Eat at least 5 servings of veggies each day

January 23, 2012 1:03 am / Posted in

Nutrition Coaching tip for this week is… Eat at least 5 servings of veggies each day.

For the next week, you’re going to focus exclusively on this habit. Your job is to log in your compliance report whether you did it or not. See below for the compliance form.

Eating five servings of veggies is not only really healthy for you but it will help you lose weight really fast. You might be thinking eating 5 servings of veggies is impossible to fit in your day, so here is what I am going to do for you. One to two of those servings can come from fruit. Yep, one to two apples per day and 1 and a half cups of veggie soup and you did it. WOW, that doesn’t sound too bad, does it?

Here are some examples of what a serving of vegetables look like.

• 1/2 cup Butter nut squash soup
• 1 tomato
• ¾ cup veggie juice like V8 “great for on the go”
• A sweet potato
• 1 cup of leafy greens for a salad
• 1/2 cup of grape tomatoes
• ½ of one bell pepper
• 1 cup of spinach tossed toss in some salad toppers
• 1 banana
• 6 strawberries
• 2 plums
• 15 grapes
• 1 apple
• 1 peach

Although it may seem hard to get at least five servings of veggies every day, the reality is it’s very simple. All you have to do is find a way to incorporate vegetables into some of the meals you eat each day.
To get a feel for a day’s worth of veggie and fruit intake, take a look at the following examples. Note, this isn’t all the food for the day, this is just the veggies and fruits.

• Meal 1: A bow of vegetable soup
• Meal 2: A large salad topped with nuts and seeds
• Meal 3: 350ml V-8” please select ones with more or all veggies
• Meal 4: 2 cups Mixed berries
• Meal 5: 2 cups of Grilled vegetables

Guess what – that’s at least 10 servings. I know you can get at least half of that.

We can eat more veggies and fruits because they have a relatively low level of calories. Their bulky volume causes us to feel fuller and they contain a high level of nutrients. This allows us to fill our tummies, leaving less room for “bad” food choices, unlike certain diets which have you omitting food from your diet and not offering you anything to replace it with.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

450 calories           450 calories                  450 calories
cookies                     chicken wraps               spinach,  chicken bean salad

 

Less volume, fewer nutrients or more volume, more nutrients – you decide!

 

Category:

Posted by