Replacement for vegetables ?

[mamadboze]

I started South Beach Diet along with insanity workout last week, and i have already lost 6 pounds. Everything is going great except south beach diet requires me to eat lots of vegetables.

Let me first start by explaining how I feel about vegetables:
- Looking at vegetables makes me wanna pull my eyes out
- Smelling vegetables makes me wanna throw up
- Tasting vegetables makes me ill (Literally for about 2 hours)

So the question:
Is it fine to replace all my vegetables with vegetables juice like V8.
The Juice I can stand, because I can hold my nose and avoid smelling it while chugging the glass, and afterward I can drink lots of water to get rid of the disgusting taste. So is this replacement reasonable, or is it going to mess with the diet?

[Kimboroni]

Is that always how you feel about vegetables, or is this just since starting the diet? I ask because eating low carb (while SB should NOT be low carb) can cause some interesting symptoms, including a complete disgust for food.

That's not a great solution to substitute V8 for all your veggies. It lacks the fiber of whole veggies. It also has a lot of sodium.

SB is not a short term fix. You can lose weight on it, but you have to stay on it in order to keep the weight off. Vegetables are a healthy part of a balanced diet, so you really need to keep trying different ones and different methods of preparing them so that you can eat them regularly. When you include the various kinds of beans/legumes, the p1 food list has over 80 different vegetables on it. That's a lot of foods to try. So hopefully you can find a way to make this work longterm, or else it ultimately won't work.

[mamadboze]

Thanks for your response.
And I have always hated vegetables, since I remember.
I think I'm gonna try different types, and see which one I could stand eating, so that I can go through this diet, and hopefully get used to it.

[Kimboroni]

If it helps, I used to think that I hated vegetables (except things like corn and potatoes, which are actually starches). It turned out that I disliked badly prepared veggies, like the canned string beans that I was forced to eat as a kid. With SB and some better recipes, I found that I liked vegetables.

[ami]

I agree with Kim, I suggest you try some fresh veggies, some are as sweet as fruits, like red sweet peppers, even my 8 year old grandson loves!
Try different veggies each week, experiment with different types of lettuces, for example, different types of tomatoes, I love grape tomatoes, they're like candy for me! You were probably forced to eat canned veggies when you were a kid and that's why you can't stand them. Except for beans, I don't eat canned veggies either, mostly fresh or frozen.

Happy experiments!

[Magna]

My suggestion would be to take some time to find vegetables you like, before starting SBD in earnest. You might look down the phase 1 "foods to enjoy" list, and see what looks like something you wouldn't mind trying. There are also a lot of recipes on this site, and some other sites like Kalyn's Kitchen - I'd suggest you look those over and find a couple of vegetable recipes that seem good to you.

If there are any cooking shows you like (ones that focus on high quality food, not "guilty pleasures"), you might consider watching some shows where they prepare vegetables, just to get some inspiration. Even if it's not a recipe you can use, at least you may get some insight into how vegetables can be prepared so they taste great. You could also watch videos online, or borrow DVDs from your library. Just a few good shows for the basics are Julia Child (The French Chef), America's Test Kitchen, Simply Ming (Asian food), Jacques Pepin, The Galloping Gourmet (old show), and Good Eats (with Alton Brown). Almost anything PBS has aired is good, except stuff on their infomercial-type shows, which I think is mostly hype.

For example, here's a Jacque Pepin show where he cooks a ratatouille and shrimp with cabbage and caviar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCC47QYyV0Q

The ratatouille itself is fine for phase 1, and you could serve it with a ww pasta in phase 2. The shrimp and cabbage could pretty easily be modified for phase 1, by using NF evaporated milk with some olive oil in place of the cream. He also makes a peach melba, which could pretty easily be adapted for phase 2 by using just pureed raspberries as the sauce (no jam, but maybe adding some sweetener) and another frozen dessert besides ice cream. But if you are just preparing to go on SBD, you could make these dishes exactly the way he does, and enjoy them that way. (Not saying you have to use these three recipes - just an example of how you could use a cooking show to help you learn to like vegetables.)