Wednesday, July 29, 2009

How To Eat Well Without Eating Fat

By Dan Sewinski

With the humongous servings that restaurants serve these days, Americans have grown used to eating large amounts of food every day. This is good if the food that they eat is nutritious and lesser in calories. Unfortunately, this is not the case. That is why, it is important that when you do eat at home, you eat healthy and light as much as you can to counteract the calorie intake that you have gotten. This starts with the cooking light.

Cooking light does not only depend on the ingredients but also the oil that you use. In fact, the oil can change the caloric and fat content of the dish. You see, even if all your ingredients are healthy, for instance, vegetables; but if you use oil that is based on animal fat, you will still have a not so healthy dish.

These guidelines will help you to cook light and healthy when you prepared home-cooked meals. First, you need to use vegetable oil when cooking, so that your meals don't add a lot of fat and calories. Corn oil and palm oil are the most popular vegetable-based cooking oils. They contain lots of the so-called 'good' cholesterol that can help to protect your heart, and they cancel the effects of the 'bad' cholesterol contained in animal fats.

No added chemicals: As much as you can, do not put any other chemicals or flavoring into your food that are not natural. It adds to the unhealthiness of the dish that you are serving. Powder flavoring may help enhance the taste in the dish that you are cooking but it can also cause liver and kidney problems because of its high salt content. Another thing to avoid is to use deep fried mixes and batter to your food as this only add to the caloric content of the food but none to the nutritional content.

In order to have a healthy diet, you should replace some servings of meat with vegetables and seafood. It is best to have meat for only one or two meals a day. Your family will still gain the protein they need, while reducing harmful fats and cholesterol. White meats, such as turkey or chicken, are more healthy than red meats, such as pork and beef. Turkey and chicken contain less cholesterol than red meats. If you must serve a red meat, choose pork because you can quickly remove the fat from the meat. It is difficult to remove fat from beef since the fats are distributed throughout the meat.

Eating light does not just refer to cooking foods that are low in calories and fat, but also to the size and frequency of servings. Over a period of time, start serving smaller meals and cut back on the side dishes, such as rice. A phased plan to incrementally decrease the serving size will avoid the health problems associated with a sudden decrease in food intake. However, children need the calories from properly proportioned meals in order to grow and should not be a part of a dieting plan without a physician's approval.

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