Eight Ways and 30 Days to Eat Your Way To Greener Pastures

Going Green For Health

On Tuesday Sept 1, via Sunday’s Active Aging newsletter, I launched a month-long (30-Day) challenge. You can participate on your own, or join us on the Facebook page where you can share images, recipes, and have a chance to win a book a week (each week onecopy of Navigating Fitness After 50) will be given to the winner (paperback mailed to you- unless you live in Australia…let’s talk!) who connects with me so I have her address!

What do you need to do? Get healthier, basically! That’s it. If you post a picture and a recipe (and it can be a SIMPLE little of this little of that…) and it gets the most “likes” for the week…. we’ll announce you as the winner.

You’ll be sharing ideas with hundreds of others that might give them ideas for including more vegetables into their everyday. If you can stay the course for a month your skin will thank you! A pound of vegetables or 6 cups of green leafy vegetables will fill you up with antioxidants.

Hello, Beautiful!

Here are a handful of ideas to get you started:

1. Cut up a huge tray of fresh vegetables you love in all the colors of the rainbow. Have them ready and waiting in the refrigerator to put out at meals when you’re most hungry. Set them on the counter while you’re cooking. Use fresh hummus or only organic made dressings and dips so you’re staying the course.
2. Steam a bag of veggies. It’s a shortcut to be sure. I don’t love the idea of microwaving a bag of vegetables in plastic. If you have the time, steam yourself in glassware with small amounts of water in the microwave or better yet on the stovetop the old fashioned way.
3. Put your veggies on the bottom and on the top of a pizza with a cauliflower or zucchini crust and loaded with veggies on top.
4. Saute kale or spinach or the two mixed and use as a bed under grilled meat. You can easily eat two cups of raw when you cook them down that may look like too little in fact! You can put them into an omelette or without getting that fancy just cook up a scramble and then stir the cooked greens in before serving.
5. Add handfuls of spinach, kale, chard, to green juices or smoothies.
6. Add handfuls of spinach or kale to soups and chili. Shred carrots, and slice zucchini and toss them in as well. You’ll get a little more texture but these are not going to change the flavor, just the nutrient density of your soup. If you do this you can get a 1/2 to a full cup of veggies in every cup of soup. If you’ve added the greens and really packed them in, potentially more.
7. Make a marinated veggie salad by steaming and blanching veggies. Add some olives, onions, flavorings and a simple oil and vinegar dressing.
8. Roast a large pan of veggies to use all week as a side, tossed with a (healthy) protein and dressing for a salad or to top quinoa with a protein for a dinner bowl.

Are you ambitious. This isn’t a diet. But you may find you lose a few pounds by adding all the veggies. You’re adding fiber and antioxidants. They’ll both love your both and your skin. To start this out…take a before photo of your face. Take another snapshot of your body by measuring – hit the belly button line, hips, mid thigh (exactly between knee and hip) and see what happens.

~Debra