You didn't think I was going to preach deprivation after my recent post on rejecting traditional resolutions, did you? Perish the thought. 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.

Open-faced sandwiches.

These are exceptionally fun at home fresh out of the toaster oven for a quick lunch break. 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 only the top slice of bread. You really won't even miss it.

Water.

I'm sure you're expecting me to point out the need for hydration and suggest the standard DIY flavored fitness water options. While those are valid points, they are not what I'll be advising here. This tip relates to reducing fat in cooking, and celebrates the power of steam. Bonus? You don't even have to go buy a special cooking gadget. Here's what I'm talking about: When stir frying up some shrimp and snow peas or a batch of haricot verte in a couple of tablespoons of oil we often find we need a bit more moisture before the job is done. Rather than immediately grab the oil to add more, we first see if a few drops of ye olde 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.

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 2 liter bottle). One batch of mixed up frozen orange juice concentrate can last forever if you are just flavoring the seltzer a bit. Even healthier juices have a high natural sugar content. A personal trainer and health coach told me once that in general, 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. For other lower calorie cocktail ideas, check out this post.

Try more veggie juice .

This is a sort of 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 V-8 can all be incorporated in a healthy way.

Go miniature on the dessert.

Hey, if you are joining the New Year's resolution revolution, you're trying to simplify things without depriving yourself anyway, right? 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 recent meat money article.

Out of many other ideas out there, these seemed the least painful to me as far as maintaining lifestyle and not feeling exceptionally deprived. If you have other suggestions or tips, you know I'd love to hear bout them. Remember to sound off below.