When eating food with family and friends try not to eat unhealthy, high fat and high calorie foods. Food does not have to be tasteless neither when you eat with family and friends. Making a few small changes in your meal choice can make a huge difference.
You don’t have to avoid meat to eat healthier. Just make better choices when choosing meat. Meat is more leaner today than it has been in the past because of the fat trimming done by meatpackers or butchers. The best choices are beef that has been labeled round, loin, and extra lean. Cuts like tenderloin, sirloin, or top round qualify as lean and healthy according to the Wisconsin beef council. In addition to buying lean meats, there are some healthy ways you can cook meat as well; including baking, braising, broiling, grilling, roasting, and steaming. Use cooking spray instead of oil or butter while prepping and use nonstick pans. One way to decrease fat is to strain cooked ground beef, afterwards rinse it with hot water, and drain it very good before continuing to cook.
When we think of lean meat, we often think about chicken. Many times we turn the healthy chicken into something unhealthy such as fried chicken. Try avoiding fried chicken including chicken tenders, patties, and nuggets. Try baking, broiling, roasting, and steaming chicken instead. Remember to use cooking spray with a nonstick pan. Take note that the dark meat of poultry contains twice as much fat as the white meat of poultry. The skin of chicken contains a lot of fat. You can always remove the skin from chicken or buy skinless chicken. You can usually find skinless chicken breast in the grocery stores.
Eating lean turkey is a wonderful choice as well. When preparing turkey, cook the stuffing separately. By cooking the stuffing separately you will decrease the fat content because you will keep the stuffing from soaking up the fat from the turkey. Also use less margarine or butter when preparing the stuffing and skim fat from the gravy. You can use a gravy separator or refrigerate the gravy. Choose the light meat over the dark meat because light meat has less calories. You can give the dark meat to someone who wouldn’t mind the extra calories.
Instead of serving vegetable casseroles or cheese based vegetable meals, try serving steamed vegetables. You don’t have to add any fat to vegetables when you steam or microwave them. You can replace margarine with herbs, lemon juice, or vinegar. You can also replace oil, cheese, or butter with spices and herbs or imitation butter sprinkles for taste. When sautéing vegetables you can reduce the amount of oil and use flavored vinegar and broth as a replacement for oil.
When choosing bread choose whole grain. For example you can choose whole grain noodles, whole grain/wheat bread to make sandwiches, whole grain dinner rolls, whole grain breading for stuffing, whole grain hamburger buns and the list goes on and on. Refined/white bread is known to be high in calories and refined sugar than whole grain bread. The refined sugar is bad carbs. If you can’t resist white bread try eating a version with less calories.
Top photo credit: Turkey, preparing to be dried by rklau
In text photo credit: Steaming Vegetables for lunch by Eyebee
