If you aren’t adding vegetables to your breakfast, you are missing out on one of the best ways to increase your daily servings of vegetables.
Including vegetables to our meals increases our daily fiber intake, can reduce the overall calorie density, floods our body with antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties, adds vitamins and minerals, and helps manage blood sugar. The freshness and crunch of vegetables can also help us feel more satisfied with the meal.
When I eat a few servings of vegetables at the beginning of the day my whole day goes better. I feel like my blood sugar is more stable and I can relax a bit knowing I am already ahead of the game with getting those vegetables in. Common recommendations for vegetable servings per day are between 6 and 10 servings. Waiting until lunch or even dinner to eat some vegetables makes it a lot harder to get all the recommended servings in.
Three ways you can plan the night before:
1. Do something as simple as set a pot with water on the stove, for steaming or blanching vegetables. The next morning when you go into the kitchen, it’s there as a reminder that you planned to cook some vegetables.
2. Prep the vegetables the night before, or prep extra while making dinner. Then all you need to do in the morning is pop them into boiling water or steam.
3. Set aside some leftover vegetables from dinner.
Having a hard time imagining vegetables tasting good in the morning? Try blanching some vegetables like green beans, keep them long which makes them kind of fun. Sugar snap peas are lovely. Blanched greens with a little apple cider vinegar is so good for blood sugar and blanching keeps them fresh and light. Broccoli is a nice choice as well. If you want to hide some vegetables, add riced cauliflower to porridge or tofu scramble.
Get a piece of paper out and write out which vegetables you will eat in the morning three days this week. Make it simple. Make it easy. It’s okay to start small. It’s okay to buy a packet of snap peas from Trader Joe’s, pair them with some dressing and add them to breakfast. Don’t make this hard. Make it doable and then build on it week by week.
If you want some support, I have a no-cost email series titled 10 Days of Vegetables with Breakfast. Five days of tips and recipes to your inbox and then a bonus five more days in a free course. Sign up using the link below.
Vegetables with Breakfast Mini-Course