There are 7 calories in one cup of spinach. As you increase your spinach serving size, the nutrition benefits explode in value. After you read this summary on spinach, we will bet that you will want to increase your intake!

How Spinach Helps You Lose Weight And Explode Your Energy

Spinach contains almost no calories, and has an amazing breadth and depth of nutrients that help you lose weight, improve your health and most importantly explode your energy.

For those of you on PEERtrainer who follow the (simple) Cheat System, you know that green vegetables are the only food that we incentivize you to eat.

In the basic plan we outline, you will earn 1/2 a cheat if you eat 8 ounces of total greens before 5pm. And a full 1 cheat if you finish your total green intake after 5pm.

We do this because we see a lot of people have a hard time with night eating, emotional eating and just bad behaviors as the evening progresses. If you are filling yourself up with greens, it is a great way to minimize the damage that may be inevitable.

Additionally, the nutrients in spinach and greens in general are so numerous, that they help your body feel full, which helps to turn off food cravings.

For those of you who have been around PEERtrainer for a while, you know that we make sure that people understand the basics of Dr. Fuhrman's research. His most important finding has been that as people increase the amounts of certain foods, and green vegetables in particular, the body is "getting what it needs" and stops sending out so many "food cravings."

His work can be a little controversial, but our experience at PEERtrainer has shown us that when people combine his ideas with other approaches like portion control, great things can and do happen.

In fact, we have made his advice part of our very simple free healthy eating plan that we have recently launched.

How Much Spinach Do You Need To Eat A Day?

One and a half cups of cooked spinach gets you a full 25% towards what Dr. Fuhrman considers an ideal day on his eating system that is designed to promote nutrient density.

If you doubt the power of this, walk into your nearest Whole Foods Market. Go to the food bar or the produce section, and you will see this points system on every single food item there.

One important note is that once you get up to speed on upping your intake of greens, you want to work to get a very wide variety of greens, and rotate them. If you are lucky enough to live near a Whole Foods, you'll find some easy to access high nutrient greens that you can mix and match at their salad bar. Be careful about not adding too many heavy foods because the price can add up quickly. If you just stick to greens you'll come out ok.

How To Make Spinach Taste Great

A great way to make spinach taste good is by sauteing either fresh or frozen spinach for a few minutes. Fresh spinach is more expensive, but tastes so much better if you are eating it on your own. We have published a very simple sauteed spinach recipe.

Additionally, spinach can be blended and mixed with almost anything. It is very easy to completely hide its presence, especially in the presence of a fruit smoothie.

How Spinach Can Boost Your Energy

We have been working to discover the exact research that explains this phenomenon, but consuming large amounts of pureed or blended spinach will give you a big burst of energy.

As in, go out and run 10 miles burst of energy. One piece of research that has caught our eye has been some work people at MIT have been doing, studying the use of spinach as an energy source to power electronic devices.

We know that Popeye ate spinach for his muscles, and it is always interesting to see research that backs up these stories that had to have come from a deep bed of human knowledge over the years.

Spinach And A Healthy Pregnancy

Dr. Jonny Bowden points out in his book, "The 100 Healthiest Foods To Eat During Pregnancy" that Spinach is high in the critical nutrient folate. It contains 7 times more folate than is in iceberg lettuce.

In general green vegetables are high in folate. The book referenced above is an excellent guide for eating during pregnancy, and that link takes you to a short review we done of it.

Why You Should Consider Blending Spinach

One thing that most people don't know is that our bodies cannot penetrate the cell wall of a plant during digestion. As you know, there is all sorts of great stuff inside the cell walls of plants. What you chew is what you get access to. Blending is an ideal way to get at them. Different blenders get at more of the good stuff than others.

Vitamix is a popular option among "people in the know" and has a strong following in the healthy community because of its ability to completely pulverize the cell wall of a plant.

PEERtrainer has written a small piece on why a Vitamix costs so much relative to other options, and how to get one cheaply. If you are looking at buying some blender or juicer, you may find this post helpful.

It Is EASY To Hide Spinach In Smoothies

If you have kids and are looking for ways to increase their green vegetable consumption, spinach is really easy to add to a fruit smoothie. As the kids get used to the green color you can start to up the amount. You'll be surprised- if you persist at this over time the kids will start to embrace the spinach and other green vegetables.

This entry was written, edited and is maintained by PEERtrainer. If you have any questions, suggestions or comments, please leave them below!