One of the best tips for losing weight is to learn how to prepare and cook your own meals. The ingredients you choose should include vegetables, fruits, and lean proteins. Think beans, chickpeas, vegetables, fish such as salmon or tuna, low fat yogurt (plain), cottage cheese, eggs, chicken (skinless), and whole grains such as buckwheat, barley, quinoa and brown rice.
How you cook is just as important – aim to grill, poach, broil, bake, sauté, steam, roast, or boil your food whenever possible. Frying should be avoided. You can grill or sauté by using a small amount of oil if needed. As an alternative to oil, consider a vegetable stock or chicken stock.
While you’ll want to add spices and/or seasoning to your foods, you may need to limit the amount of salt you use. There are several brands of salt-alternatives you can try, or consider adding flavour from other sources (lemon juice, pepper, garlic, mustard, chicken or vegetable stock, just to name a few). Note that chicken and vegetable stock contain sodium but there are some low sodium options available.
Consider investing in an air fryer, steamer, or a spiralizer for vegetables like zucchini, which you can use as a substitute for pasta. The more tools you have in your kitchen, the better, as this can motivate you to create nutritious home-made meals that you’ll enjoy.
There are a lot of delicious and healthy recipes available online. A couple of good websites to check out are: verywellfit.com and health.com, although you can do an online search and find a lot of options.
For those who are interested in having meal kits delivered to their door, beware as some of the meals being offered look (and taste) great, but they can be high in calories, fat and sodium. Do your research and look for ones that offer lower calorie options.
Being prepared by having healthy recipes and/or healthy meals on hand will go a long way in helping you reach your goals.
Bon appetit!