Two simple ways to add more fruits and vegetables to your diet

So you buy your share of fruits and vegetables at the grocery store with good intentions of eating more of them.  You know that eating a peach instead of a Snickers bar is more healthy.  A few carrots are better than a cold slice of pizza.  Yet, a few weeks later, you look in your vegetable drawer you see and smell how bad good intentions not acted upon can get.  The blueberries are ‘fuzzy’, the broccoli smells like something your dog dug up in the back yard. 

Hey, I know what it’s like, you’ve worked hard, you’re tired.  When you open the refrigerator, you think "ugh…I’m too tired to bend down and look in that produce drawer.  I’ll eat some tomorrow."  Unfortunately, the fruit and vegetable tomorrow sometimes never comes.

So if you want to add more fresh fruits and vegetables to your diet, read on…

Why do we go from good intentions to rotting produce?  Is it that we
really don’t like fruit?  Is it that we despise vegetables?  If that’s
the case you likely wouldn’t buy any in the first place.  Instead, I’d
argue it’s because we’re so busy, we get distracted.  We want things
fast.  We want things easy.  Cutting the core out of an apple takes
effort and it’s sticky.  Snapping fresh beans or shucking corn can be
boring and time consuming.  Effort alone can account for some
reluctance to deal with the hassle.  "Why bother?" you say.  Just being
"good for you" isn’t enough.

Another strike against fruits and vegetables is the out of sight out of
mind factor.  Where do we keep our produce?  In the produce drawer of
course.  So when we go into the fridge for something to eat, the first
item we we is not a carrot.  We don’t see a juicy papaya.  Nope,
instead, what is staring us in the face is some left over Chinese food,
pizza or another easy food. 

So if you really want to eat more fruits and vegetables, there are two
rules for buying produce you can use to make it easier and more
enjoyable.

1.  Never buy fruit or vegetables unless you are ready to prepare them when you get them home.
2.  Place your fruits and vegetables on the shelves in your refridgerator and turn the produce drawer into a "junk food" drawer.

Starting with the first rule, you need to think at the grocery store.
As an example, you need to consider "do I have time to cut these
carrots and celery into sticks, slice these cucumbers, dice the beets,
snap the beans and chop up the broccoli when I get home?  Or is all of
that just wishful thinking?  If you can’t see yourself working that
hard on grocery day, I would argue you won’t do it after a 12 hour day
at the office – when you are hungry and need something nutricious.  So
scale it back a little.  Get the broccoli and the carrots and save the
others for another time.

The second rule is obvious.  Easy, usually means fattening and
unhealthy.  So position the easy stuff in harder to find locations
(like the produce drawer) and the produce easier to locate – like the
top and middle shelves.  When you open the fridge, you should see a
fresh fruit salad sitting there or a juicy orange already peeled, not a
plate of left over french fries and hot wings.

Bonus benefit:  Preparing your produce immediately and placing
them outside the produce drawer may cause a decrease in their shelf
life.  As such, it’s an added twist of pressure to influence you to eat
your produce earlier rather than later.  You don’t want it to go to
waste anymore do you?  Start crunching now!