Checking your cooking!
There are a number of ways to ensure your food is low fat but just as tasty! Why is it important you ask? Well, when you’re counting your calories each day and measuring your weight loss, it is essential to find ways to keep your stomach full with the most nutritious food that contains the least amount of calories. Sounds tricky right? Not so much if you examine your cooking techniques and make necessary changes! Let’s check them out.
- The Replacement: Substitute all you fatty ingredients with healthier options. We’re conditioned to believe that any kind of cooking required oil, even a dash of it. Try and replace the oil with fats from other ingredients like nut purees or fats from avocados. This also takes care of our fatty cravings. Replacing these items with healthy fats makes sure we don’t compromise on taste!
- Addition of herbs: Adding fresh herbs are a good start to making your food tastier. Instead of adding extra butter, add fresh rosemary, coriander, thyme or chives! This will ensure you get that extra taste for fewer calories!
- Stir fry technique: Stir frying always has had a bad reputation for making food greasy. It’s almost second nature to us to heat the pan and add some oil to it The truth is you can sauté your ingredients in almost anything. You can use some water or broth to sauté your ingredients!
- Update cooking methods: Every time we cook meat, we add every fatty ingredient possible to increase the potential taste of the final dish. It is essential to remember that we don’t have to make a saucy dish for the meat to taste bomb. Updating your cooking to a slow roast is a great way to cook. It is the easiest way to cook even if it does take some planning. When prepping your meat, cut off the fatty bits from the meat. Try to squeeze all the excess oil out of the meat after cooking it. You could also use a blotting paper to absorb all the extra oils. Cook with lean meats instead of fatty meats. Slow roasting your vegetables is also a great way to increase the overall taste of the dish!
- Change traditional dressings: Traditional dressings like butter, cream and sauces have always been high in fat content. Switch out these traditional dressings for a dash of lemon or anything citrous!
- Add some spice: In face, be generous with your spice! Spices are a great way to add the much needed flavour for your dish. Start using spices like cardoon, cinnamon and cumin everyday and see how they elevate your palate. You can them move onto more exotic spies like star anise and saffron! But substituting an excess of butter and cream with these spices is a sure way of reducing the amount of fat you consume each day.
In addition to these methods, switch out your whole fat milk to skim milk. Replace whole eggs in recipes with twice that amount of just egg whites. Use your imagination and don’t cook more than necessary. This just ensures you have leftovers that you are forced to take second helpings of. If you have leftovers, you can store them and eat them as another meal!
Following these simple steps and will ensure your health improves and you don’t consume more than the essential calories!
