Eat Right! It's National Nutrition Month.

March is National Nutrition Month. It's a month-long outreach and celebration by Registered Dietitians across the country to encourage people to make good nutrition choices. Food is your friend! This month, I'm going to try to encourage you with lots of simple ways to make good choices by sharing something small that I did each day (well, each day I write a post), which if done consistently, makes a big difference.

Today's small effort was to have fruit for dessert. I love to have something sweet at night. I think I've ALWAYS had a sweet-tooth. I went by the grocery store and wanted to pick up a carton of ice cream for dessert - I rarely have ice cream in the house, because if I buy it, I eat it. Instead, green grapes were on sale and they made it into the cart. These beautiful, plump sugary little jade jewels became dessert instead. Let's compare...

• 1 cup green grapes = 104 calories, virtually zero fat, 1.4 gm fiber
• 1 cup of light ice cream (average) = 251 calories, 7 gm fat, zero gm fiber

By choosing the fruit, I saved almost 150 calories and more than 5 gm of fat. Averaged across a week, this would equal more than 1,000 saved calories. So, if you eat ice cream every night, but switch to fruit instead, you could lose more than a pound a month without making any additional changes. Visit the American Dietetic Association at www.eatright.org for more tips!