How The Canada Food Guide Has Changed My Diet
The Canada Food Guide was revised this year as it now suggests that people increase their intake of vegetables and fruits. It also no longer recommends fruit juices as good beverages because of the relatively high sugar content of juices and has put plain water as the ideal beverage for us now.
I’ve had a pretty good diet ever since my martial arts competition years and have maintained it even long after retiring from active competition. But I must say that the recent changes with the Canada Food Guide has influenced me to modify my own diet at home.
My home intake of meat has not changed. So this remains mainly chicken, turkey and fish with very little red meat consumption at home. I do eat red meat when eating out but this is only a few times per month at most.
I also still drink milk during all my home meals believe it or not but it is still the low fat skim milk from powder form.
What Has Changed In My Diet
I have decreased the amount of carbohydrates such as rice, breads and pasta. I still eat these but just slightly lower amounts especially during dinners. These use to be the largest portion of my dinners but no longer.
The biggest change in my diet as a result of the 2019 revised Canada Food Guide is with my vegetables intake. The Canada Food Guide recommends 50% of our intake is with vegetables so my home dinners now reflect this change. The photo above is an example of what my nightly dinner vegetables are.
I have 1/2 to one full tomato (mainly as a preventative measure against prostate cancer), a carrot and a green leafy vegetable which can be spinach, romaine lettuce, broccoli, green cabbage or in the case of the photo above, napa cabbage. I also sometimes use beans for the green portion of my vegetables especially when I have them available from my outdoor deck garden during the summer months.
But as you can see from the above photo, the three types of vegetables I usually eat as part of my home dinners take up pretty much an entire plate full. So it’s the amount I’ll eat for my dinner vegetables that has changed the most for me. Believe it or not, I still manage to pile up the meat and carbohydrate portions of my meals on that plate!
Overall, I have not found these changes to my diet to be that difficult to adopt. The only thing about an increased intake of vegetables I have to deal with now is I have to go to the grocer more often to buy fresh vegetables which now get used up faster!
