A rousing success

I've been on the Everyday Food Fruit & Veggie Challenge for one week now and although I don't like to measure success over such a relative short amount of time, this week has been great in terms of my fruit/vegetable intake.

I thought I had been doing well to incorporate fruits and vegetables into my meal plan but having taken this challenge I became aware that I had been falling short on many days. It's easy to snack on fruits/veggies and that was the way I was consuming a majority of my fruits/veggies but with this challenge before me, I was forced to look at different ways to incorporate them into my daily meals.

As a result, I opted for more healthy foods for dinners instead of choosing what was easy or possibly a more desired option. For instance, I made an Asian Chicken and Cabbage Salad recipe (from Martha Stewart) that was loaded with veggies. That was a direct result of this challenge. I may have opted for nachos since we had some ground beef that needed (and still needs) to be used up. And just a quick heads-up, that will be part of this week's Savory Sunday so keep an eye out for that.

All told, I met my five servings for the first couple of days but wound up exceeding my five servings toward the end of the week, and in some cases by quite a few. Nine servings of fruits/veggies is what is recommended and while that figure still seems high it doesn't seem that ridiculously high as it had at the start of the week. I think I may have reached that yesterday as I had a lot of zucchini with dinner and then a lot of pineapple for "dessert" - it was just cut-up pineapples, not like an upside-down pineapple cake or anything.

Anyway, I'd recommend joining up even if you don't have Sirius Satellite Radio. The challenge is not necessarily just for listeners but for anyone who wants to increase their fruits/veggies and to get a much-needed shot of fiber and nutrition into their respective meal plans. You can join by e-mailing them at everydayfoodradio [at] yahoo [dot] com. And tell them I sent you.