I will definitely have to try this sometime with orange juice!
6 Painless Ways to Cut Calories
Photo: Olatz eta Leire
If going without isn't on your list of things to try this month, consider these six painless strategies for shaving calories where you won't even notice they're gone. (See also: 10 Healthy Things to Eat and Drink in the New Year)
Make Open-Faced Sandwiches
These are exceptionally fun at home, fresh out of the toaster oven for a quick lunch break, with half the carbs and all the flavor. A few suggestions would be tuna melts, shrimp toast, and leftover roast and gravy over toasted wheat bread. And of course, there's always the eternally popular English muffin pizzas in both the breakfast and lunch varieties. Here are more sandwich ideas if you need them. Pick something yummy, and skip the top slice of bread. You won't even miss it.
Use Water
I'm sure you're expecting me to point out the need for hydration and suggest the standard DIY flavored water options. While those are valid points, they are not what I'm advising here. This tip relates to reducing fat in cooking and celebrating the power of steam. Here's what I'm talking about: When stir-frying some shrimp and snow peas or a batch of haricot vert in a couple of tablespoons of oil, we often find we need a bit more moisture before the job is done. Rather than immediately grabbing the oil to add more, first see if a few drops of tap water will do the trick. I'm not talking about pouring so much in that your side veggies get soggy; just a spritz or a drizzle will often get the job done. It releases loads of moist heat up through the veggies or whatever else is cooking in the pan, finishing up the job in record time.
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Make It a Spritzer
This not only works well with wine, but is great for stretching juices as well. We are always deeply stocked with generic Hannaford-brand flavored and plain seltzer (about 89 cents for a two-liter bottle). One batch of frozen orange juice concentrate can last forever if you are just flavoring the seltzer a bit. Even healthy juices have a high natural sugar content, and a personal trainer and health coach told me once that if you are going for nutritional power and metabolism boosting, you're better off to go with the full fruit anyway. The fiber content helps slow down the conversion to blood sugar in your body, apparently. So when we do have juices, or cocktails that contain them, we try to include seltzer to balance things out. For example, today for lunch we had a little bit of grapefruit juice left in the fridge. There was enough to put in the bottom of each of our drinking glasses, so I added ice and straws, topping the rest off with plain seltzer. We felt like we were having something to drink with lunch that wasn't completely boring, but didn't have a whole lot of calorie guilt. Check out other lower-calorie cocktail ideas.
Try More Veggie Juice
This is a follow-up on the natural sugars point made above. If you can embrace the flavors, tomato, clamato (which you can make yourself using leftover juice from canned clams), and Spicy Hot V8 can all be incorporated in a healthy way.
Go Miniature on Dessert
If you're having people over for dinner and really want to offer that extra dessert course, consider serving smaller fruit tarts, individual portions of biscotti, or a little Caffe Vergnano with individually wrapped chocolates such as Ghirardelli squares or Andes mints.
Skip the Prepackaged Lunch Meat
This tip comes from women's health writer Amy Capetta. She warns of all the “hidden fats” and other no-nos such as sodium that often come in prepared lunch meats. She recommends going for deli meats if you really feel you need the sliced meat option in your daily brown bag lunch. If you are worried about the extra cost per pound, consider trying out my “shaved, not sliced” strategy from this meat money article.
Out of many other ideas out there, these seemed the least painful to me for maintaining lifestyle and not feeling exceptionally deprived. If you have other suggestions or tips, I'd love to hear about them. Sound off below.
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Glad you liked it. It really is a great way to get more flavor in your seltzer than you would otherwise, but not overdo it on the juice calories.
Great tips! I use a variation of the water idea... I skip the oil or salad dressing and use water and my favourite seasoning to add some flavour. It's great for cooking veggies or meat. I sometimes use a hint of honey for sweetness too.
I love the open-face sandwich idea -- sounds like a great opportunity to pile on the roasted veggies!
In the open face sandwich category, my kids and I love a quick, inexpensive lunch we call Cheese Toast. I spread a *very* light coat of butter on a piece of bread, set it on a baking sheet butter-side-down, and top it with a slice of cheddar cheese. (Our favorite is the Tillamook sliced cheddar from Costco.) This goes into the oven at 350 degrees until the cheese bubbles and the bread is toasty.
This is so much easier than making grilled cheese for several people, and it tastes more "special" than a cold cheese sandwich on a winter day.
Great point about the water! It's amazing how much oil can contribute to a meal's calories, but water will get the job done nearly as good, and adds no calories!
I found an electric steamer at a yard sale. It's awesome. I can steam veggies, seafood, even chicken, without adding fat of any kind. It also will cook rice, and bake some things (using batter in the smaller loaf pans). Check out yard sales, amazing what you'll find (this sold for around $40, and I paid $5 barely used.).
Shelle
I'm not a gadget person, but I purchased a bubble water maker and I love it. It keeps the cost, trips to the store and waste to a minimum. Kids love them too.
It makes spritzers so easy. I keep cut limes in the fridge for a quick pick me up.
Is that exactly what it's called when searching for one to purchase? I ask because I can maybe track down a company that would like their product reviewed and test drive a few for the readers . . . Thanks for the tip!
Oh, and P.S? Are they relatively affordable?
The tea shop near where I live gave me a great hint: use loose tea as seasoning. For instance, lemon roiboos tea can season fish, and loose teas with "gunpowder" add a smokey flavour to meat. Plain ginger tea can be used as a broth for vegetables and meat as well. (I throw whatever is left in the tea pot into the vegetable pot). You can even find blends that use garlic.
Loose tea isn't that expensive (if you find a good place) and you won't get all the salt and preservatives from seasoning mixes.
We do the water flavoring idea, too. My favorite beverage is plain water with ice, but occasionally I like to stir in a tablespoon of concentrated juice into 8-12 ounces of water. Just lightly flavored, yum! Or sometimes we'll get sparkling water and drink it plain. I discovered I mostly love the carbonation of soda, so I rarely drink soda anymore. Sometimes flavor the sparkling water with juice, too. Would love to know where to get the bubble water maker thing that "not a gadget person" guest mentioned.
I use low-fat sour cream, cream cheese, and yogurt instead of full-fat versions. And, no-fat milk for day-to-day calcium and instead of cream in my coffee. I think I have tried low-fat or no-fat cheddar cheese but it didn't work for me.
You know, I like the low fat stuff as well. I can even go fat free on sour cream and plain yogurt ( as well as with mixed up powdered milk for baking), but the fat free cream cheese? No thanks. It's reduced fat for me in that department.
I also remembered something else I do that didn't make the article. Instead of necessarily trying a butter and flour roux base whenever I need a sauce that's thickened, I either use my fat free cream soup mix that I make in bulk, or a whisk up a bit of corn starch in water and add that to whatever I'm cooking. If the recipe starts with butter and onions and such anyway, I"ll go ahead and add a bit of flour. But I don't necessarily make that my first choice.
I used a water trick over the holidays with chocolate chip cookies. Left out 1/2 the butter and 1/2 the egg, and added about a quarter cup of water to the dough to replace the missing moisture. The trick was to add the water slowly, in splashes, to keep the dough from getting too wet. Nobody could taste the difference.
I like your reasoning about cutting the carbs - I'll never look at an open-faced sandwich in the same way ever again :)
It is a really easy way to cut calories and carbs painlessly. I guess this means we can enjoy bruschetta with gusto, right?
