Eat Well (content) – Eat colourful meals
We all know we need to eat less calories; but it isn’t necessarily just a matter of eating less of the food we are currently eating if we want to eat well.
Eating well for the rest of our lives means ensuring we are having excellent nutrition.
What is excellent nutrition?
Excellent nutrition is taking on board good daily quantities of all the vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients that are necessary for running the 10 trillion human cells of our bodies long-term.
But, in the same way that we don’t need to become marathon runners to recover from obesity, so too, we don’t need a PhD in nutrition to eat well as part of a new recovery lifestyle.
One way of helping to make sure we are having excellent nutrition is to increase the colour of our meals. Eating a colourful diet is having a rainbow diet consisting of foods from red, orange, and yellow through to green, blue and violet. For example this could include tomatoes/beetroot, carrots/kumara and yellow capsicums through to broccoli/spinach, and eggplant/purple cabbage, along with a rainbow of fruits from time to time – cherries, oranges, and pineapple, through to kiwifruit and blueberries. You don’t find brown or beige in the rainbow.
And it is easy to eat a rainbow diet if we include a variety of vegetables (and fruits) along with herbs and spices in our homemade meals. Aim to have at least three colours at every meal.
Keeping the colour up in our meals is especially important as we head for winter, when stodgy brown/beige comfort food becomes more tempting on cold grey days. We can brighten up those days with warm, colourful food, featuring a range of vegetables, and know this is also ensuring excellent nutrition. Colourful salads during the winter can bring a touch of summer into dreary days as well.
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