Top 5 Healthy Cooking Tips for Weight Loss

Most Americans are looking to lose at least a little bit of weight these days. There’s a real obesity epidemic going on, and it’s impacting people at younger and younger ages. A large part of the answer can be found in exercise, as thirty minutes of moderate exercise each and every day has been shown to improve health across the board and help avoid the build up of fatty deposits in the body. But exercise alone won’t get the job done if you don’t think about what you eat. That doesn’t mean you have to eat like a pauper all the time. In fact, if you eat a healthy, balanced diet you can actually eat far larger quantities than you can with fatty meals without gaining weight. But a large part of success comes with how you cook. So here are the top five healthy cooking tips for weight loss.

First of all, consider steaming your food whenever possible. Steaming is a very gentle method of cooking, where basically you enclose the food in a sealed environment infused with steam, and you let that heat do the work. Steaming can be done in several different ways, and if you head to the kitchen goods store you’ll see a number of products that allow you to steam foods of all shapes and sizes. Most people steam vegetables, but you can steam fish and chicken as well, to delicious effect. The best thing about steaming your food is that you don’t have to use any fat or oil to get the job done. Steaming also keeps more of the nutrients and vitamins in your food than cooking in mostly any other way.

When steaming won’t get the job done, consider pulling out the wok for a stir fry. This is basically cooking your food at high heat for a very short amount of time. This is fantastic because the fast cooking time also preserves a lot of the nutritional value, and you won’t have to use a whole lot of oil. Stir frying is excellent with vegetables, and you’ll notice yourself eating a healthier balance when you cook with this method.

Those are both fantastic, but if you don’t pay attention to your ingredients you’ll fall short of your weight loss goals. So consider cutting the cheese in your diet down to a minimum. Cheese is basically all fat, and clogs the arteries of Americans more than any other food source. For a sad but true example, consider that it takes more than an hour of cardiovascular exercise to burn off the calories from a single slice of cheesecake. So look for opportunities to leave cheese off your plate whenever possible. Eat hamburgers or sandwiches without the cheese, or ask to go light on the cheese if you simply cannot do without it. There are also very tasty fat free or vegan cheeses that you can use in cooking at home.

Many people struggle when cooking big meals for family or around the holidays. That’s why gaining weight over the fall and the winter is so common. If you are concerned about gorging yourself on all of these delicious options, then consider cooking things that you don’t particularly like. Perhaps you can construct a menu of foods that your family loves, but you think are just okay. That way you won’t be as tempted to overdo it, and you won’t be sampling from the pan all evening long.

Finally, cook meals that take a little bit of work to eat. This may sound silly, but when looking for recipe sites to visit here and there, consider the actual complexity of the eating process. It’s been proven that eating more slowly causes you to eat less, because your stomach has time to tell your brain that it is full. So if you cook things like lean meats on the bone, hot soups or even fresh sushi, you’ll be giving your stomach more of a chance to fill up.