How to make your favorite foods healthier?
The foods that make up our diets can impact a lot on our overall health. While it is undeniable that foods give us energy, keep us alive and help our bodies grow, it is also factual that certain foods can have detrimental effects on us.
There are a significant number of cookbooks and recipes out there that will guide people on how to make healthy diets. But if you can’t afford getting any cookbooks at the moment, you can check out these 7 tips that will show you how to make healthy diets through your favorite foods.
Cut Back on Cheese
While it is recommended that you stay away from eating excess cheese, you can still opt for cheeses that are deficient in fat and calories. If you’d be including cheeses in your favorite dishes for one reason or the other, you can safely choose Parmigiano-Reggiano, goat cheese or any other bold-flavored varieties.
Choose Low-fat Milk
Regular ice cream might contain excess fat but if there is need to add ice cream to your diet, you’re advised to make the ice cream with low-fat milk already condensed with gelatin. Doing this will give you healthy ice cream with less fat and few calories. Despite helping to reduce calories and saturated fat, this mixture looks exactly like full-fat ice cream.
Add Egg Whites instead of Whole Eggs
Whole eggs might not make a healthy diet simply because a single egg yolk contains 5 grams and 54 calories. Instead of adding one whole egg to your diet, simply add two egg whites. Besides helping you to cut back on calories, this will ensure you aren’t adding fat to your diet. Compared to a whole egg, an egg white contains no gram and just 16 calories.
Use Healthy Fats in Place of Bad Fats
Not all fats are bad and while it might be difficult to avoid all fatty foods, it is recommended that you stick to the ones that contain healthy fats. To cut back on saturated fat, you can simply replace butter with olive oil and canola. Compared to butter, olive oil contains less saturated fat but if you’ll still be adding butter to your diet, ensure you’re using half of the amount you would normally add. Meanwhile, you can use olive oil in place of the remaining half butter. For healthy meals, you should always keep enough vegetable items in your meals. These days, you can save time grocery shopping online if you are particularly a busy person. Online shopping saves your travel time and efforts.
Use Little (or No) Salt without Limiting Flavor
Everybody already knows that excess salt wouldn’t make a healthy diet but again, you might not be able to maintain the recommended standard of salt consumption especially if you don’t cook most of your foods by yourself. Instead of adding salt to your diet, you can opt for lime, lemon or any other flavoring with no sodium content. Also while buying canned beans, tomatoes and broth, ensure you’re choosing only the ones with low sodium content.
Cultivate the Habit of Using Little Oil
While canola and olive oil are suitable replacements for butter, they still contain fairly above 100 calories per tablespoon. To make your dish much healthier, ensure you’re always using a very low quantity of these oils.
Add Whole-Wheat Flour
Whole-wheat flour such as the one in breads, muffins and substantial cookies increases the amount of magnesium and zinc in the body. It also boosts the amount of fiber which, in turn, stimulates digestion.