat, the less saturated fat and cholesterol you’ll get. Win win.
Think about a spinach omelette or extra lettuce/tomato/pickles/onion on your burger. Be sneaky about it by mixing half cauliflower into your mac and cheese or throwing a handful of spinach into your daily smoothie. Have a salad instead of fries. Or fries with a salad, instead of a burger. However you want to make it happen, is a good way.
Drink enough water.
This might sound strange on a list about vegetables. But fiber only works with water.
And when you start upping your vegetable intake there should be a complementary upping of your water intake. Nothing crazy. Over-hydration is a real thing, so no need to guzzle a gallon of water a day.
Stick to getting 1-2 liters daily, and you’ll be good.
Eat the rainbow.
It’s more than just a cute saying. It actually MEANS something. It’s great that you love broccoli, red peppers and mushrooms. But what else are you eating?
When we eat the same things all the time, we only get a finite amount of nutrients. Each plant makes a certain number of nutrients in a certain ratio – and we need almost all of them.
Eggplant has phytonutrients that broccoli doesn’t. Zucchini has vitamins that bell peppers don’t. Onions have minerals that mushrooms don’t have. Mix it up, all the time. This is how we get the full benefits of all the vegetables we have available to us.
Don’t boil.
Do anything else, but don’t boil. Roast, grill, sautée. ANYTHING else except boil. Water soluble vitamins are pulled out of your vegetables when you boil. So unless it’s a soup and you’re planning on drinking that liquid, avoid the boil. Boil potatoes and you lose potassium. Boil greens and you lose the water-soluble B vitamins. Boiling changes the nutrient composition of the vegetables you’re going to eat. The entire point is to get as many of the nutrients as possible from these plants. So boil with caution, or care. Just boil responsibly.
Once isn’t enough.
Eating half of a little side salad that at dinner isn’t enough. Vegetables need to be part of every meal. Even if you’ve been pretty good at getting vegetables in twice a day, find a way to squeeze in a third. Remember, the recommended number of servings per day is 8-10. And if a serving size is a cup of raw leafy greens or 2 cups of cooked greens, you start to get a good idea of how much 8-10 servings really is. HINT: it’s a lot. I know VEGANS who don’t eat any animal products at all, who have a hard time meeting this standard. So do you best and get as close as you can get.