How to Reduce Fat and Calories When You Cook

When you’re trying to lose weight and stick to a diet, it’s often the best choice to cook your own meals at home. This gives you an easy way to control portion size as well as control what food goes into each meal.

Unfortunately, many meals cooked at home are made with fattening ingredients like vegetable oil, butter and rich creams.

Invest in Proper Cooking Tools

A few basic tools will go a long way to help you with your weight loss efforts.  Non-stick cooking pans, for example, although you to skip a lot of the fat and oil that usually needs to be added to food to keep it from sticking.

With non-stick pans, add just a tiny amount of olive oil when you’re cooking meat and vegetables to give your food a boost of heart-healthy monounsaturated fat without adding a lot of calories.

A digital kitchen scale is also important to measure the amount of food you’re cooking and eating. This will help you reduce calories by using an exact portion of vegetables, meat and pasta when you cook.

The Psychology of Portion Control

Numerous studies have shown that most Americans tend to underestimate the portion of food they’re eating by around 20%. Overweight people also tend to underestimate portions even more than normal-weight people.

A few other studies have offered additional insight into the psychology of portion control.

A 2005 study published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior found that people don’t just overeat foods they enjoy, as the size of the container increases food intake significantly, even with unpalatable foods.

This study found that people ate almost 34% more 14-day-old stale popcorn when it was in a large bucket over a medium-sized bucket.

During the same year, a study published in Obesity Research examined the importance of visual cues on food intake. During this study, participants were split into two groups.

Half of the participants were served soup in a regular bowl that offered them a visual cue. The other half received soup in a bowl that self-refilled without their knowledge.

This bowl very slowly refilled the contents as the participant ate. Researchers found that people eating from one of the self-refilling bowls consumed over 72% more food than the people eating from a regular bowl, although they did not believe they ate any more soup than the others in the group.

So how can you use this information when you’re preparing meals at home?

After making a large batch of food, divide it into individual single-serving containers to store it so you have a way to accurately gauge how much you’re eating.

Using Food Substitutions

You can also modify recipes to use healthier food substitutions to make your favorite snacks and meals. Here’s a look at some common substitutions that offer important health benefits and help you skip unnecessary fat.

• Applesauce. This substitution can be used instead of oil or butter in many recipes, particularly baked goods. This will reduce the calories and fat in your recipe but also alter the texture. For this reason it’s best for baked goods like dessert bars, cakes or muffins. You can usually substitute an equal amount of applesauce for butter or oil, but make sure you use low-sugar applesauce.
• Chicken stock. This can also be used to replace oil, butter and even cream in many recipes. It also keeps food from sticking to a pan and adds moisture, which makes it perfect for sauteed vegetables. Try using chicken stock with a tiny amount of olive oil in mashed potatoes and hummus spread as well.
• Pureed white beans. Instead of using heavy cream or whole milk in your favorite soup, try pureeing canned white beans to lower both calories and fat.
• Canadian bacon or turkey bacon instead of bacon.
• Rolled oats instead of bread crumbs.
• Fat-free half-and-half instead of cream.
• 2 egg whites instead of 1 whole egg
• For baked goods, use half the sugar called for and add vanilla, cinnamon or nutmeg