Wow I need help

I tend to read the message boards...there are a lot of recipe threads that will give you ideas for swapping. Here's one I've discovered that is fairly painless...We used to love the occasional "big breakfast". Bacon, hashbrowns, eggs, muffins....NOW I can live without the bacon and muffins and instead of hashbrowns, I make a breakfast hash. 1/3 potatoes, onions, peppers, and whatever other veggies I have in the fridge. Yesterday's included daikon and butternut squash.

Everyone loves it with a fried egg (or two) on top and it is a delicious big breakfast!

I started by finding those healthy things I like...and eat those. Turkey burgers smothered in sautéed mushrooms, chicken, apples, celery, cucumbers...those low cal things that taste good to me!

Keep logging and learning...some of us have also found some surprising low calorie things too!

Get a new cookbook?

try sparkrecipes.com. there are a lot of healthy recipes you can try.

Another vote for Pinterest! Just type in a few choice words (easy healthy recipe) and see what appeals to you! Plenty of ideas out there and you can easily save them all in one spot.

softblondechick wrote: »

Don't cook.

Make simple foods, meat, veggies.

I had to stop cooking. I made too large of portions. Now, I grill a chicken breast, side salad. Portion control made easy.

I agree that thinking about modifying recipes can be unnecessarily complicated.
For me it makes sense when I am grocery shopping to think about what vegetables I want to eat.
Often I cook them grilled, steamed, baked, or kind of stir fried with one or two teaspoons of oil, garlic, and some water.

Hummus instead of mayonnaise works great (and I actually even like the taste more) for sandwiches, tuna etc. If it's any recipe that needs something to thicken it up and provide texture hummus often works. I also really like it as a sauce on burgers or subs.

Cauliflower mash in itself isn't the nicest substitute for mashed potatoes for me, but it's fantastic with low-fat cottage cheese (esp if you mix in onion and garlic powder and chopped chives), or you could mix in some cauliflower mash *with* mashed potatoes for it to still taste really good. Low-fat cottage cheese actually works great as a substitute for a lot of things to get your cheesy/comfort food cravings with very little calories and a lot of protein at that, and it makes a lot of food very nice- if you microwave cauliflower torn or chopped up into decent sized pieces and have it with a cup of low-fat cottage cheese, it's easy to eat three or four servings of veggies and a lot of protein in a meal.

For green tea, if you get bags that are green tea with mint it's still really pleasant even without any sugar, because the mint flavor balances out the slight bitterness of unsweetened tea really well. Peppermint or spearmint green tea substituted for sodas and coffees or other beverages cut out a lot of calories.

It's hard to avoid the calories with something like rice, but lentils (or chickpeas) are a really good way to add body to meals that would normally be rice, because it has a similar feel and is also delicious. Not the way health junkies will tell you kale is delicious, I really love chickpeas. If you're making a rice and thick curry (works best for tuna or vegetable curries or just thick curries), having half rice and half lentils is really satisfying. I think there's actually a Middle Eastern comfort food called mujadarrah(?) which half and half rice and lentils with I think cumin (that or coriander, there'll be recipes on the internet) and spices, and it is actually really nice.

Tossing a cube of frozen chopped spinach in works for a lot of meals. It's inoffensive and often unnoticeable esp in stronger dishes like curries but adds nutrition. Benefiber grit and glug free fibre powder is also completely tasteless and dissolves in basically anything, and you can add a couple spoons (or more, depending on the thing) into anything from curries to tuna to pasta to sauces to breakfast cereal to soups (you can add a *lot* to soups with almost no change) to baking to protein shakes.