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how i am planning to eat more vegetables this year

health best eat food this year

By skmazeethPublished about a year ago 3 min read
how i am planning to eat more vegetables this year
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

I have a strong aversion to "managing" my eating too much, like many millennial women who grew up in a society that valued extreme thinness, for fear of falling victim to the diet business. That doesn't mean I haven't tried to look at my food, though. On the premise that it would help me understand the psychology underlying my food and beverage choices, I downloaded Noom a few of New Years's ago. After realising that the app was essentially a calorie counting game, I deleted it. (Also, the pandemic was at its worst. My decisions were motivated by the mindset that "it's the pandemic."

Recently, though, it occurred to me that there was one very, very easy aspect of my diet that I wanted to change: I am one of the about 9 out of 10 Americans, per the Centers for Disease Control, who do not consume enough fruits and vegetables. My family was fairly healthy when I was growing up, so when I started college, I had access to pizza and munchies like never before. The effects are still being felt today. I just don't seem to eat that many plants, despite the fact that I have access to supermarkets and plenty of spare time to cook vegetables (non-grain division).

I didn't want to push myself to become overly preoccupied with my eating habits. But I desired to correct this.

It turns out to be surprisingly challenging to eat enough vegetables when you've never done it on your own as an adult. I've gone through phases when I've said, for example, "more salads," historically referring to an extra plate or two per day, for a few weeks until I completely forget about the endeavour and stop purchasing leafy greens. Carrots will never really work for me as a snack because I run a lot, which makes me hungry a lot. I know that other items, like hummus and pita chips, can have carrots added to them. But despite my best efforts to make myself baby carrot crudité arrangements sometimes, the remaining carrots always end up drying out in the refrigerator.

For a while, I accepted the notion that I should eat "intuitively" as a counter to diet culture, which promotes eating whatever you feel like. Although I still believe this to be largely accurate, when I tried to eat what I felt like, I ended up right where I had started, relying heavily on carbohydrates, which does not feel good. (To be honest, some who practise intuitive eating advise taking something like this into consideration.) However, establishing a definite rule like "five servings of fruits and veggies" for yourself is desirable regardless of how instinctively you eat. Eating a lot of veggies, possibly more than you are used to, is excellent for you, even though a lot of nutrition research may be trendy rubbish.

didn't feel inspired to change the situation until I saw huge containers of rolled oats on sale while supermarket shopping in October. I made the decision to purchase the oats and carry out the process of soaking them in yoghurt in a jar for 12 hours because my fiancé was out of town and I was seeking for food preparation assignments. The following morning, I mixed an apple with the oats and, miraculously, found myself having fruit for breakfast. Did they consume enough plant materials in this way? They got going early? I was aware that I needed some sort of accountability if I wanted to continue having success. Simply put, my notions of what the ideal diet for me was changed from moment to moment.

I found the See How You Eat app in the app store after looking for a dead basic meal tracking app. The app offers a brand-new page with six squares each day. You place pictures of your meals and snacks in the squares. You can simply record what you ate in the square if you forgot to take a picture. You can text an explanation if you eat more than six times per week.

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