It’s no secret that vegetables are healthy for you and we all need to eat more, but they hardly taste as good as a burger or a big piece of cake.
However, I’m here to tell you that you can have your cake (or pizza), eat it and lose weight too.
Loading your plate up with plenty of vegetables is a smart way to increase your food volume without raising your calories too high. For example: When enjoying a weekend home delivery, you can always pop a side of broccoli or cauliflower with those two pieces of pizza that never make you feel full anyway. A slice of pizza is around 500 calories whereas a cup of broccoli is only 55 calories. Not that broccoli tastes anywhere near as palatable as pizza, but rather than denying yourself the pizza, and possibly overeating on it later due to deprivation, why not enjoy a little and then bulk it out with some more filling low calorie foods (they’re also high in fibre too).
Adding grated zucchini to your meals is also another way to bulk them out, I often put it in my pasta sauces, burgers, risottos/paellas and Mexican enchiladas. I’ve also added it to my sweetened Greek yoghurt too funnily enough. Zucchini doesn’t have a flavour did you know?
I’m constantly coming up with clever ways to increase the volume of my meals with vegetables so that I’m still adhering to my calorie targets and not feeling hungry while still in weight loss mode.
Adding steamed broccoli or cauliflower that I’ve made in bulk on meal prep day, can be thrown in a salad cold too.
Some of my favourite vegetables to eat often are: broccoli, cauliflower, kale (great in soups and protein shakes), frozen beans, roasted and air dried sweet potato, baked jacket potato, pumpkin, zucchini (grated and made into noodles), carrots, capsicum (not technically a vegetable) and mushrooms (a fungi really).
Robyn Law is an Australian living in the Middle East, raising her family abroad. Passionate about self-transformation and living “her best life!” Find her at robynjlaw.com www.robynjlaw.com.
Robyn is the author of The Body Plan: Simple, effective and flexible strategies for weight loss in the real world. If you want some yummy and healthy recipes download your free ebook here.