Welcome back everyone! I hope you enjoyed the first week of the Real Food Experience. If you missed the first week, you can get caught up here. We spent the week getting organized and ready to go for our weekly eating challenges. If you follow along and really put in the effort you will be well on the way to your own real food journey. Step by step gets you there. This is exactly the approach that I took with my own family and I have found that my family was much more willing to accept changes to what they ate when I switched things out week by week. Each week builds on the next and in the end you will discover that you are eating more nutrients dense foods and less chemical, sugar, and salt laden processed foods.
Eat 2 Servings of Fruit and Vegetables Per Meal
Yes, that’s right. This week is all about eating more. More fruit and vegetables. Organic, conventional, fresh, frozen, dried or canned……… I don’t care. Just eat it. The foundation of a real food lifestyle is filling your body with lots of nutrition. There is a whole rainbow of fruit and vegetables to choose from. Each color brings its own list of beneficial nutrients. Nutrients are what helps your body to feel great and fight disease.
[bctt tweet=”Yes, that’s right. This week is all about eating more. More fruit and vegetables. Organic, conventional, fresh, frozen, dried or canned……… I don’t care. Just eat it. The foundation of a real food lifestyle is filling your body with lots of nutrition. “]
Eat more. How can that be a challenge? Well……..if you are like most of us in the United States who eat the Standard American Diet (SAD), you probably don’t eat two servings of fruit or vegetables in a day. And now I’m asking you to eat two for every meal. By the end of each day, you should have eaten 6 servings of fruit and vegetables. This begins the transition to a more plant-based diet. I’m not saying you need to go all out vegetarian, but the more plants you eat……..the better you will feel.
I have always found fruit to be a good way to deal with sugar cravings. Sugar is an addiction that is difficult for me and many other moms I know to break. Fruit has plenty of its own sugar, but it is natural sugar and has lots of nutrition benefits. One of these health benefits is that fruits and vegetables contain fiber. Fiber makes your belly feel fuller and if you feel fuller, you are less likely to try to fill up on junk food. Fiber is also the key to the oh-so-glamorous world of the properly functioning digestive system. Constipation is a real problem for a lot of children that can be easily fixed by eating more whole fruits and vegetables.
A few tips before I go and you get started on the challenge. I realize that not everybody loves fruit and vegetables. My little guy has got to be one of the pickiest eaters I know and I still find ways to get fruit and vegetables into his body. Smoothies are a great way to include a ton of nutrition into one delicious cup. We like to make pancakes with a banana as the sweetener and then top with fried apples. So good! Another of my favorite tricks is to shred carrots and include them in my meatloaf. Soups and pasta sauces are great ways to pile on the nutrition. And this may sound silly, but don’t forget about onions. Onions taste great in eggs, soups, sauces…………just about anything. Just make sure you make them really small so your onion-hating family members can’t find them and pick them out.
Well……….there you go. Time to get started. Have a truly delicious week. Fill your body with lots of health-enhancing nutrition. Start talking with your children about nutrition and why it is good to eat a variety of foods. Have a contest and see who can come up with the meal that has the most different fruits or vegetables in it. I can’t wait to hear what you come up with. We can’t wait to see your progress. Share pictures of your meals over on the Facebook group and if you are on Twitter or Instagram use #RFE2016. Your pictures will certainly help and encourage us all to make healthier changes for our families. Please leave me a comment below if you have any questions or want to share your progress with us. We are all into this together!
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I make soup from vegetables in season, it is an easy way to get vegetables into everyone and very popular this cold and wet winter! Freshly pressed orange juice every morning also goes down well and as you say, thank goodness for smoothies!
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We all just need to eat more vegetation. I aim for half my plate in vegetables at least at lunch and dinner. I totally agree that smoothies are a great way to get in plants.
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