Fruits & Veggies... Getting a baseline

Getting a Baseline

Paying attention to the fruits and veggies that my children eat often takes a back seat to the urgent millions of other things on the radar in my role as parent.   Author Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) coined this the "tyranny of the urgent".  Urgent means it requires immediate attention as in, "Quick!  Get in the car we should have left 5 minutes ago for soccer practice!"

On the other hand, eating fruits and vegetables is not an urgent matter.  Not packing veggies in my children's lunch today will unlikely cause much of an immediate impact.  However, there may be negative effects down the road as there is overwhelming evidence that eating adequate fruits and veggies helps protect us against major diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke.  Therefore, although important, it is not urgent that we make sure we are eating adequate fruits and veggies.  Important matters that are not urgent require more initiative, more pro-activity.  How am I going to make this non-urgent activity of eating adequate fruits and veggies begin to get some traction?

 

To get started, I need to learn how far short we are falling with eating adequate fruits and veggies.  The current recommendation is to eat at least 5 servings but ideally closer to 10 servings per day of fruits and veggies. To get a sense of how many fruits and veggies we eat, our family agreed to begin tracking this week.  At dinner, I asked everyone if they would be willing to keep track of how many fruits and veggies they eat for one week.  Although no one jumped up and down with joy, they at least did not moan and groan. 

 

So, after dinner, I pulled out  this free on-line tracker  www.pps.k12.pa.us, and I printed the following:

 

• The tracker - front page (one for each person)
• What counts as a serving size - page 3 (one copy to share)

Using a marker I modified the tracker pictured here.  Under each day of the week, I added an "F" (for fruit) above the left column of 5 circles, and a "V" (for veggies) above the right column of 5 circles.  We used an orange marker to fill in a fruit circle for every serving we ate, and a green marker to fill in a veggie circle for every serving we ate.  There is a fruit and veggie tracking app at http://munch5aday.com/, but I prefer the colorful paper and pen method.

Although at this point we are simply gathering data to develop a baseline, I am pleasantly surprised at how the simple act of paying attention to a behavior provides it's own built-in motivator.  Without even mentioning a peep about any "should"s  (i.e., "we should eat more fruits and veggies"), the children are already in healthy competition to eat enough fruits and veggies to color in all the fruit & veggie "bubbles".   When trying to determine how much salad David ate, he had the great idea to measure the salad with a measuring cup the next day so we aren't guessing what constitutes a serving size.  ;-)

I want to be a good example and do all that is within my power to set my children up to be of healthy mind and body, now and in the future.  This can be done by teaching them what is an adequate amount of fruits and veggies to eat each day, and how to do it.   For now, we are just collecting information for a baseline.  No judgment, no pressure.  Just data collection.  From this baseline, the next step will be to track our progress as we find ways to increase our intake of fruit and veggies.