More Fruit, Please!

I just finished a project where I analyzed four days of diet records for ten different women; the only information I knew about the women was their age, height and weight. Their diets ranged from pretty darn good to downright negligent of nutrition.

My takeaway from this assignment was a reminder of something that the research has long declared - we don't eat enough fruits or vegetables. Not one of these women were eating enough of either, and most of the women skipped fruit altogether some days.

Now, I think I have revealed before that I am not a perfect eater - not even close. But, doing these records really served to remind me that it's not that hard to do just a little better, and motivated me to keep trying to do better. And you can, too - here's what I recommend:

* try adding a fruit or a vegetable to each meal, even if it's just a glass of 100% juice with breakfast, veggies to your turkey sandwich at lunch, and a big handful of baby carrots with the pizza you ordered.
* try to snack on fruit or vegetables at least once a day (this one's hard for me, but worth shooting for - of course, the trick is to have the food on hand and to not have less desirable food on hand at the same time)
* add fruits or veggies whenever possible - frozen berries to oatmeal or ice cream, canned corn to Hamburger Helper, veggie pizza, grated carrots to meatloaf, etc. Don't knock yourself out, because then you'll burn out and give up. Just think creatively when you're cooking and see if you can add the good stuff to your dish.
* Try to order veggies instead of fries at restaurants - I remember doing this at a restaurant, and the waitress looked at me knowingly and said "oh, you're doing the low-carb thing, huh?" I wasn't - I just wanted the asparagus instead of the fries..... but, I digress.