You’re on a bus. It’s stuffy and boring and  the bus has moved approximately 10 metres in the last 10 minutes. So you pull out your phone and absent-mindedly tap the icon for your current favourite Angry Clans / Candy Ninja / Clash of Birds game.

Thirty minutes later, your thumbs hurt, your battery’s almost dead and you’re going to be late for work because you’ve missed your bus stop but just one more go at unlocking the Candy Combiner achievement, you’re SO CLOSE…

If only there was a way to get some sort of real-life achievement out of all that app use.

Good news! Our nutritionists have developed a new app aimed at helping you get more vegetables into your diet every day (minus the soul-destroying microtransactions and bus-stop-missing influence).

Veggie tracker, recipes, serving sizes and unlockable achievements

If you tend towards the Ron Swanson approach of vegetables — ‘Vegetables? That’s what my food eats’ — then you’re probably not quite getting your five-a-day. If you want to change, our new VegEze app might be right up your alley.

The app features a 21-day ‘Do 3 at Dinner’ challenge, aimed at helping you to eat three types of vegetables at dinner every day, as research has shown people who do that are more likely to have a healthy diet overall.

To help you with the challenge, the app has a vegetable intake tracker to help tally up your serves, with daily reminders and unlockable achievements to help keep you motivated. There’s also a visual guide to specific vegetable serve size (because it can be hard to visualise what a serve of broccoli looks like without grabbing the measuring cup), along with recipes, cooking tips and nutritional info.

Can apps help us change our behaviour?

Everyone knows that eating vegetables is vital for our health, but actually doing it has proved really hard for most of us – two in three Australian adults still aren’t eating enough of them. What we need to find out now is how we can actually help people change their eating habits in a lasting way to improve their overall health and wellbeing.

The VegEze app, developed in partnership with SP Health and Hort Innovation, is part of a larger study to figure that out. Information from app users will feed back into our research into Australians’ vegetable consumption, while helping to analyse how effective the app is – moving towards finding the key ingredients for long-term vegetable-eating success.

Want to give the 21-day Do 3 at Dinner challenge a go? VegEze is available for free on the Apple App Store, with a view to expanding to other platforms down the track.