Is Your Cookbook Making You Fat?

To me, cookbooks always represented wholesome cooking...My Mom had stacks of them and would whip up some pretty amazing stuff with those recipes. All natural ingredients, fresh vegetables, and high quality meats - they had all ingredients to a healthy diet.

Now that the recession seems to be kicking into full gear, more and more of us are staying home instead of dining out. That means were cracking open those cookbooks again and discovering some new recipes.

However, if you're trying to keep your waistline from expanding while you're trying to save your bank account from contracting, you might be in for a big suprise...Low and behold...those recipes that I used to think were healthy, aren't so healthy.

In fact, since 1936, the number of calories in those recipes have grown over 66%...Add that to the fact that we are more sedentary today, and it's no wonder we keep gaining weight.

There's two primary facts that account for this:

• Portion sizes have grown.
• More high calorie foods have been added to these recipes

When you take those two changes into account, it's easy to see how calories can get out of control.

Changing To Low-Cal, Healthy Recipes

Once you know the culprit for the calorie increase, it's easy to come up with a solution. You don't need to abstain from your favorite recipes, but you do need to make some changes to waht's printed in your cook books.

First, watch your portions. Does the recipe really feed 4, or is it more like 2. To figure this out, determine your daily caloric requirements and then figure out the amount of calories you should consume at each meal. Let say your daily caloric needs are 1800 calories. Divided over three meals, that gives you 600 calories per meal...Your serving size should fit within that requirement.

So, take the total calories of the prepared meal and divide by the number of calories you have allocated to this particular meal. That tells you how many servings you have. Now, divide up the final recipe into the number of servings you just computed. Put one on your plate, and put the rest into seperate containers.

Secondly, pay attention to the individual calories of each ingredient. Three common calorie killers are:

• High fat dairy, such as cheeses and creams
• High fat meats
• Sugars

There are plenty of low fat dairy options that you could swap out the high fat items for. These items are easy to find these in most grocery stores. Just read the labels and compare, paying particular attention to the fat grams and servings.

Meats on the other hand are a little harder as the can be integral to the dish and changing them out may prove a little trickier. For some recipes you might consider using ground trukey in place of ground beef, or go with a low fat ground beef option. Pork and chicken are also lean meat options as well.

Sugars creep into our diets in a lot of ways. These calories can really add up, too. Plus, too much sugar can spike your insulin levels and interfere with your fat burning process. Try options like Stevia or other artificial sweetners.

With a little planning, you can have all sorts of home made dishes that fit into your diet. It just takes a little bit of planning.