Carb lovers often have a hard time keeping away from pasta. But with spiralized veggies, you’ll hardly notice you’re eating healthier. Plus, if you have picky children, they might not realize their favorite noodles have been replaced with a veggie variety.

Sure, you might have switched to whole wheat pasta but eating a whole bowl of that isn’t exactly helpful if you’re trying to lose weight. Instead, you can get all the flavor without filling out when you spiralize your vegetables. If you want to eat a mountain of it, you can without eating more calories than you need in one day in one sitting. Plus, you’re likely not getting all the nutrients you need from the foods you eat. By spiralizing your veggies, you’re getting more of the vitamins your body needs and plenty of fiber too which keeps things running as they should.

Ready to try spiralized veggies? Here are some suggestions for veggie noodles:

• Zoodles: These are made from zucchini. They work beautifully with Italian flavors in particular.
• Swoodles: These are made from sweet potatoes. They’ve got that starchiness to them that does really well with Thai-style sauces with a coconut curry flair.
• Coodles: Carrot noodles can be added to salads or cooked in with a mixture of other spiralized veggies for a burst of color and a bit more sweetness.
• Poodles: Kids won’t eat parsnips. That’s a fact. But they will slurp down spiralized parsnips.

Of course, experimenting is half the fun. Getting a good veggie spiralizer is the best way to make short work of your time in the kitchen. Another bonus of eating spiralized veggies is that some can be eaten raw, like cucumber, which makes for an ideal salad base, while others only require a short cooking time. In less time than it takes to boil water for traditional pasta, you could have dinner ready with spiralized veggies!

There are manual spiralizers that require a little more effort, but you won’t regret investing in the electric countertop models that can take your vegetables from whole to spirals in seconds. Plus, you can choose different thicknesses to change things up a bit and get a different texture from the same vegetable.

There are no limits to the dishes you can make when you spiralize your vegetables. You can even use it to make salads more interesting, create spiral potatoes to drop into your air fryer for healthy fries the kids will go gaga for, and so much more. Even just adding your favorite sauce to a pile of spiralized vegetables will make you wonder why you haven’t tried this sooner!