Fruit Monster

Healthy meals start here!

The fruit and veggie bowl always looks lovely at this time of year now that the sumer harvest is in. I didn't grow the bananas or peaches but everything else is from my garden! I had a friend who asked me to teach him how to make healthy meals and I told him it's so simple. Here's my formula:

-start with a fruit or vegetable

-add a lean protein

-(optional) add a complex unprocessed carbohydrate

That's it! I frequently also add a small amount of good quality cheese or sour cream. (I just love sour cream, that's a vegetable, right?) Plus once a day it's important to get in a small portion of some healthy fats, like avocado, nuts, chia seeds, flax, or olive oil. But really, this list of three things is how I think when I'm standing around with the fridge open trying to decide what's for lunch.

Here are some foods that count for those good carbohydrates: oatmeal, air popped popcorn, potatoes or sweet potatoes with skin, winter squash (acorn and butternut are my favorites!), quinoa, brown rice, wild rice, beans, lentils, and peas. Beans and lentils are a double whammy because they can also count as your protein.

Don't be afraid of nutritious carbohydrates, especially if you're an active person. The super low carb diets out there work not because of the lack of carbs, but because of the calorie reduction that happens when you eliminate all breads, pastas, pizza, cakes, cookies, rice, milk, french fries, chips, ice cream, sugar, soda, and alcohol from your diet. But you can get similar benefits by eliminating just the processed carbs. Slow digesting complex carbohydrates are good for satiety, blood sugar control, positive mood, stable energy levels, good sleep, and impulse control.

Speaking of impulse control...this is my favorite new video. Cookie monster explains his love of fruit to Matt Lauer. There's a good lesson here: Cookie Monster will always eat his cookie, but it's best to eat it after a meal, rather than on an empty stomach! Just like with alcohol, having food in your stomach slows down the absorption of sugar into the bloodstream. Everything I know I learned from Sesame Street.