Vegetables have tons of benefits for your body, and eating more vegetables daily can help you get the most out of those benefits.
They’re great sources of healthy nutrients and antioxidants, they can help you with weight loss or weight management, and they can fill you up without leaving you tired and bloated.
A lot of people don’t eat enough vegetables throughout the day – they either don’t like them, don’t know how to prepare them in an appetizing way, or they simply choose the less healthy food instead.
It can definitely be a challenge to consume the recommended serving size of vegetables each day if you’re one of those people.
So, I’m sharing some of my favorite tips for incorporating more vegetables into your daily diet and meal plan, without making the meal less tasty or appetizing.
31 Easy Ways To Eat More Vegetables
1. Add Vegetables To Your Eggs
Everyone loves eating eggs for breakfast! So, a great way to sneak some veggies into your daily diet, is adding them to your eggs. You can add minced vegetables to your scrambled eggs, or chopped veggies into your omelett. Some great veggies to add to your eggs are onions, bell peppers, tomatoes, brussels sprouts, and even a handful of spinach.
2. Bake/Grill Your Vegetables
Baking and grilling your veggies makes them so much more delicious than just boiling or steaming them!
You can make them in a casserole dish with some heavy cream to make a delicious side (broccoli or cauliflower are great for that), or you can just chop them up and bake them with some olive oil to get a delicious and healthy plant based side. Grilling them is also a great way to make them more delicious! Some veggies that are great for baking and grilling are sweet potatoes, butternut squash, green bean, zucchini, eggplant, bell peppers, broccoli, and zucchini.
3. Season Your Veggies
This might be obvious, but many people don’t properly season their veggies. Just like any meat, veggies need to be seasoned well in order to make them taste amazing! So, add your favorite herbs and spices, and your veggies will definitely taste much better.
4. Have A Box Of Vegetables Delivered Each Week
There are delivery services that can deliver weekly food to you. So by getting veggies delivered to your door, you will always have them, so it will inspire you to actually eat them more.
5. Put Vegetables In A Visible Place In Your Fridge
If you keep a lot of food in your fridge, and you put your veggies somewhere where you don’t see them easily, you will probably forget about them if you’re not used to eating them a lot. So, keeping your veggies in a visible place in your fridge will make you remember them at all times, and eat them more.
6. Prepare Vegetables Ahead
Washing and cutting your veggies can definitely be annoying. It takes up some time, and if you’re not a fan of them to begin with, you probably won’t want to prepare them every day.
So, prepare them in advance.
Wash them when you buy them, and depending on the veggie, cut them up and put them into containers with lids. You can also wash your leafy greens.
You can go a step further, and cook vegetables as well! Grill, bake, cook, or steam them, and keep them in your fridge for a few days, so when you want to eat something, you have veggies ready to eat. And if you want to prolong the shelf life, freeze them. Then when you’re ready, pop your frozen vegetable into a soup or slow cooked meal. It will definitely make you eat them more, because when you’re in a hurry, you’ll have them ready to go, and it will be super convenient for you!
7. Add Veggies To Your Nightly Meals
Try to include a veggie into your nightly meals – either in a salad form, or as a side. Brussels sprouts for example taste great when pan seared. Try pairing brussel sprouts, asparagus, green bean, or squash to your dinners when grilled chicken or fish is on the menu.
8. Substitute Ingredients For Similar Veggie Options
Swap out pizza dough for cauliflower dough, make eggplant pizza where you use eggplant as a base, eat zucchini noodles, veggie burgers, etc. There are tons of veggie substitutes for different foods and different ways to cook vegetables, just be creative! This is a win-win for those needing gluten free options and also kills two birds with one stone because of the additional veggie intake. If you’re feeling daring, you can go all out and make the crust with veggies, pasta sauce has veggies, and add veggies as your toppings for a hardy and healthy twist to an old meal.
9. Eat Vegetables For Breakfast
Include veggies in your breakfast, either put them on toast, in your eggs, or in your smoothie. You can pair a handful of spinach with rice and sausages to create a breakfast bowl that’s delicious and nutritious.
10. Add Veggies To Smoothies
Speaking of smoothies, you can add veggies to your smoothies. Make a green smoothie with leafy greens (and other regular smoothie ingredients), or make a fruit smoothie that you’ll add some veggies to. Adding a frozen vegetable like a handful of spinach or green bean to your smoothie works great to give that smoothie texture.
Just put everything into a blender or a food processor, and your veggies are good to eat.
11. Make Soups
Eating soups is a great and delicious way to eat veggies, especially since you can make them with almost any veggie that exists and in any form, including canned or even a frozen vegetable. You can also add pasta sauce to your soups to breathe new life to an old soup recipe.
12. Use Lettuce Wraps
Swapping out burger buns for lettuce leaves is a great way to consume your veggies even when you’re eating a burger! Bonus points because this idea is also gluten free.
13. Eat Cauliflower Rice
Cauliflower rice is gluten free and a great alternative for rice, since the texture is different, and you can serve it with almost any protein.
14. Eat Cauliflower-Crusted Pizza
Cauliflower-crusted pizza is very popular these days, and for a reason – it’s super delicious, much healthier than regular pizza, and you’re eating your veggies!
15. Eat Raw Veggies As Snacks
Eat veggies with a dip like hummus and ranch, and they’ll make a great snack. Celery, carrots, cucumbers, bell peppers – all of those veggies are great with dips!
16. Turn Veggies Into Noodles
Zoodles aka zucchini noodles are not only delicious, but super healthy and super good for you! Squash is also another vegetable alternative to turn into noodles. You can make spaghetti squash and pretty much any other pasta substitute dishes substituting the noodles with veggie lookalikes. Spaghetti squash is a hit for even picky eater toddlers – if you haven’t tried it!
17. Turn Veggies Into Chips
Cut your veggies super thin, and then bake them – you’ll get healthy chips perfect for any snack.
18. Add Vegetables To Your Sauces
Adding blended veggies into a sauce, or using it as a base for a sauce, is a great way to sneak more veggies into your meals. You can even make homemade pasta sauce using tomatoes, garlic, onions, mushroom, and seasoning to taste.
19. Plan Your Meals Ahead
Including veggies into your meal plan will be much easier if you plan ahead – that way you can make a conscious decision to include veggies into your diet.
20. Do Your Grocery Shopping In Advance
If you have veggies in your house, you’re more likely to eat them. When you don’t have any veggies, you probably won’t go to the store just to buy some, and you’ll end up eating something else, so doing your grocery shopping in advance is a really smart idea.
21. Research New Recipes
There are tons of delicious recipes that include veggies, you just need to research a bit to find new and inspired ways to cook vegetables you already have at home!
22. Add Veggies As Side Dishes
Veggies are amazing to eat as side dishes, so you can still include them into your diet even if you don’t want to eat less meat.
23. Combine Veggies With Meat
Combining veggies with meat will make it much easier to eat – you can put your veggies into meatballs, burgers, pastas with meat, and so on.
24. Add Veggies To Pasta
Adding veggies to pasta is probably one of the easiest ways to eat your vegetables. You can substitute the noodle itself for veggies like in the spaghetti squash dish. Or you can simply sneak more vegetables into some of your favorite pasta dishes you have already. Everyone loves pasta, and you can make it a thousand different ways – so just incorporate some grilled veggies into it, and you’re good!
25. Incorporate Veggies Into Stews
Adding veggies to stews is another delicious way to eat veggies – stews are amazing, and you can put whatever you want into them.
26. Add Veggies To Casseroles
Adding veggies to casseroles and making them with sour cream is a great way to eat your veggies!
27. Drink Your Veggies
If you don’t want to eat your veggies – drink them. Make them into a smoothie, or make a juice by squeezing/juicing your veggies.
28. Put Veggies Into Meatballs
Sneaking in some veggies incorporated into meatballs is one of the best ways to make yourself eat more veggies. The meat flavor will overpower the veggie flavor, so you won’t even know you’re eating them, but you will be.
29. Treat Your Veggies Like You Treat Meat
Season them, marinate them, grill them, taste them – treat your veggies like you treat your meat, and I promise veggies will start tasting better.
30. Make Purees
Making a sweet potato pure, a pea pure, a cauliflower pure, or another type of pure, is a great way to eat veggies as a side dish next to your meat.
31. Make Veggie Burgers
For meat-lovers, veggie burgers might not be the same as regular burgers, but they’re DEFINITELY a great option when you want to up your veggie intake – it’s still a food you love (aka burgers), just using new ingredients!
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