VEGGIE STARTERS TO STEADY YOUR GLUCOSE :
THE ULTIMATE 2024 GUIDE
This is a complete guide to veggie starters, one of my most powerful hacks.
So if you’re looking to:
→ Manage your glucose.
→ Reduce cravings and hunger.
→ Feel amazing.
Then you're in the right place. Let’s get started.
When I talk about the veggie starter hack, I’m talking about adding a dish at the beginning of your meals. You will eat more than you usually do and flatten your glucose curves in the process. The goal here is to return to
how food used to be, before it was processed: wherever there were starches and sugars, there was also fiber. By adding a delicious veggie starter, we’re bringing fiber back.
The amount of fiber we eat these days is much lower than what we should be eating.
Fiber is in the structural lining of plants—it’s abundant in leaves and we get most of our fiber from beans and vegetables. It's is incredibly important to us: it fuels the good bacteria in our gut, strengthens our microbiome, lowers our cholesterol levels, and makes sure everything runs smoothly.
Fiber is also good for our glucose levels for several reasons, notably because it creates a viscous mesh in our intestine. The mesh slows down and reduces the absorption of glucose molecules from food across the intestinal lining.
We know that consuming more fiber is beneficial and that eating it before all the other foods is even more so. That’s why adding a veggie starter to each of our meals has a powerful effect on our glucose curves.
The objective is to add additional vegetables as a starter to a meal:
And this hack is best used before the meal of the day highest in starches and sugars.
To make our veggie starter tasty and delicious, we can add protein or fat to it, such as:
Avoid adding starch or sugar to your veggie starter. We want the fiber to be there first, so if you can, keep the starch for the main dish, and the sugar for dessert.
Beware of premade dressings you can buy in grocery stores. They’re often packed with sugar and loaded with vegetable oil—it’s better to make a simple one from scratch.
My recipe for homemade salad dressing is:
I usually make a batch of dressing every Sunday and keep it in the fridge to use all week.
COMMON QUESTIONS
Yes, of course, you can always add more veggies to the rest of the meal.
You’ll know you’re doing this hack properly if the veggie starter makes up about 30% of your overall food quantity for that meal. Then, as you eat your veggies, picture the fiber from them arriving in your digestive system and setting up camp there to protect you for the rest of the meal.
You might find that you eat less of your regular meal afterwards – however, eating less afterwards is not the objective. I encourage you to eat just as you normally do and to just add this veggie starter to the front end of your meal.
And remember that any amount is better than none, and the more, the better. If we don’t have time to make a salad, we can grab from the fridge, like a couple pieces of roasted cauliflower. Though that’s not a one-to-one ratio, it’s enough to start seeing a small benefit, and it’s better than having no veggies before a meal at all.
If your party is ordering starters, you can order a salad. If no one is ordering starters, you can ask for a vegetable-based side with your main (such as a simple green salad with olive oil and vinegar, steamed green beans, sauteed spinach, or even simmered black, navy, or garbanzo beans), and you can eat it before the rest of your dish. You can even wait until after eating your veggies to eat your main or touch the bread.
It’s always best to eat whole food instead of supplements, but if it’s easier on some occasions, a fiber supplement at the beginning of a meal can help.
Yes it does, but this isn't important. Recent research has now debunked the importance of calorie counting for better health. It's the type of calories that really count, not the number. I think we can all agree that eating 200 kcal of fries is not the same for our body as eating 200 kcal of broccoli. Steadying our glucose is much more important, and leads to reduced hunger, improved energy, and better overall health and well-being.
It doesn’t - that’s a myth that’s been debunked.
Here are some more tips and tricks I've used to make this hack as easy as possible:
I love the veggie starter hack because it tells us to add more food to our meals all while helping keep our glucose steady. It isn't restrictive, and it can make us explore veggies in a fun and original way. The veggies can be prepared any way you like, or simply eaten raw. Adding protein and fat to our veggie starter is a good way of adding taste, especially for kid-friendly starters.
See this hack in action.
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