Kitchenability

03.11.2019

Food Is Not Your Foe: 4 Ways to Make Your Favorite Dishes Healthier

4 Ways to Make Your Favorite Dishes Healthier

Guest Contribution: Lizzie Weakley

Regardless of whether you want to lose weight, improve your nutrition, or achieve other health-related goals, you may dread the thought of having to give up your favorite dishes. Dieting or simply adjusting your diet can seem restrictive and even unbearable when you have to make huge sacrifices. The good news is that you may still be able to enjoy your favorite dishes by making a few smart adjustments.

Eating at restaurants is convenient, but it also is expensive and may be very unhealthy. Restaurants often saturate their foods with fats, excessive amounts of sodium, sugars and more in an effort to make them taste amazing. You have little or no control over the ingredients that are used to prepare the meals ordered at restaurants, so a smart idea is to skip restaurants altogether. Learn how to prepare your favorite dishes at home so that you have control over the ingredients and cooking methods.

Choose the Right Cooking Methods
You may be aware that poaching, baking, and broiling foods are some of the healthier cooking methods. Frying is generally off-limits if you are focused on healthy eating. However, you can invest in discount kitchenware and affordable small appliance that can help you to cook your favorite dishes in healthier ways. For example, you can replace your deep fryer with an air fryer. You can also invest in a vegetable steamer so that you do not saturate your veggies with unnecessary butter or sauces.

Adjust the Ingredients
When you find recipes for your favorite dishes, understand that you can adjust the ingredients slightly. For example, if a recipe says to fry something in butter, you can use ghee instead. You can replace whole milk with skim milk, fatty beef with lean chicken, and more. By making a few of these smart adjustments to the recipes, you can dramatically improve how healthy they are.

Reduce Portions
Another important way to make your favorite dishes healthier is to simply consume smaller portions. For example, you may love chocolate cake. Making a few minor adjustments to the recipe is a good idea, but you still may be aware that chocolate cake is generally unhealthy. Regardless of whether you are eating cake, lasagna, mac, and cheese as a side dish or something else, simply reduce your portion size to lower the fat, sugar, and calories consumed.

While you may still need to make some significant adjustments to your diet, you can see that you may still be able to enjoy your favorite dishes from time to time as well. These tips can be applied to many of the dishes that you love to make them healthier.