How To Get Fruity At Work

Have I mentioned yet how hard it is to eat the right foods and ignore the wrong ones?  The past couple of weeks have been eye-opening for me in terms of some of the foods I've eaten over the years.  I'm focusing on cutting out fatty foods, heavily processed foods, cutting out junk foods (like POP, as a proper Minnesotan would say).  I'm also looking for easy ways to increase fruit and vegetable intake.

We've always tried to keep some sort of fresh fruit in the house, but honestly we were just going through the motions.  Grapes, apples, oranges, typically those get thrown into the bottom drawer of the refrigerator, forgotten until we rediscover then six weeks later.  Bananas sit on the counter until they resemble some sort of pudding, or possibly the leavings of a large animal.  We've eaten a lot of banana bread over the years.

The problem with fruit is that it takes effort.  If you're looking for a snack, and you have the choice between a bag of chips that are ready to eat, or grapes that you have to wash first, typically you're going to grab the chips.  Taking an apple or an orange to work may seem easy, but sitting at your desk with sticky fingers, dripping apple juice all over the place, you quickly decide it's not worth the effort.  That's been my experience anyway.

I read somewhere recently that a way to solve this dilemma is to prepare the fruits ahead of time.  Wash the grapes all at once and divide them into containers.  Make a fruit salad, again dividing into containers.  I've been doing that for the past two weeks with grapes, and it's worked perfectly.  I've had a cup of grapes with almost every lunch, with no extra effort on my part.  This week, I'm expanding that to include apples and watermelon.

Each of these containers contains 1 cup of grapes, 1/2 cup of apple chunks, and 1/2 cup of watermelon chunks.  That's 2 cups of fresh fruit in a grab-and-go ready-to-eat container.  This, a yogurt, and a handful of cashews will be lunch this week.  All it took was 10 minutes of prep work.

Now, back to my bottle of POP, the first one I've had since mid-week.