Veggie Tales

On my never ending quest to live a healthy lifestyle I recently decided to consciously eat a minimum of five servings of vegetables a day. Why? Every diet or eating plan that I've read or heard about can't stress the importance of eating veggies enough. But, like many of us, I've read and heard things until my ears hurt and my eyes were ready to fall out and I still didn't do anything about it. My turning point in motivation came from Sierra. She said, "Mom, you need to eat more vegetables!" No, not really but I've been lamenting the fact that it is a huge challenge to get Sierra to eat vegetables; she mainly survives on carbs. Lately I've noticed that if she sees me munching on a carrot or a sugar snap-pea than she'll too, gnaw on some. I need to lead by example.

• How hard could it be if I actually tried? As long as options were in the fridge it shouldn't be that hard. I figured I did pretty good already. Here's reality: 1 serving equals 1 cup of raw vegetables or 1/2 cup if cooked. It didn't seem like that much until I took out a measuring cup. Using that scale meant that I averaged 1-2 servings per day.

• Only 1 or 2!!!
• Yikes!
• Really??
• No way!
• How can that be?

We eat pretty healthy and always have veggies.

• Yup, it was true. I needed to seriously boost the rabbit food intake if I wanted to meet the standard recommendations.

Problem: (in a whisper) I don't actually like vegetables all that much. Please don't tell anyone, especially Sierra and Trevor (who I'm also trying to get to eat more veggies)

• With the serving size reality in check I thought, "is it even possible to consume that many vegetables on a daily basis?" You know what?

It is!

• You know what else?

I really do feel better and have more energy and it's only been a week and a half.

• I think I also might actually be developing a bit of taste for the stuff.

Don't tell anyone that either.