Easy Tips for a Healthy New Year
It’s that time of year when most people are resolving to eat better and live a healthier lifestyle moving forward. While sometimes making a change in diet can seem a bit daunting – it doesn’t have to be! For our January Pasta Spotlight, Deborah Murphy, MS, RD, and blogger behind Dietitian Debbie Dishes, gave a few helpful tips about some easy ways to boost veggie intake, her recommended foods to eat more of, and some easy health tips to stick to in 2018. Read below for all she has to say:
- Start small with resolutions – When it comes to New Year resolutions, I encourage people to think about setting smaller health goals rather than overhauling their whole diet or committing to an hour at the gym every day. Lofty resolutions are the hardest ones to keep, so try to come up with a new healthy habit that you can successfully maintain over the whole year. It should be something that can manageably fit into your current routine. Here are a couple of examples:
- Switch from refined grains to whole grains
- Drink 6-8 glasses of water a day.
- Eat at least 3 servings of vegetables a day.
- Walk 10,000 steps a day.
- Pack your lunch for work 4 days a week.
- Think about plant-based protein: My favorite “super food” is beans! They are high in fiber and packed with nutrients like protein, potassium, phosphorus, magnesium, thiamin, folic acid, and iron. Plus they are inexpensive and can easily be adapted to use in a variety of recipes. Vegetables are also at the top of my list of foods I am always encouraging people to eat. We all know that they are healthy, but none of us are eating enough of them! I think that people find them bland and boring, but they don’t have to be that way. My blog is chock full of creative salads, smoothies, and vegetarian main dishes that incorporate lots of vegetables into meals you can truly enjoy eating.
- Veggies are great to add into pasta dishes. – I try to keep a bag of baby spinach in my fridge all the time because it can so easily be stirred into pretty much any pasta-based dish! On busy weeknights, I make a quick meal by sautéing seasonal produce with beans and tossing it with pasta like in the Summer Harvest Vegan Pasta recipe I’ve shared. Since I try to use seasonal produce, I never get bored of eating the same vegetables with my pasta every time.