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Laura@LauraForteFitness.comEating enough fruits and vegetables is crucial for maintaining a healthy diet. They give you plenty of fiber, and fill you up so that you aren’t eating empty calorie and nutrition deficient foods!
If you are at a healthy weight, it isn’t necessary to be too concerned with which fruits and vegetables you are putting into your body. However, if you are looking to lose weight, here are a few tips that I can share with you.
- Limit your intake of dried fruits. These usually contain a high amount of sugar and preservatives.
Limit high sugar fruits such as grapes, bananas, mangos, sweet cherries, pineapples, and pears. Eat more vegetables in place of the high sugar fruits. Here is a table of all fruits and their sugar content. The best time to have high sugar fruits is before or after a workout.
- Choose lower sugar fruits instead. These are blackberries, blueberries, grapefruit, oranges, strawberries, tangerines, cantaloupe.
Here are some more general tips concerning fruits and veggies:
Buy organic fruits and vegetables when possible. Organic fruits and vegetables are grown without the use of artificial pesticides, herbicides, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Organic foods are also abundant in trace minerals and have far less sugar content in them then their commercially grown, highly hybridized counterparts. They have much more nutritional value, and I believe they taste better!
- Eat your fruits and vegetables raw when possible. When you heat food above 116F, you destroy enzymes that aid in digestion and nutrient absorption. A great way to eat your fruits and vegetables raw is to make a green smoothie! This way you don’t have to add anything extra to make it taste better (like adding high sugar salad dressing on top of a salad).
- Always wash all produce before you eat it. It’s a good idea to always wash your fresh produce because it can contain trace residues of pesticides or other pollutants.
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