I have a coworker who is doing a YMCA fitness challenge and needs to keep a food journal. After reviewing her journal for the first week her trainer told her that she needs to eat more veggies. She wasn’t sure how to go about doing this since she doesn’t like them so she showed me her food journal to get my opinion.
That week she had a cup of potato soup.
That was her only vegetable consumption for the entire week. This was a normal week for her. I think that as a vegetarian I tend to not get enough fresh vegetables in my diet but I never really considered that it was possible for an omnivorous adult human to avoid them entirely. I invited her to go to lunch with me since I go to a restaurant with a huge salad bar but when I listed off the veggies on the salad bar she declared that she didn’t like any of them. I think I got her talked into trying baked sweet potatoes at home. She likes broccoli and cauliflower chopped up small so I told her my cold veggie pizza recipe. It isn’t healthy but it may force feed her vegetables.
My mother always wondered how I could be a vegetarian when I didn’t eat vegetables as a kid. I think I’m better now. To find out and to give my coworker an example of what you can eat with vegetables in it, I’ll keep a food journal this week too. I’ll start with yesterday which was a bad food day just so I won’t just list things that are good to eat since I’m reporting it now. Hopefully, knowing that I have to report will shame me into making better choices too!
Yesterday:
Breakfast – one chocolate luna bar on the way to a Dr’s appointment
Lunch – California Pizza Kitchen cup of southwestern tortilla soup and the hummus appetizer with mango lemonade
Dinner – Chipotle veggie burrito with rice, beans, corn salsa, tomato salsa, and cheese. Root beer
Snack – mini bag of salt and lime popcorn
Verdict – too much restaurant food and sugary drinks! But that was a weird day since I was away from home before work and starving afterwards.
Today
Breakfast – fat free Greek yogurt with honey and fresh mango pieces. I don’t like the taste of plain Greek yogurt but the dog and cat love it so it ought to count as a workout to try to eat this and shoo them away at the same time.
Snack – 2 pieces of celery with peanut butter. This isn’t something I’d normally eat but the celery is soon to go bad in my fridge and I’m trying to eat more protein. I’m not a natural fan of protein packed food like yogurt or peanut butter so I’m easing into it by just doing little bits at a time. This tasted pretty good though.
Lunch – mashed sweet potato with 1/4 cup of black beans and 1/4 cup salsa. I couldn’t eat all this at one sitting so I’m saving it for later.
Snacks – more celery and peanut butter. Then I had a small double chocolate chip cookie dough blizzard. I thought long and hard about this because I knew I’d have to write it down but I did it anyway.
Dinner – potato soup. 2 cans of sliced potatoes, 1/2 carton of vegetable broth, and 1 cup of salsa in the crockpot all day. Blend with immersion blender. I topped it with a bit of cheddar cheese and some soy milk.
Snack – apple and cheese
Verdict – Not bad except for the blizzard. Pretty potato heavy but I was thinking of potatoes while writing this post.
