If you’re like me, you’re not really a fruit eater. I like a good apple, but it’s hard to find a good apple. I love a good pear … but it’s hard to find a good pear. And so on. So I really don’t eat a lot of fruit.
I probably don’t need to explain to you the health benefits of fruit, from their anti-oxidants to their added soft fiber to their lower glycemic sugars. I really felt that I should eat more fruit, but, whenever I bought apples and bit into a mushy one … blech!
Then my life changed.
When I started doing Tony Horton’s P90X, I also changed my diet. The dietary suggestions in the P90X program did not necessarily include more fruit, but they did include allowances for a lot more protein than I was used to eating. To get enough protein, I turned to prepackaged protein drinks.
Then I read Mark Sisson’s The Primal Blueprint and it made a lot of sense to me, so I stopped eating all grains. All of them. No pasta. No bread. No oatmeal. No tortillas.
(I eat grains again now, but in far smaller quantities that I used to. That is my usual approach to reducing a dietary item: Quit it for three to six months — sometimes longer — to break the habit, then add a little back in.)
I had already stopped eating almost all sugars with the exception of some honey after workouts.
Given those circumstances, how could I get the 250 grams of carbohydrate I needed for my new diet if I did not eat those things? I had to add more fruit to my diet.
I switched to a protein powder, so I could prepare my own protein shakes, and, yup, I added frozen fruit to those protein shakes.
I mostly use blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries. I don’t use bananas — too much sugar in those, and I’ve also always thought that drinking bananas is kinda gross.
Recently Costco also started stocking frozen organic peaches, so I use those in my protein shakes as well.
I mention “organic” because that’s important for me, if affordable. The organic berries and fruits that I’ve been buying have far less sugar in them than the fruits I was used to, and I find that much more enjoyable. When I eat those organic peaches, I feel as if I am eating food, not just sugar.
I don’t use the USDA Dietary Guidelines or the Food Pyramid as any kind of logical guidance for eating. You can read Good Calories, Bad Calories to find out why. (HINT: What shows up on those lists is way too influenced by politics, instead of being totally driven by actual nutrition science.)
But I do think that eating more fruit is a good idea, and I’m happy that I’ve found a way to incorporate fruit into my current eating habits.
How about you? Do you get enough fruit?