Diet \u201cchallenges\u201d are, by their nature, strict and not sustainable. (That\u2019s what makes them challenges.) They usually demand you restrict your food choices in some way, such as cutting out entire food groups. But what if there was a diet challenge that just wanted you to eat more vegetables? That\u2019s the idea behind the 800-gram challenge.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The basic idea is simple: You eat 800 grams of fruits and\/or vegetables each day. That\u2019s it, that\u2019s the challenge.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Surely it can\u2019t be that simple!<\/em> you might object. Well, you\u2019re right. There is an official website for the challenge<\/u><\/a>, and if you sign up for the newsletter, you\u2019ll get a free guide telling you the rules for the challenge. This includes a big list of \u201cYes they count!\u201d foods and a smaller list of \u201cNo, they don\u2019t count\u201d foods. (You can also view those lists at the main website.) Corn and potatoes count. Raisins, juices, and nuts do not.<\/p>\n It also includes a note that the hashtag #800gChallenge is trademarked, and \u201ccannot be used for organized programs, challenges, or coaching without licensing from OptimizeMe nutrition.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The 800-gram challenge website cites a 2017 meta-analysis on fruit and vegetable consumption<\/u><\/a>. The authors concluded that the more fruits and vegetables you eat, the lower your risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and \u201call-cause mortality\u201d (which makes it sound like if you eat enough vegetables you\u2019ll live forever, but they just mean you\u2019ll live longer). The benefits level off at 600 grams per day for cancer risk, and 800 grams per day for everything else. If you eat more, that isn\u2019t a bad thing, it just isn\u2019t necessarily any better than eating 800 grams.\u00a0<\/p>\n They write: \u201cAn estimated 5.6 and 7.8 million premature deaths worldwide in 2013 may be attributable to a fruit and vegetable intake below 500 and 800 g\/day, respectively, if the observed associations are causal.\u201d That is, I will note, a big if<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Despite what a few contrarians on TikTok want you to believe<\/u><\/a>, fruits and vegetables are associated with good health\u2014in this study and in others. Will you personally<\/em> avert death by eating 800 grams of fruits and veggies? Nobody can guarantee that. But it isn\u2019t likely to hurt.\u00a0<\/p>\n This Ultrean scale<\/u><\/a> is only $10 and will get the job done just fine (I own a similar model).<\/p>\n<\/li>\n This two-platform KitchenAid scale<\/u><\/a> ($40) is what my cheap scale wishes it could be.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n This mechanical kitchen scale<\/u><\/a> ($37.50) will have you feeling like you live in an old-timey grocery store.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n I had to try the challenge, of course. The prescribed 800 grams sounded like it would be a lot<\/em>, since that\u2019s 28 ounces, or about 1.75 pounds. Per day.\u00a0<\/p>\n The OptimizeMe website helpfully offers that this amount of fruits and veggies is about six cups, typically totals 400 to 500 calories, and can fit on a dinner plate. You would split that up over your full day of eating, of course\u2014so about two cups per meal. And it\u2019s up to you how much of that you want to be fruit and how much will be vegetables.\u00a0<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what I ate on the first day of the challenge:\u00a0<\/p>\n Banana, 199 g<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Two small apples, 215 g<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Carrot, 80 g<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Black bean soup, ingredients 381 g (beans, onions, etc.\u2014I weighed these as I made the recipe and then divided the total by the number of servings)<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Total for the day: 875 g<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n In addition, I had a slice of pizza, some Sour Patch candy, a package of pork bao from Trader Joe\u2019s, a leftover Olive Garden breadstick, a small portion of steak, and an Old Fashioned cocktail.\u00a0 Total: 2,580 calories, which is neither unusually high nor low for me.\u00a0<\/p>\n I did have to work to get those veggies in. The soup was a meal I had already planned for the day, and I might normally have an apple or<\/em> a banana at some point, but on this particular day I had two apples, one banana, and one carrot as snacks. It took extra effort, but not enough to be onerous.\u00a0<\/p>\n I kept up the challenge for over a week, with totals of 875, 804, 830, 838, 877, 777, 745, 765, and 756 grams. You can see I stopped worrying so much about meeting the magic number of 800. I also got a bit lazy about weighing: Bananas usually came out to around<\/em> 200 grams, so instead of weighing a banana, I would just log it as 200. There\u2019s an asterisk on those banana numbers, though, which we\u2019ll get to.<\/p>\n Based on my experience\u2014as a person who routinely buys fruits and veggies, preps meals on the weekend<\/u><\/a>, and has a decently large calorie budget to work with<\/u><\/a>\u2014it wasn\u2019t hard at all to do for a week. It was getting old by the end of the week, though. Here are a few things you should consider if you want to give this challenge a try:\u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019m no stranger to the food scale, but come on, do I really have to weigh the onion that I\u2019m about to chop to make some soup? If I\u2019m following the challenge, I do. And then I have to jot it down on a piece of paper somewhere, because this isn\u2019t something that apps do automatically (unlike calories, where I can scan the barcode on that pack of Trader Joe\u2019s bao and have the data saved instantly to my phone).\u00a0<\/p>\n Another thing that annoyed me: I don\u2019t think you\u2019re supposed to count the peel on the banana, or the core of the apple. My 200-gram bananas were likely only supposed to count as 120 grams or so. But who is going to weigh their banana peel when they\u2019re done? Or their apple core? The beauty of an apple as a snack is that you can eat it on the go. I\u2019m not saving the core to weigh when I get back home.\u00a0<\/p>\n And another thing!<\/em> The rules of the challenge are arbitrary and\u2014yep, I\u2019m going to say it\u2014stupid. Hummus only counts if you make it yourself, not if you buy it. (Sorry, I counted my store-bought hummus.) Applesauce and pickles\u00a0 don\u2019t count if there\u2019s any sugar in them\u2014what<\/em>? Like the sugar somehow cancels out the fact that applesauce is made of apples?\u00a0<\/p>\n You could defend these rules by saying you want to make sure that the 800 grams only counts fruits and vegetables, not oil that might be added to the hummus or sugar that is added to the applesauce. But does that really justify not counting<\/em> those items? It sounds more like an opportunity to restrict foods or to make foods less accessible. How many of us make our own hummus?\u00a0<\/p>\n The rule about juice had the same feel to it, too. Juice counted as fruit in at least some of the studies that the meta-analysis was based on. Striking it from the list for an internet challenge sounds like an attempt to make the challenge fit with other rules beyond just meeting a total. I\u2019m not a huge fan of juice<\/u><\/a>, nutritionally speaking, but it seems unfair to add an anti-juice rule. Even myplate.gov allows juice in your daily servings of fruit<\/u><\/a> (they just recommend that you don\u2019t allow it to be all<\/em> your daily fruit, and cap it at half).\u00a0<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t an issue I had, but one I see reported a lot: Not everybody\u2019s gut is ready to handle that amount of fiber all at once. It\u2019s an 800-gram challenge that people tend to jump into all at once, not a \u201cslowly work up to eating 800 grams every day\u201d plan. Your intestines might prefer the latter.<\/p>\n The challenge\u2019s website asks if you are \u201csick of the lack of results\u201d from restrictive diets,\u00a0 which seems to imply that this challenge is a pathway to \u201cresults\u201d that you have not heretofore gotten. Sure sounds like they\u2019re talking about weight loss. PopSugar<\/u><\/a>, in writing about the challenge, presents it as a \u201csimple solution\u201d for \u201ctrying to lose weight.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n There seems to be a temptation to think of eating more vegetables as another way to say \u201ceating fewer calories.\u201d We\u2019ve seen this in \u201chealthy eating\u201d talk in general (see my rant about how healthy eating is not the same thing as dieting<\/u><\/a>). Fruits and veggies are great, but you also need protein, healthy fats, and other nutrients they don\u2019t provide. If you\u2019re chasing the 800 gram number, and allowing that to displace other foods on a low calorie diet, you may not be eating very \u201chealthy\u201d after all.\u00a0<\/p>\n Finally, if you\u2019ll allow me one pedantic quibble, the website and many of the people who talk about the #800gChallenge talk about getting 800 grams \u201cby weight\u201d of fruits and veggies. Unlike ounces, which come in both a measure of weight (\u201counces\u201d) and a measure of volume (\u201cfluid ounces\u201d), grams only work one way. And technically they are a measure of mass<\/em>, not weight, but that\u2019s a physics lesson for another time.\u00a0<\/p>\n I feel conflicted about this whole thing. On the one hand, getting more fruits and veggies is a good thing, and I like that the challenge has you focus on what you are including<\/em> in your diet, rather than encouraging you to cut things out.\u00a0It also gives you credit for what you already eat, rather than demanding you add a certain amount; if you already eat 600 grams of fruit and veggies most days, you only need to add another 200.<\/p>\n I also like that the focus isn\u2019t on body size, but on healthy eating. Even if you ignore the formalized challenge and just take the results of the fruit-and-vegetable research to heart, you\u2019re eating veggies to make yourself healthier, not to lose weight. Not everybody needs to lose weight, but we can all benefit from working a variety of plant foods into our diet.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ultimate I think my biggest problem with the challenge is the challenge format. The OptimizeMe website promises an \u201cantidote to dieting nonsense\u201d and then tells you to weigh your food and consult yes\/no lists. That sounds like dieting nonsense to me.\u00a0<\/p>\n But then again: If somebody told you it\u2019s good to get 800 grams of vegetables, you\u2019d probably agree and then ignore them. If your whole Crossfit gym is doing a \u201cchallenge\u201d together for a limited time, you now have a structure encouraging you to see how much plant matter you\u2019re actually<\/em> eating, and take the recommendation seriously. Maybe the human brain needs silly challenges to thrive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Diet \u201cchallenges\u201d are, by their nature, strict and not sustainable. (That\u2019s what makes them challenges.) They usually demand you restrict your food choices in some way, such as cutting out entire food groups. But what if there was a diet … Continue reading Why 800 grams?\u00a0\u00a0<\/h2>\n
\nNeed a food scale?\u00a0<\/h3>\n
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\n\nHow much fruit and vegetables does it take to hit 800 grams?\u00a0<\/h2>\n
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How realistic is the 800-gram challenge?<\/h2>\n
Weighing isn\u2019t hard, but the way<\/em> they want you to weigh things is annoying<\/h3>\n
The rules don\u2019t always make sense<\/h3>\n
Going from 0 to 800 grams may make your tummy unhappy<\/h3>\n
You may be tempted to turn it into a weightloss diet<\/h3>\n
Every time somebody says \u201c800 grams by weight,\u201d I want to scream <\/h3>\n
Final thoughts on the 800-gram challenge<\/h2>\n
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\nSource: LifeHacker – The Good and the Bad of the 800-Gram Fruit and Vegetable Challenge<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"