What’s great about being vegan on the WW Freestyle program is that most fruits and veggies are 0 SmartPoints, and beans, lentils, and tofu are zero Points® foods – so using zero SmartPoints foods are a great way to build meals. But that doesn’t mean that all vegan meals will inherently be low in SmartPoints (vegans like to indulge too!) and items like grains and bread products can add up the points fast.
To address the need for low SmartPoints vegan meals I have put together the following guide to help keep you on track.
Things to keep in mind:
To me, a low SmartPoints meal is anything less than 5 SmartPoints
Vegan meals are generally pretty unique in the fact that they don’t follow the traditional Meat + Starch + Vegetable format of the usual non-vegan dinner plate. So, although it might take a bit more work to assemble in some cases, you can often get a wider variety of foods and flavours on one plate.
As a general tip:
Build the base of your meal around zero Points foods like chickpeas, lentils, cauliflower rice, spiralized noodles, or leafy greens, and then layer on flavours from there.
Build a bowl
An easy way to do this is to create a bowl. I eat a lot of bowl-style meals where I’ll roast a variety of vegetables like sweet potato, carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, asparagus (all the good stuff) together on a large baking sheet. Once cooked, I’ll then mix the roasted vegetables with a zero Point base of chickpeas, lentils, or leafy greens (sometimes quinoa). At this point I’m only around 1 or 2 SmartPoints (tracking the oil used for roasting the veggies). From there I’ll make a dressing to compliment the flavour of the vegetables I’m using – which usually makes up the majority of SmartPoints (and a good kick of flavour, so totally worth it). My favourite is a creamy lemon-tahini dressing, but other great options are curried yogurt sauce, or maybe even a light BBQ sauce.