Where to Find Diet Recipes & Weight Loss Cooking Tips

If you are dieting, or thinking about starting a diet, you’ve probably asked yourself, where do I find the best diet recipes? So, where do you go to find delicious low calorie food recipes for your diet? And, which ingredients should you look for, and which ones should you avoid when choosing a low calorie meal?

Diet Recipes & Weight Loss Cooking Tips

First of all, let’s take a look at the various sources for weight loss or diet recipes. The internet is packed with great recipes. Epicurious, WebMd, iVillage, and even BeliefNet all have excellent low calorie recipes on them, and even offer some great weight loss cooking tips. And in case you haven’t noticed, we regularly share our favourite low calorie recipes right here on this website. Plus you can search for weight loss recipes for just about any specific dish by typing “dish + low calorie” into a search engine like Google (substitute “dish” with the name of the dish you are interested in).

You can also turn to traditional sources such as low calorie cookbooks to find diet recipes. Additionally, you will find weight loss recipes tied to specific diets such as the Adkins or Mediterranean diets in these books.

Cooking shows on television often feature low calorie recipes. The Food network provides details of their low calorie recipes on their website.

Create Your Own Low Calorie Recipes

Another idea you can try, is to use a recipe you like, but swap out some of the ingredients for ingredients that don’t change the texture or taste of the food, but lower the calories. For example, with pancakes, cut the oil and butter, switch to whole-wheat flour, use raspberry sauce instead of syrup, then add more fresh fruit on top. For pasta with red sauce, puree cauliflower and broccoli to mix into the sauce, and add whole vegetables as well to make it more filling and healthier.

But, it’s not enough to know how to turn an individual recipe into a low calorie recipe. You need to have a good idea of what ingredients make a dish off limits. That way, you can plan your substitutes. Learn about the food & diet fundamentals for effective weight loss, here.

As an example, regular whole wheat bread (not calorie reduced) has 70 calories, but a low fat bagel has 150. So, eating a “diet” brand isn’t necessarily a cure-all for dieting.

You should also start incorporating the so called “superfoods” into as many diet recipes as you can. The superfoods are: blueberries, black beans, spinach, yogurt, tomatoes, carrots, oats, and walnuts.

When a recipe for a baked product such as cake requires oil, substitute the oil with apple sauce. This will have no impact on the baking process or the taste, but will save a whopping 15/16 of the calories! (1 tablespoon of oil is equal to 120 calories, while 1 tablespoon of apple sauce has 6.5 calories).

Other Recipe Substitutes

  • Use Cooking spray instead of butter
  • Use Rolled oats instead of bread crumbs
  • Use Wine or fruit juice instead of oil based marinades
  • Use Turkey bacon instead of bacon
  • Use Ground turkey breast instead of ground beef

If you are looking for diet recipes for weight loss, the good news is that you are in good company. There is a wealth of information out there for people wanting to cook healthy meals at home, and live a healthier lifestyle.

How about you? Have you found any good diet recipes, or do you have cooking tips of your own? Share them with us in the comments below.

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