Easy Tips for Healthy Meals

dmisom79

There is a common misconception about eating healthy: that good-for-you doesn’t taste good.

But flavor doesn’t have to come from fat and calories, sugar, oil, and butter. And when weight loss is on the menu, your best bet is to experiment with other savory sources.

Whether you’re kicking off a new healthy-eating plan or trying to put a nutritious spin on old stand-bys in your dinner rotation, start by exploring recipes and finding ways to incorporate a variety of healthy ingredients that will jazz up your meals without padding your waistline.

To start from scratch, just click your way to popular recipe sites such as Food.com, Allrecipes.com, and MyRecipes.com. A simple search will yield a mind-boggling number and variety of healthy recipes and recipe collections for specific dietary needs: low-calorie, low-fat, diabetic-friendly, vegetarian, and more.

If you’d rather doctor up an old favorite to make it healthier, play around with the ingredients until you find a happy compromise. Consider cutting back on (or omitting) oil, using egg substitutes or egg whites in place of whole eggs, or replacing whole milk or cream with fat-free half-and-half or skim milk.

It may take some tweaking before you cook up what you’re looking for, but the tasty results will be worth your time and effort.

Here are some more healthy-cooking tips:
• Scale back the amount of meat or poultry called for in a recipe and make up for the cut by adding extra vegetables.
• Use less cheese than a recipe calls for, and/or use the 2%, reduced-fat version. Light sour cream, low-fat, reduced-sodium canned soups, and low-fat milk can also be substituted for their full-fat counterparts, with little or no change to flavor.
• Use caution with condiments: Ketchup, mayo, jelly, and mustard, for example, can add unnecessary salt, fat, and calories to your food. A little goes a long way.
• Switch to a healthier cooking method. Bake instead of fry, use nonstick pans or cooking spray to decrease the amount of oil, and make use of your grill, which adds lots of flavor without much fat.
• Tastes change, so don’t automatically dismiss something just because you’ve professed to dislike for years. You might be surprised to find that a self-proclaimed tomato hater can, with the help of a great recipe, reform.