Fruit, it's good for us, we need to eat it, but it can be detrimental to weight loss - how can we include fruit in our diet without it becoming a problem? Here are 5 easy tips to help you choose the best variety, know how much to eat, how often to eat it and what to eat it with.
Eat fresh fruit
Avoid fruit juice, fruit cordial, dried fruit and canned or packaged fruit with syrup or fruit juice. These options are more energy dense and less nutritious then fresh fruit varieties. Eat whole fruit or fruit you have cut up yourself.
Eat a variety
Different fruits provide different combinations of nutrients and eating a variety will ensure you get a bit of everything. No fruit is necessarily better than an another and no fruit needs to be completely avoided, eating a variety everyday is best. Allowing your fruit choices to be guided by seasons will help you keep it fresh.
Only twice per day
2 servings (100g, 1/2 cup or 1 medium peice = 1 serve) of fruit per day meets your daily requirements of all the good things while keeping your sugar intake to a minimum. Regardless of whether you choose a higher or lower sugar variety keeping servings to 2 per day will keep your energy intake from fruit under control.
Not at the same time
Spread out your 2 servings of fruit across the day, for example, 1 at breakfast or morning tea and the other at afternoon tea or dinner. Regardless of the glycaemic index (GI) of the fruit variety you eat, eating only one serving at a time will keep the glycaemic load (GL) down - this is far more important than just the GI of the fruit.
With protein
Eat fruit at the same time as eating protein containing food such as yogurt or nuts. This will help you keep your fruit servings to just 1 at a time, slow the absorption of the sugar in the fruit and help you feel full for longer.