Diet Correctly

The word diet strikes fear in the heart of many of us, but diet doesn’t have to be a bad word. Learning how to eat healthy is a diet habit that we can do for the rest of our lives. Most people think of diet as being something that you do until your lose a certain amount of weight, and then you go back to regular eating. This is the precise reason why most diets fail; they are impossible to sustain in the long run. Learning how to diet right will help you get to a healthy weight and stay there.

Staying away from fad diets is vital to losing weight successfully. Low carbohydrate diets are a good example of this. Millions of people swear by the latest low carb craze, but how many of us know a friend or coworker who had lost a shocking amount of weight in a short period of time, only to gain it back in an even shorter period? Carbohydrates are an important part of a complete and healthy diet, so they certainly can’t be omitted forever. While your body may lose weight while on the diet, you’re bound to gain it back when you start eating carbs again.

Everyone knows that too much fat is a bad thing. While certain fats are very good for us, many people on low carb diets are getting too much of the bad fats, i.e. animal fats. It is a shame that people are so concerned with losing weight that they lose sight of the fact that their wonder diet may actually be doing their body harm.

Approaching losing weight with an attitude of health and longevity is the secret to dieting success.

Calorie counting can be a great way to learn how many calories you are consuming each day compared to how many you are using. If you consume more than you use, you will gain weight. However, this type of dieting can be done to the extreme as well which is unhealthy. Make sure you discuss what range of calories you should be consuming each day to make sure you’re getting the recommended amounts.

Calorie counting can actually be detrimental to your diet. If you find yourself constantly hungry your body is probably in starvation mode. This means that your metabolism slows down and any calories consumed are stored as fat. Not exactly what you want to have happen. Be sure to eat a wide variety of food and get the required calories so that you’re losing weight in a healthy way.

Talking to your doctor is the best way to diet and lose weight. He or she can give you a recommended plan, or even put you in touch with a nutritionist who can help you look at your current eating habits and how to change them.

Adapting Recipes for Good Health

Most of the recipes of some of our favorite foods are full of fat and calories, as well as other ingredients that people with food allergies and intolerances aren’t able to eat. However, most of these recipes can be altered and adapted to suit anyone’s dietary restrictions. All it takes is a bit of knowledge about what makes a recipe healthy and how you can make these alterations so that the recipe still tastes good.

Having restrictions on what you eat doesn’t mean that you have to give up food that tastes great or that you need to limit yourself to what you eat. By incorporating some of the following changes to any recipe you’ll be able to add lots more food ideas to your daily food plan.

One of the most important things that you can do to reduce the number of calories that a recipe has is to cut back on the amount of sugar that you’re using. No matter how much sugar that a recipe calls for, you can reduce the sugar by 1/3 of the original amount. To keep the taste of the recipe you can add nutmeg, cinnamon, and vanilla flavoring. Recipes that can be successfully adapted by reducing the amount of sugar include cakes and cookies, muffins, quick breads, fruit recipes, custards, and puddings.

Reducing the amount of fat in recipes is important if you need to watch the fat content in your daily diet. You can reduce the amount of total fat used in recipes by up to 1/3 without significantly altering the texture of the recipe or the way that it tastes.
For cake recipes a general rule to follow is to use 2 tablespoons of fat for every cup of flour that you’re using. For cookie recipes you can add apple juice as you reduce fat by 1/3 but you may have to add a bit more flour to get the cookie recipe to the right consistency.

Many recipes use too much salt that is entirely unnecessary for the taste of the dish. You can reduce the amount of salt that you use in a recipe by up to 1/2 (for some recipes you can eliminate salt altogether) by using salt-free seasonings, herbs, and spices to get the taste and flavor that you’re looking for. Adding garlic to many main dishes is a great way to get added flavor without the use of salt.

Changing recipes for health is easy once you’ve adapted one or two recipes. You’ll find that you can eat the foods that you want by making modifications to any recipe to improve the overall health and nutrition of the final product.