Top 5 Low Fat Cooking Tips

Most people assume that when you're on a "diet" and you're losing weight, that you essentially eat cardboard. Now, I love my food, and if I had to eat cardboard, or boring and bland food, there is no way I would have been able to do so well with my weight loss!!

But what I forget is that some people are not sure where to start when it comes to low-fat cooking, and making your same family favourites with just making a few small tweaks and changes, and it will still taste delicious.

I have to say, I also like a decent serving size too! None of this 1/2 cup of boiled rice business.

So here are 5 of my low-fat cooking tips, and I'll build on these as the year goes on.

1. Substitute some meat for chopped or grated vegetables, depending on the dish. This works particularly well in casseroles, stews, curries, mince dishes, you get the drift. 100g of lean mince mince is around 2.5 points, whereas if you use carrot or zucchini, they are are 0 points. In a curry dish with 500g meat, and you replace the meat with 300g of vegetables (I would suggest carrots, cauliflower, sweet potato and pumpkin), you reduce the points per serve by 1-2 points, and giving you a larger serving.


2. Substitute oil for spray oil. I don't use oil to bake my vegetables, and I can still get them crunchy and tasty! The same for browning your onion and meat when cooking.


3. Substitute pureed apple for butter. This worked particularly well in a cake I made recently, where I used a grated apple instead of 60g of butter (reducing the butter required in half). It still tasted fabulous!


4. Use low fat ingredients - but watch the sugar content! But just because you use low-fat ingredients, doesn't necessarily mean it's a low-fat dish!!! Especially if the dish is still laden with a large quantity of the ingredients.


5. Use evaporated milk instead of cream. I have a gnocchi dish I made recently, and it was delicious, and tasted much more guilt-free because I didn't use full-saturated-fat cream.