Recipes for Healthy Weight Loss

Generally speaking, to lose weight you must cut down on consumption of fat and calories. For healthy weigh loss, however, you also need to eat larger amounts of nutritious foods. To do this, you need to find healthful recipes to cook as well as know how to adapt recipes to replace unhealthful ingredients with lower-fat, lower-calorie, nutritionally rich foods. Add this to my Recipe Box.

Recipe Substitutions

Having a goal of healthful weight loss does not mean you have to stop making your favorite recipes. Instead, you can identify the unhealthful elements in recipes--ingredients that are high in saturated fat and calories--and replace them with more healthful alternatives. For example, recipes that call for ground beef, like hamburgers, meatloaf and spaghetti sauce, can be made with ground turkey, chicken or pork instead. These meats are leaner than beef and lower in calories. If you crave sweets, instead of making a milkshake, blend fruit with low-fat milk or fruit juice to make a smoothie.

Cooking Methods

The way you cook food can make a big difference in terms of nutrition. An easy way to aid healthful weight loss is to simply change the way you cook your meals. Obviously, deep frying and shallow frying methods add unneeded fat to foods, while broiling, baking and grilling methods usually do not.

Even very simple adjustments in your cooking methods can have a positive and cumulative effect. Try using half the amount of oil that you usually would; broil or bake meat and poultry on a rack so that fat will drip down; trim visible fat and remove skin from meat and poultry. To get the maximum nutritional value from vegetables, steam rather than boil them so that the vitamins remain in the vegetables, not in the water.

Portions and Proportions

Healthful weight loss does not necessarily mean eliminating all "bad" ingredients and replacing them with "good" ones. If you adjust the proportions of the more and less healthful elements in a recipe and control your portion sizes, you can still eat your favorites and lose weight.

For example, if you are cooking a stir-fry with vegetables and meat or poultry, without changing the basic recipe, cook more vegetables and less meat or poultry per serving. The taste will be the same but the bulk of the meal will be low-fat, nutritious vegetables. Starchy ingredients like beans and pulses are high in protein while very low in fat and will fill you up so that you can eat smaller portions. You may feel hungry enough to eat several tacos or a whole plate of nachos, but if you add black beans you will feel satisfied and full much sooner.