Are You Eating Enough Vegetables?

I'm trying to eat healthier. I really am. (I'll sometimes even go a whole day without a donut!)

Apparently, one of the keys to eating healthy is having a balanced diet with just the right amount of food from each of the major food groups. I remember learning about the food groups when I was a kid, but a lot of the things they taught me as a kid have changed. (Such as, Pluto is no longer a planet, and there is no such thing as a brontosaurus. (Maybe.))

So, I can't remember what the food groups were when they were taught to me, and they've probably changed since way back then anyway. The way I look at it, these are the main food groups:

1. Meat--beef, bacon, chicken, non-bacon pork, and maybe some fish.
2. Cheese--all of the cheeses: cheddar, Swiss, provolone, mozzarella, etc., plus butter and milk.
3. Wheat and grains--all of the breads and all of the noodles. (Donuts qualify as breads, right?) (Cinnamon rolls are definitely bread.)
4. Desserts--cakes, pies, cookies, donuts (they do double-duty), puddings, pastries, cobblers, and ice creams.
5. Fruits--bananas, oranges, apples, pears, peaches, and all forms of berries (except for bunny-berries. You don't want to eat those.)
6. Vegetables--lettuce, carrots, broccoli, green beans, cabbage, and anything else you might feed a rabbit or a hamster.

Unfortunately, while vegetables are number six on my list, professional healthy-eating people put them higher. Apparently they say a person should have six or seven servings of vegetables a day. How difficult this is depends on how exactly you define a "serving." In my mind, a serving is one unit of a vegetable. Let's look at this picture of some vegetables I ate the other day:

Sooooo many vegetables!!!

Here we see four "units" of carrot, one big pickle slice (it's hiding under the cheeseburger), and some lettuce. So, that's either six or seven servings of vegetables, depending on if you think that's enough lettuce to count as two servings or not. So, with one cheeseburger and four carrots, I've gotten my daily allotment of vegetables! Look at me, I'm eating healthy!

However, there are some who would say I'm overestimating the size of a serving. They say that one baby carrot is not an entire serving of vegetables. They say that in order to get six or seven servings, I would have to eat this many vegetables:

And this is just for lunch. (You should see what dinner looks like!)

My guess is that for truly healthy eating, my daily vegetable consumption should be somewhere between what is shown in these two pictures. (I'm thinking if I tripled my cheeseburger/carrot intake I'd be closer to eating healthy, right? Maybe I could have two pickles per burger instead of just one.)

I know I should probably eat more vegetables. Even though I'm not a rabbit or a hamster, I know that vegetables are better for me than a lot of the other things I eat, and I need to get more servings of them every day.

(I wonder how many pieces of carrot cake would I have to eat in order to get my seven servings of vegetables today?)


Edited from a post originally published on 7/14/2017.