Put some veggies in your life

Trying to get more vegetables into your diet is one of the best habits there is. This is an issue almost all of our clients deal with.

Here are 12 ways to easily add vegetables to your life:

Put a handful of spinach or kale in your smoothie

Try not to go way overboard with how much you put in. One handful is usually plenty. Otherwise you’ll be chewing spinach at the bottom of your cup.

Dip your vegetables in ranch, yogurt or hummus

Try to take carrots, celery, broccoli, cucumbers, cauliflower or whatever else you can think of and dip it in a sauce.

Try to be a little sparing with it — we don’t want to drench the vegetable — but this is a great starting point.

Stir fry

Making a stir fry is a great way to get a ton of vegetables. You can cut up many types and mix them all together.

Making a huge stir fry can also last for a few meals.

The key here is to try to not go crazy with the sauces. It’s OK to add teriyaki, barbecue or sweet and sour sauce, but remember, there is a lot of sugar in those, so be smart about how much you are mixing in.

Omelet

Sticking vegetables in your omelet is an awesome way to get them in the morning.

Cut up onions, peppers, zucchini, squash and anything else you like grilled and throw them in your omelet.

Usually I cook them a little bit on a separate skillet then toss them in the omelet as they are ready.

Salad

Salads are probably the king of ways to get your vegetable intake up.

Start with a base of romaine lettuce or spinach, or mix them together.

Add a mixture of vegetables on top — mushrooms, red cabbage, radishes, snow peas and anything else you like.

Vegetable soup

Make a big pot of soup. Bring the water to a boil, throw beef or chicken broth cubes in. Throw any vegetable you can think of into it that you like cooked.

It will last for days and is a great way to get your vegetables up.

Mixing greens and vegetables in wraps

Make a wrap and throw in some cucumbers, romaine lettuce, pickles, tomatoes, etc.

You could do this on a sandwich as well.

Just top your meat with a few slices of something to uptake your vegetable number. Remember, you don’t have to have a full serving of each thing, you could get a half of a serving of multiple things throughout the day.

Double up on what you like

If you have a vegetable you really love, eat twice as much of it.

If you love cauliflower, eat two servings at a sitting. Eat a huge salad if you love them — just be careful with the amount of dressing.

Love pickles? Eat two large dill pickles.

Grill your vegetables

Grilling is a great way to give some different flavors to your vegetables. Put asparagus in tin foil, throw some grassfed butter and salt in there with it and it tastes amazing.

Broil your vegetables

If you like a little crunch to your vegetables, the broiler is amazing. Cut up asparagus, yellow squash, zucchini, throw them under the broiler for a few minutes.

Use them as your new pasta base

This is a more advanced strategy, but for those of you who like to cook, here are a couple of great ways to replace pasta and rice.

Use cut-up cauliflower as your rice base, use cauliflower as a potato base. Use spaghetti squash instead of spaghetti.

There are many creative ways to get these bases into your cooking.

Recreate “fried” foods you love

Cut up a potato, sweet potatoes, kale, etc.

Drizzle on some olive oil and bake.

Trevor Warnke, a 2004 graduate of Jefferson-Scranton High School, is CEO of Game Changing Performance, 708 N. Cedar St.

He has a bachelor’s degree in exercise science and is certified as a strength coach and personal trainer.