Do you eat five pieces of fruit a day?
I know it’s the recommended daily amount, but I’ve never understood how people find the time to eat so much fruit in one day. I eat maybe five pieces a month, though I do eat lots of veg and also have some sort of fruit juice every day (and no, not just grape juice
). It isn’t that I don’t like fruit, it’s just that I never get round to eating it.
But thanks to my friend “S” (aka Pipocas, popcorn mule and international woman of mystery) and my student & friend Paco (aka iskenderum ) that’s all about to change . . .
While we were out ’emergency shopping’ after our fabulous lunch the other day, S told me that she finally lost all the weight she put on after having her baby simply by adding five pieces of fruit to her daily diet. And although I suspected that this was largely due to her not having time to eat anything else I thought ‘can’t hurt might help’ and tried visualising myself as a fruit-eating person. To no avail.
Then a couple of days later Paco and I were talking about food during class (for a change) and he mentioned that he’d found a way of getting more fruit in his daily diet, and well, it just doesn’t get much more serendipitous than that, so I asked him for his secret. Which is very simple. Every day he takes five pieces of fruit and purées them with his moulinex hand mixer . . . and then he eats it throughout the day. And I thought to myself – hey I can do that! Because I’ve read that drinking juices doesn’t actually take the place of eating fruit and I find fruit smoothies a bit like drinking Guinness
(too thick for a beverage, too thin to be food).
And so I made my first fruit purée yesterday using a granny smith apple, a banana, a kiwi, an orange and some pineapple.
It’s a bit like eating baby food, except I don’t purée mine too much as I like it a bit chunky. It’s certainly more substantial than either juice or smoothies so it feels like a proper meal. And it’s totally delicious with a dollop or two of plain yoghurt – makes a fabulous breakfast. Yesterday and today I only managed to eat half of the purée each day. But that’s still better than before – poco á poco!
Whaddaya think – good idea?
casa azahar 
Excellent idea. Fruit juice is a cop-out but fresh fruit is what nature intended us to eat – after an excellently prepared Mammoth steak and some fried fungi! Just don’t stray too far from the fire – there are sabre-toothed tigers out there!
Oh, and tomato is a fruit as well!
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Fruit juice doesn’t count?! Oh no! I thought it did. Damnit. Not even if it’s freshly squeezed juice?
I’m like you, I can never be bothered with fruit (except for Cox apples for the two weeks of the year they’re in season in England).
Fruit puree doesn’t sound that great to me, but I like smoothies so maybe that can count. Fortunately I eat tons of tomatoes so perhaps I’m not doing quite so badly…
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do Froot Loops count? what about the fruit flavored mini-Tootsie Rolls? limes in margaritas?
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Huh. I’m of the fruit-eating camp. Though I probably only get about 3 pieces a day. (Is it 5 pieces, or 5 servings? Because by some counts, a banana is 2 servings of fruit. And I’ve also seen the recommendation to eat 5 servings of fruit and veggies a day, rather than 5 of fruit. But that might be just a U.S. thing.)
A fruit salad appeals to me more than a puree, actually. And I even like smoothies. I also like to eat cooked fruit, and have been known to microwave up a bowl of frozen berries for a dessert. Or to cut up an apple and microwave it with some cinnamon and a touch of brown sugar or maple syrup. In the winter, when not as much variety is available, I eat a fair amount of dried fruit, too. Dried apricots and prunes are quite tasty, and require no preparation.
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Hey, Pipocas here! I never got around to clarifying how I do that (due to the shopping… the earrings were a big hit, btw). Usually I only eat 2 or 3 pieces of fruit each day, mostly apples and bananas. Then I drink a Compal Esencial or make a batido or eat some dried fruit.
I can’t insert an image here, so go see and buy this:
Esensial
Also? I didn’t mention that I had that pregnancy weight for 22 months before I started the fruit thing. And I eat normally besides that; I simply added the fruit and didn’t go about removing things from my diet.
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Re: juices. I recall reading somewhere that they are ‘false friends’ because they have concentrated sugar without any of the fibre you get when you eat the whole fruit.
Hey, you’re right, alejna. I did a bit of googling and most of the food pyramids I came across (like this one) say about 2-4 servings of fruit is recommended. For my age group I am probably good with the ‘two and a half’ servings I’ve been getting this week, which also means I only have to make up the purée every other day. Phew, that’s a relief!
In general, a serving is considered to be:
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Hey, bom dia Pipocas! How’s the trip going? Lunch on Friday?
What a coincidence – I saw an ad on tv last night for something similar to that Esensial stuff, can’t remember the name, saying that drinking one little bottle of it was the equivalent of two pieces fruit a day. Is it like a purée?
Glad the earrings went over well. 🙂
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It’s five portions of fruit AND veg here in the UK, and I’m good with that. In fact most of that will be in my lunch today.
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I think I mentioned on archie’s blog how much fruit I eat. today it’s been a punnet of blueberries, punnet of blackberries, punnet of raspberries and a persimmon. I seem to snack on fruit all afternoon, berries are in season right now and pretty cheap.
fruit never fills me up though. I still eat 3 normal meals as well. if I wasn’t eating the fruit I’d be snacking on chocolate and would probably weigh a helluva lot more. a punnet holds about 125 g of fruit…..
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Yes, I was thinking about you and your punnets as I wrote this post, nursemyra. Berries would indeed be a nice snack food – mmmm… blueberries!
But other fruits are often so much trouble to eat. Oranges are so messy, apples take ages to finish and I can’t do anything else while I’m eating them.
I actually LOVE pears, but there’s a fine line between them being too hard and turning to mush and I often miss this moment as they are sitting there looking pretty in my pretty blue glass fruit bowl.
I have to admit that my fruit purée doesn’t look terribly appetizing, though it tastes fantastic. Strawberries are just coming into season here so I might add a few of those next time for colour. And if I can find some other nice berries I’ll stir them into the purée rather than mush them up.
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See, this sort of thread makes me so envious.
As someone who has admitted to a certain amount of difficulty in the waist-line dept., it would be lovely to snack on something healthy like fruit, but there is just so little of it that I actually like enough that eating it isn’t a chore.
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I’m reckoning we’re not alone, Johnny, as the recent batch of products (such as Pipocas linked to) offering up to two fruit servings a day in an easy to consume drink bottle wouldn’t be on the market if there weren’t a market for this sort of thing.
The fruit purée takes about 7 minutes to prepare and whip up and I think it has to be healthier than anything pre-made.
But I don’t know what you mean about there being ‘so little of it’ available as I can find almost every type of fruit (berries excepted) at my local supermarket, and even better looking specimens at the various markets here. Though of course you said stuff you like enough to spend the time eating, which is also my problem.
I mean, I quite like mangos (mangoes?) but hell, they are so much work! And I could never eat a whole one at one sitting. And the only way I’d ever eat a banana – other than in the purée – would be sliced up with yoghurt or on top of breakfast cereal.
Fruit purée! It’s now, it’s happening! It’s what you really want and need! 🙂
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The Esencial has a mango variety; it’s the bestest. The pear variety is a close runner-up. I’m bringing you some on Friday.
It took me quite a while to figure out fruit management. I buy a bunch of fruit, then take whatever ends up over-ripe and throw it in the blender with milk and honey and a couple cubes of ice to make a batido. The over-ripe stuff tends to be sweeter which makes the batido tastier.
And, excuse me, but you can’t eat an apple and surf the internet/type emails at the same time?
I agree that oranges are way too messy and too much work even to juice them. Haven’t figured that one out yet. And bananas… I like them but am oddly self-concious eating them in the office with my male coworkers around.
Don’t you like dried apricots or prunes?
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And when you mentioned the pineapple, I was reminded of this:
http://xkcd.com/388/
Hee.
I leave you with one more fruit-related thought: I try to eat 3 pieces/servings (oh, the semantics!) before midday.
Can we talk about sex now?
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Oooh, okay … so Friday is on then? Fancy going to Modesto?
No, I can’t eat an apple and do anything else, unless I have a small bowl handy to put the apple in when I’m not tediously trying to chew through it all. Okay, I’ve sometimes sliced it into wedges that can then be eaten as fingerfood, but I still need the bowl. Fuckin’ apples, eh?
I’m less concerned about the sexual connotations about eating a banana than I am about them being rather dry and almost sickly sweet, so that’s why I need to eat them with yoghurt or on cereal with milk.
Haven’t had any dried fruit for ages, but I think they are a bit like juice – lots of concentrated sugar without all the ‘goodness’ that fruit is so famous for.
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What do you mean by now, Pipocas? 😉
Oh, I love those xkcd cartoons! But I have to say that grapefruit used to be one of my favourites, except way too difficult to actually eat on a regular basis.
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Meanwhile – watermelons??? Who the hell actually likes watermelons? They taste of hardly anything and you have to keep spitting out the pips … bleh.
And yes, I do tend to do all of my fruit eating in the morning … eating fruit in the afternoon/evening just feels wrong somehow.
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Yeah – what I was saying was not that fruit of an almost obscene number of varieties (whatever the season) isn’t available. Rather that there are so few fruits (and I admit I haven’t tried much) that I like enough that I would eat them “voluntarily”.
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blue bowl and blue chairs. very nice!
azahar, it’s funny that you think fruit is only a morning thing. my ex husband used to say that about fish!
and have you ever seen what a dragon fruit looks like? bright pink and knobbly on the outside, snow white with millions of miniature edible black seeds on the inside. so pretty and very thirst quenching, though like watermelon, not a very strong flavour
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Fish in the morning? Like kippers on toast? Ick.
Yeah, those chairs were a gift from my pal Agustín (aka guspemar) when he was doing a bit of re-decorating and before he decided to go the whole hog and totally renovate his gorgeous apartment. They were black and I thought they’d look prettier cobalt blue. And so they are. 🙂
Never heard of dragon fruit, but there is a very popular fruit here called chirimoya that is also full of seeds and weirdly ends up tasting exactly like apple custard. Me? I can’t get beyond the seed thing. Bleh.
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I’ve never heard the name chirimoya. we have that fruit here and it’s called ‘custard apple’
how about kiwi fruit? those seeds are very tiny and totally edible. that’s the siz i’m talking about with the dragonfruit seeds.
http://www.thirteenmonths.com/picturepages/vnA/vnA18.htm
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i totally have the fruit thing covered, and yes, it saves me A LOT from post-lunch sugar snacks. there are *always* some sort of seedless grapes in my house, and generally, those make their way into a little container for lunch’s dessert.
azahar, i’m with you on pears…if i don’t remember to check them EVERY morning, i miss the perfect spot myself. try asian-style pears instead: they’re crunchier (don’t have the sandy, mealy texture that overripe regular pears get), but still juicy and sweet. underripe ones will have the same texture but just a bit less flavor.
nursemyra, my local asian market often has gloriously colored piles of those dragonfruit in a bin. i’ve just never been brave enough to try them out!
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That’s a sensible name for it, nursemyra. 🙂
I don’t mind kiwi fruit seeds – kind of remind me of poppyseeds. Mmm… that dragonfruit looks good (though it probably wouldn’t after I got through mushing it up).
I’d forgotten about seedless grapes, fireweaver. And yes, aren’t pears annoying! Thing is, I don’t tend to go for sweet things as snack food anyhow, so I don’t reallly need fruit to keep me from eating chocolate, candy, etc.
That’s what the Orville’s 94% fat-free popcorn is for – snacks!
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I have tried the custard-apple fruit thingy, and though it’s almost like apple and custard, there’s something subtly wrong about it. Think I’ll stick with proper apple and custard.
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