Posted by kathryn in A Balanced Diet

Over the last week I’ve been blogging about the importance of variety in your diet. Over four days I posted a list of the foods I ate, to check on the variety in my own eating.

Each day I ate over 30 different foods, but you may have noticed the same ones cropping up regularly.

• There were at least two occasions where I had tahini bars, quinoa and oat croquettes and fetta and olive muffins.
• I had the black bean and sweet potato burrito filling on two occasions.
• My fresh fruit was mainly mandarins and bananas
• Beetroot greens made quite a few appearances

While my daily totals exceeded 30 foods, when I count the number of different foods over the four days, it totals 65. This gives an average of 16 foods per day.

Changing your shopping list

I think this would be a common pattern in my diet and it’s partly a reflection of my habit of shopping on a weekly basis. I buy a certain amount of food, to last the week. By default that means I’m going to be eating the same foods several times.

But then when I go shopping the next week, I’ll buy something different. While last week there were lots of bananas and mandarins, this week I bought more oranges, grapes and apples. Last week we had bok choy and beetroot greens, whereas this week I’m eating silverbeet and cabbage.

Varying your shopping list each week, gives you variety over a stretch of time.

Varying the foods in the freezer

I also usually spend some time cooking every couple of weekends. I make regular batches of soup and often cook some muffins or snack bars. These go straight in the freezer and I find them invaluable for snacks, breakfast variety and quick lunches.

But I’ll never make the same thing two cooking sessions in a row. Last time I made roasted cauliflower soup, the tahini bars, fetta and olive muffins and the quinoa croquettes. So these foods have turned up frequently in my diet.

However next time I do some cooking I’ll make something else. Maybe a different flavoured soup, some apple and oat bars, or I’ll switch to fruit muffins, rather than savoury.

Again, this is another way I vary what I eat over time.

Other people talking about variety

I also asked readers to note down the variety of foods they were eating. And thanks to all of you who took part.

Johanna, Sue and Ricki all left examples of their menu in comments. While Cassie, Lili and Stephanie have all blogged about their own food variety.

21 May, 2008