Half the battle with nutrition is finding a way to eat a lot more vegetables.

Vegetables are the best way to maintain your food volume but reduce the amount of calories you eat.

The problem is that vegetables, or salads, as they’re usually eaten, aren’t that good. You can’t eat them without craving something more tasty.

Unless your life with more vegetables is better than your life with Carbonara and monster Chicken Parmis, your nutrition changes won’t stick.

So how to make vegetables better?

I’ve been experimenting with this over the last few months and here’s what I’ve found.

1 – Disconnect ‘salad’ from ‘vegetables’.

Try and get your vegetables without having salad.

Salads as most places currently serve them are abominable. A cubic foot of lettuce or baby spinach, drenched in dressing with some capsicum or rubbery olives to try and make you forget you’re eating rabbit food.

And don’t get me started on the baby spinach in a plastic container salads you get offered at takeaway joints. They smell like compost and taste even worse.

2 – Win with Snow Peas + Avocado.

You can eat snow peas straight.

As for Avo: Spread it on toast, guac it, eat it in slices.

Just those two veges alone will get you a fair way down the path.

3 – Learn To Cook Three Vege Go-Tos.

Mine?

- Shakshuka – Thanks Idan!

- Coconut Red Lentil Soup – A Punchfork favourite.

- Esquites – A throwback to food stalls in my Mexico days.

4 – Make your salads cucumber-based.

This is something I inherited from my time in Tel Aviv. I found myself devouring Israeli salads because, for the first time, I realised a salad didn’t have to resemble a plate of damp, mown grass.

Diced cucumber, red onions and tomatoes will do the trick. A simple lemon dressing will make it really tasty.

5 – Vegetables as hummus vessels.

Shout-out to my Israeli brothers again for opening my eyes to real hummus. If you buy the expensive stuff in Australia or the US, you can get yourself 60% of the real hummus experience.

Don’t skimp.

Think of every 100 grams of hummus as enabling you to eat a kilo of vegetables.

Just cut up a ton of them, carrots are my favourite, and dip them in hummus. Capsicum, cucumbers, celery also work.

You can also swap out hummus for peanut butter, almond butter or sundried tomato dip if you need a change-up.

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You have to figure out a way that works for you. It has to taste as good as anything else you could be eating. You have to want snow peas or <insert your vege here> as much as you want cookies or M&Ms.

The best way to start is just to start buying a lot of vegetables once or twice a week and then figuring out a way to eat them all before they go off.

After all these months, here’s my buy-always list: a. Cucumbers, Tomatoes, Onions (Red+White), Snow Peas, Carrots, Broccoli, Brussel Sprouts (totally great with bacon), Cauilflower, Zucchini, Avocado, Celery, Capsicum, Asparagus and Corn.

Update

This clip (H/T Sima in the comments) is perfectly accurate.

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