How to ensure a colorful plate at every meal time?

How to ensure a colorful plate at every meal time?

Planning your meals is essential to following a healthy diet.

Starting by making a shopping list, with the priority being to ensure that your shopping cart includes a variety of vegetables, from fresh to frozen, is essential!

We all know how important it is to eat vegetables, but following the recommendations for a healthy diet is not always easy. So we must think of strategies that make our daily lives easier, especially by saving time.

I believe that if we have healthy foods in our fridge, ready to eat, such as fruits and vegetables that have already been washed and prepared, we are more likely to eat this type of food on a daily basis.

Colourful salad with beetroot, tomato, carrot, red cabbage and cucumber. Salad dressing: balsamic vinegar, olive oil, lemon juice and honey.

To ensure a colorful plate at every meal, preparing a salad with a variety of vegetables in advance will make it easier. You can store the salad in a tightly sealed container in the fridge, without adding any seasoning. If you wish, prepare a salad dressing in a separate container. For example, one of my favorite salad dressings is lemon juice, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and honey.

Every week, try a different combination of vegetables for your salad, always taking advantage of the opportunity to include seasonal vegetables. In addition to these being the best price, their flavor and nutritional content will be at their best.

By taking into account this advance planning of vegetable preparation, little by little, you will create new healthy eating habits, which will reflect on your health and well-being.

Nutritional aspects of colorful vegetables

The importance of consuming vegetables of various colors has to do with their different nutritional properties. Each vegetable, depending on its color, will be richer in certain nutrients with different functions in our body. For example:

• Yellow vegetables - such as yellow paprika, carrots, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, lemon - are rich in beta-carotene, flavonoids, potassium, and vitamin C.
• Red vegetables - such as beets, tomatoes, red peppers, and pomegranates - are rich in lycopene.
• Green vegetables - asparagus, kale, arugula, lettuce, cucumber, broccoli, zucchini, green beans, spinach - are rich in calcium, folate and vitamin C.
• Purple vegetables - eggplant, red cabbage, red onion, beetroot - are rich in vitamin C, lutein and flavonoids.

It is important to note that when vegetables are cooked they may lose some of their properties, mainly losing a large part of their vitamin C content, so we should consider cooking methods that reduce vitamin loss, such as steaming. If you boil vegetables, you can then use the cooking water to make soups, or cook rice or pasta, for example.

Here are some salad suggestions to try this summer:

• Tuna salad with chickpeas and avocado
• Cous cous salad with pomegranate
• Beetroot & lentil salad with goat's cheese

I hope you like them.

If you are worried that your fruit and vegetable intake is insufficient and are having difficulty including more fruit and vegetables in your diet, I can help you! Book a free consultation with me by clicking on this link.

Author

I’m Joana, a Registered Dietitian in the UK. I’ve been helping busy adults lose weight by helping them to identify the small changes in their lifestyle that will bring results. Book a free call with me to learn how we can work together.