See who can set the plant eating high score in your home.
There was nothing quite like the thrill of getting your initials on the high score list during the arcade game era.
And we know we should eat more plants to be healthy.
What if you combined the two for everyone in your household?
See who can eat the largest variety of plants in your home on a given day. The benefits are as follows:
- It makes a game of something that is often hard/boring to do
- Greatly decreases the chance of eating too much of one plant
- It creates a more mindful approach (which just means you’re paying attention) to what you’re eating
- It will most likely make it easy to get your recommended daily intake of vegetables and fruit (and thus fiber)
Even if you’re an omnivore, we should all be on a plant-based diet. (Somehow, the term “plant-based” is often erroneously thought to mean vegetarian or vegan when it means that plants form the basis of your intake and thus are what you consume more of than anything else – not in terms of calories, but in terms of volume.)
Benefit #2 above is worth mentioning further. We go overboard when the popular media decide to spread the word that something is healthy. It’s happened with soy, kale, and avocadoes over the years just to name a few. By eating a large variety of different plants in a given day, overconsumption and the vitamin and mineral imbalances that can result are automatically avoided.
But this is about the fun of making eating plants a game so let’s get back to that.
Without intentionally altering what I ate, here are the different plants I ate on random recent day:
Raspberries, blueberries, pumpkin seeds, flaxseeds, chia seeds, walnuts, pecans, coconut, tomato sauce, lettuce, mixed greens (3 different), broccoli, endive, celery, grapefruit, hummus (4 plants – chick peas, lemon juice, tahini, olive oil), onion, potato, curry leaves, brussels sprouts
That’s 25 plants!
If you’ve got people in your house who are ambivalent (or perhaps openly against) eating more plants, pick one day a week and see who can set the high score.
Having a bit of fun with a health behavior makes it less burdensome and it will likely lead to people trying some new plant foods they perhaps had not tried before.