Incorporate Healthy Habits into Your Daily Meals

Eating healthier means cutting back on sugars, fats, and salts. With this in mind, it can seem impossible to continue your eating lifestyle with the items you already have- most of us don't thrive on diet foods, after all. However, you can take your current food supply and incorporate healthy habits into the foods and meals you prepare every day- here's how!

When preparing a meal that requires sugar, such as canning fruits or baking a cake, eliminate half the sugar content that is called for. We recently made apricot jam and the recipe called for multiple cups of sugar for 3 jars- we only added one cup of sugar, and our jam came out awesome. You won't notice the lack of sugar, but you will notice the lack of waist expansion after you eat.

With dinner, remember that meat should not be the main course; meat should be a side dish. Which means, where you would normally have chicken or steak or even hamburger, replace these meats (or cut back on them) with vegetables. Recently we made a chicken alfredo dinner with just one chicken breast rather than 2- I simply doubled up on the broccoli that was in the pasta- it was delicious and the amount of chicken was just right! If you are cooking with hamburger, reduce the amount called for in the recipe (such as for hamburger helper), or mix in some fat-free refried beans when making tacos. A little healthy habit can go a long way.

When it comes to cheese and butter, less is absolutely more. If you cook with butter, particularly with meats, consider allowing your food to cook in its own juices, and using healthy spices (like garlic) to add flavor rather than butter. Bake rather than fry, and when making creamy sauces, low-fat cottage cheese makes just as great an alfredo sauce as all that fatty cheese! You don't have to cook with as much butter or oil as you think, if at all!

Toppings can be a real killer as well- cut back on toppings for your food that you don't really need, like pickles, olives, that extra cheese slice, bacon (fake bacon bits are delish and also way less in caloric consumption), extra salad dressing- even a salad can be turned into a super unhealthy food when you are burdening it with all those croutons, dressings, and other toppings. Remember, those toppings add up- instead, consider a slice of avocado instead of a slice of bacon, or some mushrooms to liven up your salad.

Perhaps the greatest healthy habit you can incorporate into your food (and possibly the easiest as well) is to simply make water your primary beverage at meals rather than soda or juice or other empty calorie beverages. Consider skin or soy milk as a beverage choice for calcium- too often, we forget entirely that hey- there are calories in what we pour in that glass! Drinking good old healthy water can eliminate a lot of those calories you just don't need, and can make you feel that much less guilty over the other food indulgences you have.

Sources:

personal food preparation

http://www.thefatproblem.com/5-methods-adding-health-food.html