One of my goals for this 15 weeks is to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. I typically eat a lot of vegetables but no fruit whatsoever. I like fruit, but don't find it easy to fit into my diet since I don't tend to snack and you can't just mix it into a pasta sauce or something.
I went through my food journal for this week to see what I ate.
Overall, I had an average of 1.3 servings of fruit per day, and nearly 6 servings of vegetables. That's pretty excellent. (A serving of fruit is about 1 cup, or a normal sized piece of fruit. A serving of vegetables is 1 cup of leafy ones, or 1/2 cup of cooked or chopped up ones.)
This is what I had, specifically:
11 servings of beans
7 servings of broccoli
2 servings of onions
2 servings of tomatoes
6 servings of spinach
2 servings of mushrooms
3 servings of mixed greens, or salad, etc.
3 servings of cauliflower
4 servings of carrots
1 serving of sweet potatoes
2 servings of banana
4 servings of cantaloupe
1/4 serving of strawberries
2 servings of watermelon
Pretty cool!
10 comments:
And I thought I was exciting for getting in one serving of vegetables (a salad) and two of fruit (a banana and frozen strawberries in a milkshake) today.
What kind of beans? Green beans? Or do brown/black/white beans count as veggies as well as protein or carbs?
Mostly kidney beans and garbanzos. Yeah, according to the government they count as vegetables. There is a list here:
http://www.mypyramid.gov/pyramid/vegetables.html
According to the government, a woman my age should get 3 cups 'dry beans and peas' (little green peas are a separate category) per week. I generally get more than that.
If I analyzed my whole diet, it might be that some of the beans would shift over into counting in the 'meat and beans' category instead, but my main concern with the veggies is that I'm getting lots of the good stuff in veggies. I know I eat plenty of protein.
I have typically had the opposite problem from Tam - enough fruit, but not enough veg (I love a snack of yogurt with fruit or a mini box of raisins or whatnot). But I've found that adding extra veg to the kind of one-dish recipes I favor in my current incarnation as a homecook is easy and yummy (and desirably volumetric) and since I have discovered roasted veg, I would rather have that than any other kind of side dish.
I've also heard that beans (not green) can count as either a protein or a veg, but not both. So I could consider kidney beans in red beans and rice to be a veg, but lentils in a lentil/brown rice soup to be a protein.
Lies! All lies!
Glad to see you're looking out for Tam. It is a lot easier to eat stuff if it's prepared for you. I have no problem eating enough fruit. Today I have very expensive organic cheeries for lunch. Yesterday it was blackberries. I keep buying bananas because they are easy but am not all that fond of them so I eventually throw them out. You would think I would learn from that but every week I buy 1 or 2 more. I used to make fruit salads for Tam when she was young with 8-10 different fresh fruits. Yummy.
She'll probably say lies all lies to that too.
My favorite fruit extravagance is the sweet, wonderful Rainier cherry, which is available for a couple months of the summer at some crazy price like $9 a pound at Central Market (and I can eat a pound of them in a day).
My second-favorite fruit extravagance is the Summer Splash pre-packaged melon/berry/grape combo that is also only seasonably available and is $5 for a pound. I ate two of them over 3 days this week. This would be easy for me to replicate much more cheaply by purchasing the various parts separately, but that would require cutting all that fruit up myself, since getting Mosch or Tam's momm to do it is not really a viable option. But my own mom is coming to visit me at the end of this month and I know I can convince her that we want [her] to make a huge, luscious fruit salad! But it may be hard to meet, let alone beat, the 8-10 different fruit standard Tam's momm has set. Story developing...
Thanks for not pointing out my spelling mistake. I guess I was just cheery thinking about my cherries, which were $9 a lb. at Whole Foods but down from $15 the week before. I bought 2 lbs. The blackberries were 5 something for a little carton. I can justify this by saying I'm not buying meat but then I buy the dogs 3 pounds of organic beef a week so that doesn't really work. I've had some great mangos this year from Mexico. They are small and yellow and a little more tart than the mangos I usually get.
I hadn't noticed the cheeries/cherries thing before you pointed it out, but those cherries definitely make me, if not my pocketbook, cheery too. I haven't had any yet this summer, but I'm definitely going to have to get some now that I'm thinking about them. And now that I'm aware they were as much as $15/lb, $9 starts to sound much more reasonable...
So I guess the general picture we're getting here of my fruit habits is that I am happy to eat fruit as long as someone else prepares it for me. Hmm...
Let's consider for a moment how different the history of the universe would be if Adam & Eve had Tam's fruit preferences.
Satan-Snake: "Try this forbidden fruit; it's wonderful!"
Tam: "Are you going to peel and chop that up for me or what? Oh screw it. I'm going to take a nap."
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