Eating More Veggies, One Step at a Time
Everyone tells you to eat more veggies, right? They're full of vitamins, minerals and the all important fiber. So why does it always seem so hard to do that? Why is it so much easier to just grab a bagel? Or just make a quick sandwich with turkey and cheese? Even as someone who studies nutrition, I’ve struggled with this too. For my family, dinner is guaranteed to have a veggie, lunch was less so and breakfast was almost never. I decided that I needed and wanted to change that, so I started setting small goals and building off of those.
Step 1: Set A Goal
I started by setting one goal and sticking to it for about a month. At that point the rhythm was down and I'd formed a new habit, so it was relatively easy to build on. Then I made a second goal, and followed the same structure.
So, where did I start? I decided on lunch. Breakfast is kind of all over the place in our house, we don't usually all have the same thing and I needed a bit more time to sort this one out.
So, my first goal: make one salad a week. This may or may not seem like a big change, maybe your goal is two salads, but this worked for us to start. This one salad usually served two, maybe three, plus I might use some components for the kids' lunches. Though small to start, this was also doable for me and our schedule/lifestyle. Salads can be time consuming; by the time you wash, chop, toast nuts if applicable, shred cheese, make a dressing...sometimes it seems like I need to start it at breakfast in order to have it ready at lunch. I do try to meal prep what I can ahead of time, but sometimes meal prepping just doesn't happen when or how I want it to.
Step 2: Get Started
In my perfect world, I'd take that goal and sit down and make a nicely organized list of all the salads I like and new recipes I'd like to try. In this particular season of life, I don’t have an abundance of extra time, so instead I just started by winging it. It’s not a method I would necessarily recommend, but I needed to do something and I wanted to do it quickly. I went to a food blogger whose food is always delicious, picked a salad solely based on the picture and just made it. No planning no prepping, I just did it. And it was delicious. So the next week, I picked another one. And then another one. And if we liked it, I added it to a Google Sheet which I can access from my computer or my phone, and I linked the recipe so I didn't have to go searching every time I was planning our meals for the week.
I also wasn’t afraid of repetition. I think sometimes we get in this cycle of needing new meals every week to keep things “fresh,” but that can be a lot of pressure which leads to burnout. So as I found recipes we really liked, I just kept relying on those, especially during the weeks when things were more hectic. I’ll save a new recipe for weeks when the kids are (now) in school, or if we have an extra set of hands helping us out during the week. In terms of repetition, I changed my perspective to this: if we like a particular salad, it shouldn’t feel daunting to eat it two weeks in a row, it’s not like we’re eating it every day for 14 days, we’re eating it four days out of 14 days! That leaves 10 other days to eat something else…
Step 3: Build On It & Keep It Going
After about a month I added in two salads a week; one is usually a "green" salad and one is usually a "grain" salad. The grain salad tends to be a bit more meal prep friendly because I can batch cook.
These are some of my favorites:
Greek Chickpea Chicken Salad (great meal prep option)
Balsamic Chicken Berry Quinoa Salad (great meal prep option)
Thai-Inspired Chicken Salad with Peanut Dressing (great meal prep option)
Once I felt like I had lunch down, then I turned my attention to breakfast. A quick aside, snacks would also be a great place to add in a veggie or fruit. I used to be a big snacker, but these days, chasing around two little kids, managing a home, studying to be a Master Nutrition Therapist and launching a business, I just don't always have a chance to stop for snack. Sometimes it works out to snack when my kids snack, but I find I can't rely on that. So I've learned to make sure my meals are a bit heartier to hold me from one to the next.
Step 3.1: Expand to Other Areas
On to breakfast. I'm pretty good at working a veggie into my kids' breakfasts. I might roast up some carrots and/or sweet potato with cinnamon, or mix a little minced mushroom or broccoli into some eggs, sometimes I can get away with finely shredded carrot mixed into nut butter on a toast. I also make veggie blender muffins on repeat, and those are often offered at breakfast. Me on the other hand, I was s-t-r-u-g-g-l-i-n-g. So I thought about some quick, easy, veggie-included breakfasts that I know my husband and I like and can have on repeat. These include breakfast tacos, egg hash, veggie-cheese omelets or scrambles (using leftover veggies from the night before) and smoothies that were previously made and frozen.
Some of these ideas don’t have servings upon servings of vegetables. However, improvement over perfection. If you never have veggies with your breakfast and you decide one morning to add some leftover broccoli to your eggs, well, you just ate some veggies that you wouldn’t normally have had! I’d say that’s a great first step!