Vegetables in your healthy diet plan

Weight to Go is a meal replacement diet, meaning that your complete dietary requirements are met within the meals, shakes and snack bars of our healthy diet plan. The only food you need to add is a portion (a small handful) of fruit or vegetables with each meal, to ensure that you achieve your 5 portions a day and get the benefits of these important, healthy foods.

Vegetables don’t have to be the boring side ‘bit’ to a proper meal, prepared correctly vegetables add a range of flavours to your diet meals as well as important nutrients to your diet. There are many methods of cooking healthy vegetables. Here are some of the best.

Boiling vegetables, especially over boiling, can remove a good deal of the nutritional benefit. Carrots and Broccoli, in particular should never be boiled for more than a few minutes. Chopped potatoes, on the other hand, should be boiled until they just stay on a sharp knife when skewered and held out of the water.

Steaming is an excellent alternative to boiling and also helps the vegetables retain their natural flavours. Carrots and parsnips have a lovely sweet taste that excessive boiling removes. Broccoli is naturally crisp, something that steaming retains far more than boiling.

Traditional Roast Vegetables don’t have to lose all of their nutrition either. Using a lighter oil, and wrapping the baking tray in foil is an excellent way to reduce the oil you consume from roasting. Some vegetables, like garlic, actually become more nutritionally beneficial after roasting as the heat triggers chemical changes that increase the variety of nutrients within each serving – and roast garlic is one of the tastiest vegetables you can add to any meal.

A much maligned preparation for vegetables is frying; Deep Fat Frying is definitely a no-no for a healthy diet plan, because the absorption of fat into the food is very high. Stir Frying on the other hand, uses very little oil, and traditionally, light oils like Sesame or Groundnut. For the best stir fried vegetables, use only a tablespoon of oil in a wok or large frying pan. Rinse the vegetables (Carrots should only be lightly scrubbed, don’t peal the skin off) and toss them in the pan while still damp along with some chopped ginger and garlic. Mix it all up and then put a lid on the pan, this retains the steam in the pan, which means you won’t need to add any more oil or even water. The vegetable will also retain more flavour this way. Cooking should only take a few minutes and they are ready to eat as soon as they hit the plate.