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Healthy dieting doesn’t mean that you or your family must stop eating favorite dishes.
A few small changes in the preparation and cooking of vegetables can prevent vitamins and nutrients from being leached out and washed down the sink. Wash fresh vegetables quickly under a running tap instead of soaking, and use the minimal amount of water necessary for cooking.
To maintain nutrients and color use a steamer, pressure cooker, or microwave for faster cooking time. A rapid boil is better than simmering for a long time. Vegetable water can be used as stock for soups and gravies.
Copper saucepans destroy vitamin C.
Start meals with soup. Soup is nutritious as well as filling, and you can make large quantities and store in a freezer.
Once cooked, serve vegetables as soon as possible. Keeping them warm will destroy vitamin C.
Choose lean meat or trim off fat. You need low fat ingredients if you want a low fat meal.
Fish and seafood are low in fat.
Most people consume more meat than the amount recommended to maintain a healthy diet. Nutritionists recommend 125grams of meat or fish a day.
Cook casseroles a day ahead and refrigerate. Any unwanted fats can be removed before reheating. The flavor will also be richer.
Use herbs to add flavor to your meal, they're also rich in vitamins, potassium and phosphorus.
Herbs can be preserved by freezing in ice cubes. Just drop the ice cube containing the particular herb/s you want, into the soup or dish being prepared.
To keep quantities of parsley, chop first and then place in a plastic bag in the freezer.
When you juice lemons, try wrapping and freezing the left over skins. Later when a recipe requires only the lemon peel you won’t have to use a whole fresh lemon.
Peeled bananas will not change color if you coat with lemon juice.
Store peeled potatoes by covering with cold water and adding 3 drops of vinegar. Place in a refrigerator where they keep well for 4 days.
Serve toasted bread wedges or triangles with dips and pates. It’s a lot cheaper than buying biscuits, and a lot lower in fat and salt.
Cheese is a valuable source of vitaminB2, protein, and calcium.
Cook rice, buckwheat and barley by the absorption method to prevent vitamin B from being lost.
Wholemeal or wholegrain bread, rice and pasta, add extra fibre to your diet.
You can maintain a diet and still enjoy ‘something sweet’. An occasional portion of chocolate or ice cream with topping is unlikely to have much effect on a well balanced diet. Better still, choose baked custards, crème caramels, gelato or fresh fruit.
Most recipes can easily be changed to use less fat, sugar, or salt, without any loss in flavor, allowing you to continue cooking your family favorites knowing they're a lot healthier..
Margarete Abel is a Health Educationalist formerly with the Health Education Unit, Perth, Western Australia.
Websites include:
http://www.ozebizz.com
http://www.goldongold.com
Obesity is a big problem in America and the world. Our life is filled with temptations cheap food and laziness. Unless we force ourselves to do sports most of us could live their lives without ever getting out of their chairs. We use elevators to get to our apartments or offices and cars to get from point A to point B. Walking and running are consider a sport or a hobby and are no longer means to get to our destination. The results are evident: putting those extra pounds on or just obesity. In this article we will give some simple rules to follow that can help in losing those extra pounds and keeping your body healthier.
A word of caution: the views expressed in this article are in no way scientific or facts and the reader should observe caution when following them. The goal is to provide better understanding of why we grow fat and how the body can get rid of the extra pounds. Please consult with your physician before making any extreme changes to your diet or sport regime.
So why do we add fat? The simple answer is that our body is genetically programmed to build energy reserves for bad times. Every day we consume energy – calories – and use energy. If we consume more than we use the body will convert the extra energy to fat which is the body’s way of reserving this energy for times when it’s needed. In the same manner when we consume less energy than we use each day the body will have to get the missing energy from its reserves by burning fat.
In order to keep it simple we have ignored one important fact: the body has a choice when getting that extra energy: it can either use fat or muscle mass. Our genetic program always prefers to reserve fat for the worse times so if our body needs to get extra energy it will always prefer using muscles mass than using fat. You might have noticed people that go on extreme diets and in return seem to lose their muscle mass but keep their fat on – mostly around the waistline – this is exactly the reason why. The only way to force the body to use fat instead of muscle mass is by using the muscles and the way to use the muscles is to exercise. When we exercise and use our muscles the body program will assume that the muscles are needed for our daily survival and thus can not be compromised. In return the body will not use muscle mass as energy – in fact the opposite is true the body will build extra muscle mass. In order to get the extra energy needed the body will use fat.
So to conclude our discussion so far we can see that there are two facts we must understand: One is that the body builds fat when we consume more energy than we use and uses fat or muscle mass when we consume less energy than we use. The other is that in order to make sure that body uses fat and not muscle mass for extra energy we must exercise. Taking these two facts into account you can see that any diet will consist of both exercising and making sure we consume less calories than we use. If we exercise but at the same time consume too many calories the body will still have extra energy and will convert it to fat.
It is also important to make sure that our body gets the right nutrition and not just the right amount of calories. Make sure that your diet includes vegetables low fat meats such as fish and poultry and proteins from sources such as eggs and milk. Eat in moderation and use common sense you do not need to read a book to know that deep fried food is not good for you and that a chicken salad is better than a cheeseburger. Most of us can make a good judgment of what food is good for us but many of us just choose to ignore that judgment.
To conclude in order to shed those extra pounds off and to keep a proportionate body and muscle mass remember to exercise regularity eat in moderation and try to avoid the bad food and most importantly consume less calories than you use every day.
Ziv Haparnas is a technology veteran and writes about practical technology and science issues. This article can be reprinted and used as long as the resource box including the backlink is included. You can find information about photo album printing and photography in general on http://www.printrates.com - a site dedicated to photo printing.
Today, there are several diets publicized in books and on the internet, it is difficult to choose. Here we are not going to look at foods to eat but foods to avoid on any diet.
A common sense way to understand which diet is best is to see which one fits your own personal choices for life-style and natural (we stress the word, “natural” not synthetic) tastes.
We all have our likes and dislikes…many of which from a child passes with us all our lives.
Today’s commercial world, and international food and beverage business is about as responsible for the obesity problem as the tobacco company’s are for lung cancer. When you are on a diet, or if you wish to be your ideal weight, you must avoid the general choices below.
•Any “processed” food. ANY…this means food that has been treated in an industrial way. These foods contain additives and chemicals that disturb your natural processes of digestion and elimination. In this category, you can think of any food from a can, or one that can stay on a supermarket shelf more than one month.
•Any and all fast foods. These are perhaps the worst offenders, as they somehow taste great when you are hungry, you eat them quickly, and they contain all the ingredients you don’t need or your body wants; such as transfats, incorrect food combinations (cola drinks with proteins and carbohydrates), and an excess of calories.
An average fast food meal is about 1,000 or more calories. It is often more, and leaves you hungry in about 2 hours.
•Any “deep-fried” foods. This includes the famous potato, but can also include fried meats (such as fried chicken), and some sweets, such as the donut or many oriental-type sweets. These kill your diet, raise insulin levels in the blood, and there is no way to lose weight.
•All polysaturated and animal fat. We do not say to you to eliminate fat, just eat the correct ones. These are found in fish, some vegetables and some dairy products (where omega-3 oils have been incorporated to the dairy animal’s feed).
•White Flour. There is nothing in it good for you, nothing. Whole wheat or other whole grains are another story. Eat them as you wish, but NO white flour.
It is a dead food itself, and only causes unbalances in your digestive system. White flour was invented as it does not spoil, where whole grains do. The bugs know which is best to eat. They eat the whole grains and not bleached processed white flour.
•White Sugar. As its carbohydrate cousin above, white sugar also has very little or no nutritional value.
There are so many healthy alternatives to it, and although sweet, these natural sugars are easily digested in your system as they are natural as you are natural.
•Mayonnaise and its Derivates. Although very tasty, and makes the food you eat it with so as well, the mayonnaise is heavily processed, usually with the cheapest oils, mostly transfatty ones, and full of preservatives.
Also mayonnaise is made from eggs, and commercially treated to withstand the age process on the supermarket shelf. It will not help you diet, and in fact, it is not good for you at all. If you make it yourself however, and eat it sparingly, that is another matter.
• Caffeinated Drinks. This includes coffee, dark tea, the cola drinks, chocolate, and the new power drinks that are appearing in nightclubs, supermarkets and gyms.
The caffeine (or similar chemical found in tea and chocolate) disturbs your metabolism, and will prevent the natural slimming process when you are dieting.
There are many other foods to both avoid and enjoy, but the above list is generally agreed to by most dieticians.
When you are NOT dieting, you can certainly eat these foods, but it is advised to do so sparingly as to remember you had dieted, lost weight, and now, why gain it back.
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