Low-Fat Cooking Techniques
Always trim visible fat from meat before cooking and remove skin from chicken

Braise: this slow cooking method will tenderize meats, remove fat and add flavor. To braise means “to cook in liquid in a covered container.” Braising can be done on top of the stove or in a covered dish in a slow oven. When food is cooked, refrigerate, then remove all fat.

Roast, Bake, Broil: Place meat on a rack so the fat can drip off.

Low-Fat Grilling: use a cast iron skillet. Wipe the pan with an oiled paper towel. Treating your pan this way turns it into a “nonstick” pan.

Food Labels

• Fat-Free means less than 0.5 grams of fat per serving
• Trans Fat-Free means less than 0.5 grams of trans fat per serving
• Low-Fat means 3 grams or less of fat per serving
• Reduced Fat means 25% less fat than the regular product with 2 grams or less of saturated fat per serving
• Percent Fat-Free is based on product weight NOT on the percent of calories. This can be misleading. The product must be low-fat or fat-free.

Tips for Low-Fat Food Preparation

• When using ground beef in a recipe [chili, spaghetti sauce], cook the meat until well done in a covered pan on a low flame. Drain off all the fat.
• Use mustard as a sandwich spread in place of margarine or mayonnaise.
• In meat salads and slaws, use fat-free mayonnaise or salad dressing in place of mayonnaise.
• Flavor with a dash of garlic powder or a variety of other spices.
• Use margarine spread, fat-free margarine or jelly on your bread or toast.
• Instead of seasoning vegetables with a “pat” of butter or margarine, use a butter flavoring.
• Refrigerate soup stocks, broths, and stews, then remove the fat that hardens on top. Use broth to season vegetables and make gravies.

Low-Fat Baked Chicken Chimichangas
1-1/2 cups cubed cooked chicken breast
1-1/2 cups picante sauce, divided
1/2 cup shredded reduced-fat cheddar cheese
2/3 cup chopped green onions, divided
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon dried oregano
6 flour tortillas (8 inches), warmed
1 tablespoon butter, melted

In a small bowl, combine the chicken, 3/4 cup picante sauce, cheese, 1/4 cup onions, cumin and oregano. Spoon 1/2 cup mixture down the center of each tortilla. Fold sides and ends over filling and roll up. Place seam side down in a 15-in. x 10-in. x 1-in. baking pan coated with cooking spray. Brush with butter. Bake, uncovered, at 375° for 20-25 minutes or until heated through. Top with remaining picante sauce and onions.

Yield: 6 servings. 1 chimichanga equals 269 calories, 8 g fat (3 g saturated fat), 39 mg cholesterol, 613 mg sodium, 31 g carbohydrate, 1 g fiber, 17 g protein. Diabetic

Exchanges: 2 lean meat, 1-1/2 starch, 1 vegetable, 1/2 fat

The outside of the store consists of a wide variety of fruits and vegetables; deli meat and cheeses; raw meats, fish and poultry; as well as dairy products including milk and yogurt. When shopping, follow the “80:20 Rule”. That is to say, 80 percent of your grocery cart items should be foods found on the perimeter of the grocery store; 20 percent of the items should come from the aisles. This will ensure you are buying whole foods instead of processed “food-like” foods.

Getting in the Game
Your physical activity program doesn’t have to be elaborate or incredibly time consuming. Look at the areas in your current routine where you are already active and add to it:

Follow these tips to get started:
- Choose activities that fit into your current schedule-the more convenient, the more likely you’ll stick with it!!
- Identify the types of exercise you most enjoy so that exercise feels less like a chore and more like a break from the daily grind.
- Find a time of the day where you are most likely to avoid conflicts and schedule an appointment to exercise. Make yourself do it in the beginning and it WILL get easier! If you can’t get 30 minutes in, try doing three 10 minutes sessions.
- Set specific goals—walking 30 minutes 3 days a week—so you know what you’re aiming for!

After an hour of physical activity, here’s what your body needs:

• Fluid: Replace what’s lost through sweat. Use foods that are full of fluids [fruits, salads, soups] or fluids alone
• Carbs: Refuel muscles with 30 to 60 grams of carbohydrate within the first 30 minutes after a workout
• Protein: Believe it or not, the amount of exercise you perform during an hour does not increase protein requirements.

We’ve made a list of some popular weight loss apps that can put a wealth of weight loss tools in the palm of your hand.

• Lose It! (Android and iPhone)—Lose It! brings you all the tools you need to track your calorie intake and exercise. Simply set a goal, and Lose It! helps you set up a calorie and exercise budget. Its calorie counter adds as you eat and deducts with every activity that you enter. And according to the app website, the average Lose It! user loses 12.3 pounds!
• MyNetDiary (Android and iPhone)—Like Lose It!, MyNetDiary offers calorie-counting services. What sets this app apart is its massive food database. MyNetDiary has over 416,000 food entries, with more being added each day. This means that you have a pretty good chance of finding the calorie-count of almost any meal, frappuccino, or snack! And with a weight-loss–friendly barcode scanner, it makes shopping on a diet even easier.
• Diet Point (Android and iPhone)—This app specializes in diet plans. Whether you’re looking for long- or short-term diet solutions, or want a specific diet plan, Diet Point bring you’re the options you want. It includes 55 diet plans sorted into various categories, including vegetarian, low carb, detox, fad, blood type and healthy.

How do you use technology to lose weight? Please comment and let us know!

Sleep? Isn’t that the opposite of exercise, dieting, and all the hard work of losing weight? Not necessarily. In fact, a WebMD article by Dr. Michael J. Breus shows that your body needs healthy sleep to lose weight—sleep loss and weight loss just don’t mix.

Dr. Brues writes that sleep loss affects how your body secretes cortisol, a hormone which governs your appetite, so you’ll crave foods you don’t need. Furthermore, a lack of proper sleep can prevent your body from metabolizing carbs, which leads to higher blood sugar, overproduction of insulin, and fat gain—a process which can point you in the direction of diabetes.

The article outlines a few ways in which you can prepare for relaxing, rejuvenating, and weight loss-friendly sleep:

• Don’t go to bed hungry. Eat dinner close enough to bedtime to where you won’t be hungry, but don’t go to bed on a full stomach, either.
• Prepare, prepare, prepare. Stay away from caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol in the evenings, and try to make your bedroom as dark as possible.
• Relax. Develop a relaxing nightly routine. You might take a warm bath, read for a few minutes, or have your spouse give you a massage.

How valuable is a good night’s sleep to you? How do you make sure you’re getting one? Let us know in the comments!

The study split 123 overweight or obese women aged 50–75 into two groups. Both groups were put on low-calorie diets, and one group incorporated an exercise plan into their program. Snacking wasn’t regulated across the groups, but after a year, the study participants were asked to report on their eating habits, including both what and when they ate.

As it turned out, women in both groups who reported eating a snack of some sort in the midmorning lost 7% of their total body weight, but those who didn’t eat between breakfast and lunch lost 11%.

The study’s lead author, Dr. Anne McTiernan, attributes this difference to possible “mindless eating,” that is, eating out of habit, not hunger. She does stress that snacking can be beneficial to the dieter, but not as a means of recreation.

We’ve put together a few takeaway points from this article; think of them as snacking guidelines!

• When to snack. If you have a gap of five hours or more between meals, a little pick-me-up might help you now and later. Eating some low-fat yogurt, an apple, or a handful of nuts can tide you over until the next meal, give your afternoon a nutritious boost, and keep you from being so hungry that you eat too much at dinner.
• Why to snack. You’re hungry. If you’re not hungry, the extra food just isn’t worth it.
• Are you just thirsty? Test yourself with a water bottle. When you’re hungry between meals, drink a bottle of cold water and see if you’re satisfied afterward. The best snack of all might be calorie-free!

What do you do when the midmorning munchies hit? Leave us a comment and let us know!

Dr. Brad Watkins, a guest columnist for the Middletown Journal, recommends a predominantly home-cooked diet for people on the weight loss journey. And like we’ve said in a few past blog posts, using lean meats, fresh fruits and vegetables, and flavorful herbs can make it easy to eat healthy at home—and love what you make!

But what do you do when your friends at the office ask you along for lunch, or your church group organizes a brunch? Or what about office parties with fatty snacks and sugary sweets? Peer pressure can make sticking to a diet difficult, and at times, embarrassing. You don’t want to miss out on opportunities to build relationships with friends and coworkers, but you shouldn’t have to sacrifice your health, either. We’ve put together a few simple questions to ask yourself in social eating situations.

• Do I really want this? Are you even hungry, and if so, is this something you want to eat or drink?
• Can I afford it? If you can eat something that doesn’t wreck your diet, go ahead and enjoy!
• Can I change the plan? You might have a better, diet-friendly idea for outings with your friends.

How do you handle your weight loss and your social lives? Do they overlap?

This is how fad diets crop up. We’re not used to waiting; we want results we can see, and we want them now. So we go on extreme diets and purges, eating nutrition-free, unappetizing, just-plain-weird foods in hopes of reaching a smaller size a little faster.
The problem with the quick-fix attitude is that it can forget the main focus of proper weight loss: your health! In her recent interview on Blisstree.com, nutritionist and dietician Michelle Babb advises dieters to focus on being healthy, rather than skinny. We at LetsLose have condensed the interview into a few takeaway points.

• Crash dieting is unhealthy. Babb notes that extreme diets that severely limit your intake might not even help you lose weight. Your body will sense the lack of incoming food and store up as much fat as it can, thinking that it will need it to last. This is unhealthy, and it certainly won’t help you lose weight!
• It’s about your lifestyle. The best way to lose weight is to alter your lifestyle, not just your lunch. Exercise, a proper outlook for food and yourself, and the support of those around you will work wonders. “It takes time,” Babb says, “but the end result is worth it and it allows people to ditch the dieting mentality forever.”

What were your expectations when you started dieting? How do you stay focused on your health first, and then your figure? Comment and share!

ABC News reported on this study, which showed a correlation between serving size and both color contrast and plate size. As it turns out, people are likely to serve larger portions of food with little color contrast, and larger portions of food on larger dishes.
Why? Optical illusions. When the color of your meal contrasts the color of the plate it’s on (orange sweet potatoes on a white plate), you can clearly see how much you’re serving yourself. However, when there’s not much contrast (grilled salmon on a light red plate), you’re inclined to take in larger portions. And of course, the larger the plate, the smaller the serving will look.

Good Morning America did a quick experiment using spaghetti dinners. They asked people to serve up some pasta with red marinara sauce on alternating red and white plates. The participants were instructed to scoop out equal portions of noodles, which were weighed afterward. The assumption was that people would scoop more red pasta onto the low-contrast red plates, and less onto the white ones—which is exactly what happened.

So how can you plan for successful colors?

• Color-blind yourself. You probably don’t have a set of dishes that contrasts every possible meal, but you can set some objective standards for your serving sizes. Portioning your meals by measured scoops may be more reliable than getting your plate to look full.
• Use smaller plates. Your meals will look bigger and you’ll eat less if your frame of reference is smaller. Putting your meals on salad plates instead of full-sized dinner plates will make your meals look fuller, so you can avoid needless calories.

Do you think color affects the way you eat? Let us know!

Or what if you’re on the receiving end of that message?

A recent article in Shape magazine explored the issues of breaking the news to a loved one, or receiving such news. Telling the people you love that they need to shed some weight can be a hard thing to do, and may come across as hurtful, but it could also give them the push they need to start living a healthy lifestyle. It could even save a life.

Selfless love is the key. If someone close to you needs to lose weight, say so graciously, making it clear that you love them. Weight loss coach Caryl Ehrlich suggests, “Instead of outwardly saying ‘you need to lose weight,’ you could say ‘I love you just the way you are and I want you around for a long time for me and the kids, so you might want to eat in a healthier way.”

And before bringing it up, ask yourself how you would want to hear such news.

What if you’re the one being told to lose weight? Talk about it. Define expectations—and determine whether or not they’re realistic. And ask your partner, friend, or family member for support if you should act on their suggestion; they might be willing to help you pursue a new, vibrant life!

At LetsLose, we believe that spiritual encouragement is vital to the weight loss journey. If you’re not sure how to tell someone that they need to begin this journey, remember the teaching of Jesus as you search for the right words: “And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.” (Luke 6:31 ESV)

So hours of practice and several games per week still don’t cut it? Why not?

It’s all in the food. The study showed that, with all the sugary drinks, high-calorie snacks, and post-game fast food runs, child athletes consume more fatty foods than their non-athlete peers!

School of Public Health researcher Toben F. Nelson, Sc.D., spoke with parents about these surprising findings. “They say these kids are physically active, so a little bit of extra junk food isn’t really going to hurt them. But clearly the results of our study show differently,” he remarks.

So what can we do for our kids?

• Eat well at home. Kids need a healthy and nutritious diet. Give them plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables. A healthy diet at home gives them a good foundation for eating right at school, at sports practice, and when they grow up.
• Talk to the coach. Find out what the team is eating and drinking, and see if they can focus on healthier foods. Healthy kids play better than unhealthy kids, so it’s a smart move for the team!
• Send your own snacks. If you can’t change the foods your child eats on the field, you can send along healthier alternatives. This article recommends fruits, veggies and cheeses.

How do you keep your kids healthy and trim? Let us know!