Back when I was coming up with my goals for my Healthy Goals Checklist, I decided that I needed to do some research to figure out how much of different types of foods I should be eating today and what specifically worked the best with my body. Eventually, I came up with my finalized version:
Healthy Goals Checklist:
- Consume at least 100g of protein.
- Consume at least 20g of fiber.
- Get at least 4 servings of fruits/veggies.
- Drink at least 100 oz. of water.
- No more than one treat/dessert.
- Do stretches/leg exercises.
When I first came up with the 4 servings of fruits and vegetables rule, I honestly wasn’t quite sure what a “serving” was. A handful? Eight ounces? A cup? So, for a while, I basically just eye-balled it. If it looked like an arbitrary “serving” to me, I counted it as one. I noticed that I generally considered one serving to be about a cup of vegetables.
But this guessing business just wasn’t good enough for me. Eventually, I realized that I should probably actually try to figure out what a real serving of fruits and vegetables is. I did a bunch of research on all of this kind of stuff — it is so interesting to me. I would’ve loved to be a nutrition major (if it weren’t for all the science 
).
Apparently the USDA has decided (a.k.a. pulled out of their asses) that a serving of fruits/veggies is one half cup.
ONE HALF CUP.
My jaw seriously dropped when I read this. According to my original HGC, I’m supposed to get four servings of fruits and veggies daily. One half cup per servings seems… pathetic… to me. It’s like they’re just lowering the amount of what a serving should be in order to make their random goal of “five servings a day” seem more attainable.
At this point, I’m honestly not even sure what I should be striving for. Four half-cup servings seems like too little, but my original guess of what was about four cups a day is sometimes unattainable for me. Should I be going with five servings? Or is that just the government trying to make “healthy” seem more realistic to the masses?
I guess that I’ve decided that my new goal is 5 servings per day, but that eating more is, of course, always a good thing and something that I hope for.
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Interesting, I’ve heard that it’s different for different veggies/fruits. For example a serving of lettuces is 1 c. but a serving of cooked veggies is 1/2. I say just pile the fruits and veggies on, it doesn’t hurt!
Way to go with the HGC!
Abby recently posted…Still A Lot To Marvel At
Haha, yeah, that’s my plan, too. I didn’t really go into it — you’re right, it’s a bit more complicated than the 1/2 cup thing (which is another problem that I have with the whole thing — the government shouldn’t make being healthy complicated). In general, the 1/2 cup rule applies, but there are certain ones like oranges where they say that the whole thing is one serving. But it just doesn’t make sense. Like, one whole orange is more than a 1/2 cup, yet it’s considered “equal” to a 1/2 cup of strawberries? So confusing.
I didn’t know one serving was 1/2 cup! Seems like too little. With that rule, I get between 12 and 18 servings a day. Six to eight of those servings are greens, three to four are fruit, and the rest are veggies like peppers, mushrooms, cucumbers, onions, broccoli, squash, cabbage, etc.