Cooking Lite is all about changing little things in your cooking habits at a time, and after time goes by your body will be screaming out for more. So let’s start we’re we left off last time. We we’re summing up a couple of things you can do, to help you eat a healthier diet and thereby a better quality of life. If you haven’t read the first post in this series yet, then hurry up and go there first. But without further ado here’s some more tips for you to consider doing.

• Steam cooking

In stead of frying everything, you could try boiling or steaming the food. The best of these two methods for cooking lite is steaming. Steam cooking is a method that has been used for a very long time. Before there was fire our great great….great grand father/mother used preheated rocks from a hot spring to steam the food they had. Later on the Chinese used this method of steam cooking to cook their buns and vegetables, little has changed since then.
The benefits of steam cooking are:

1. a big share of the vitamins and minerals will be preserved.
2. it keeps the natural smell, texture, taste and color.
3. makes the food tender and thus easily digestible.
4. no extra oil or butter needs to be added, so it is lower on calories.
5. easy to prepare food.

• Shopping tips

Need advice on what to get in the supermarkets? A lot of products say lite or diet so which one is better. What should you get? There is a shopping guide book called: “Eat This Not That! Supermarket Survival Guide: The No-Diet Weight Loss Solution”. If you just do one thing, get this book. It will show you in high definition pictures which brands and products to get and which ones to leave on the selves.
It is a book full of product comparisons, like:

1. Fruit Loops better than Apple Cinnamon Cheerios.
2. Xenergy’s Mango energy drinks better than Sobe’s
3. Regular Cheerios better than Smart Start.
4. Regular Quick 1 minute Quaker Oats better than Quaker’s Simple Harvest Multigrain hot cereal.
5. Dole pineapple cups more better than Dole mixed fruit cups.
6. Del Monte pear halves better than Del Monte sliced pears.

• The way we eat

When it’s time to eat, a lot of people just shovel the food in their mouth, chew 3 times and swallow. By doing this, your food arrives in your digestive system in big chunks. So when it goes through, the food won’t completely dissolve and the nutrition will just be flushed down the toilet. Your digestive system begins at the mouth not as many believe in the stomach. Just think of all the saliva you put in your food there, it’s not just a bit of water.
Also if we choose to chew our food more and thereby eat slower, we will eat less. The body has time to give out the signal to the brain that we are full. But if we gobble up the food and finish it even before it fully hits the stomach, we automatically eat more because we’re not satisfied yet. And let’s face it, you’ll at least enjoy your food more (unless it’s not your favorite thing to eat). In summary chew more and eat slower. Not so hard is it?

• Conclusion (for now)

These were some of the things you could change in the daily preparation of your meals. So you see, it is not that hard to do it the lite way. It is just a change in our ideas and methods of how we cook our food and what ingredients we use. Just start off with some little changes. You won’t even notice the difference and you’ll ask yourself why you didn’t start doing this earlier.
We will try our best to keep this series going and updated with all the new ways and ideas to put you on your path to cooking lite.

to be continued…

~If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen.

Extra tags: