28 Mar Live Longer, Feel Better and Look Younger: Operation Vegetable: Reporting for Duty!
Psst! Hey you! Want to feel healthier? Here’s a little mission I sent my clients on recently to accomplish just that. The impetus for creating Operation Vegetable was to encourage my group fitness clients to eat healthier. In my classes, I often ask clients what they had for dinner the night before. I do this, one, to give them a rest between exercise sets and two, to get recipe ideas for myself and for the group at large.
Some people eat really healthy, while others leave a lot to be desired, considering a serving of vegetables to be the salsa they ate using chips as the vehicle of delivery. To encourage those who were sorely lacking in veggies to eat more of them, I created Operation Vegetable.
Over a six-week period, the challenge was to eat:
- One large serving of vegetables with lunch
And
- Two large servings of vegetables with dinner
This does not mean that they had to eat only vegetables. The veggies would just make up a large part of the meal. They could, of course, include veggies in their breakfast too. Yum!
Operation Vegetable Example:
Lunch might be a black bean burrito bowl and a large serving of broccoli. Dinner might consist of a piece of salmon, a large salad, and a large serving of brussels sprouts.
I realize that the above may be an overly optimistic view of someone’s meals. They could just as easily have had a pastrami sandwich and a large salad for lunch, followed by pizza, a salad and broccoli for dinner, and still have been Operation Vegetable compliant.
With Operation Vegetable you crowd out the not-so-healthy food with a variety of healthy vegetables.
Not everyone took to the challenge, but even those who didn’t follow it fully reported being more aware of their vegetable-barren meals and began including more veggies in their diets, just not at every single lunch and dinner.
The two men who followed the challenge fairly rigorously lost 20 pounds each over the six-week period. They also reported feeling much better, they looked better, and they gained a sparkle in their eyes!
Why Vegetables Are the Bomb
Vegetables are:
- Loaded with micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals
- Chalk full of fiber
- Filling while naturally low in fat and calories
- Delicious!
Eating a wide variety of vegetables can reduce:
- Your risk of developing many chronic diseases
- Your risk of cardiovascular disease
- Weight gain
And contributes to:
- Glowing healthy skin
- Weight loss
- Longevity and overall health and well being
What are you waiting for? Go out and get yourself some veggies! Everyone’s doing it!