Diet Conscious: How Do You Keep Daily Meals Healthy?

Trust us, we'd be cooking with cream and layering on the cheese every night if we could! But the alternative doesn't necessarily mean restricting ourselves to a diet of carrot sticks and poached chicken.

Here are a few health-conscious habits we've picked up over the years that help us balance healthy and hearty. What are yours?

For dishes that are big on flavor but low in calories, buy quality ingredients when you can. High quality means high flavor, and a little of these ingredients goes a long way.

A tablespoon of good olive oil has the same number of calories as a tablespoon of the supermarket brand, but chances are you'll need significantly less of the good olive oil to get the flavor you want. The same is true of cheese, chocolate, and even cured meats like salami and prosciutto.

Bulk up dishes with extra vegetables. When a recipe calls for a half an onion, throw in the whole thing. If a stir-fry already contains several different of vegetables, why not throw in that zucchini as well? Sauces in recipes will often stretch to cover the additional veggies, giving you extra vitamins without sacrificing flavor.

Use spices and seasonings liberally. We've found that many "lite" recipes seem to forget about seasoning, but healthy food doesn't have to taste bland. We find there's a definite correlation between how something tastes and how "full" or satisfied we feel after eating it--even if it's just a basic green salad with some herbs sprinkled in.

Check out our lists of Asian, Latin American, French, and Italian flavors for seasoning inspiration.

Don't forget to add the salt. With so many vegetables, a dish can easily start tasting bitter. A few teaspoons of salt can help balance the flavors. (Unless you need to follow a salt-restricted diet for health reasons, of course.)

Don't be shy of low-fat alternatives. These low-fat substitutes sometimes get a bad rap, but they have their time and place. While it's true that they're not as flavorful or rich as their full-fat cousins, we still like using them in our everyday cooking. We use low-fat ricotta in our lasagna and keep a carton or two of low-fat plain yogurt on hand to round out sauces.

What else do you do to keep daily meals healthy?

(Image: Flickr member malias licensed under Creative Commons)

Comments (10)

Extra veggies are good, but I also make sure to incorporate a lot of whole grains and choose lean proteins.

Measure (esp pasta), to make sure your portions aren't too large. Plan, to make sure you have the ingredients you need. As a vegetarian, it's harder, because there are a number of lean proteins you can't eat -- poultry and fish -- so you have to really plan your meals in order to get protein without fat. Too many vegetarian receipes either have no protein, or have high-fat protein like cheese.

Beans, beans, beans. Although the are not low calorie like veggies, the fill you up with protein and fiber. I happen to love beans and I must eat them once a day.

Some favorites:
-When I make pasta I try halve the pasta part and add in some beans and more veggies. Pasta alone is not very filling. but with beans you will be stuffed.
-A quick side dish of green or black lentils. Also a little dal is wonderful.
-When I make soup I always add beans. My favorite stew in the world is from Deborah Madisons Vegetarian cooking for Everyone, I think it is called potato and bean stew, but it has fingerlings with chick peas and the base is made with sherry, cumin, and saffron...yummm.

Another trick I have found is that prosciutto adds a lot of flavor to pizza, pasta, etc with little calories. And a slice or two of bacon can add so much flavor to soups, bean side dishes, etc.

And finally, fresh in season ingredients taste the best and leave me the most satisfied. I love the summer months because I have two farmer's markets a week!

All of the above, plus I try to avoid recipes that have too many processed ingredients: as much whole, natural food as possible.

Measure portions! I also try to wait at least 10 minutes between finish my serving and deciding if I'm going to have seconds or not.

I tend to add extra veggies to everything and I eat low fat cheese and zero fat yogurt. They both taste just as good (I really can't tell the difference with the yogurt and the cheese is just a little more crumbly) and are fewer calories.

If I'm baking and it's something I've made before, I try halving the sugar and sometimes using whole wheat flour. Oatmeal cookies turned out well with half sugar and using white whole wheat flour and Nigella Lawson's Damp Apple Almond cake works great with no sugar at all.

Mostly, I eat what I want and try to do so in moderation, including chocolate, ice cream and whatnot.

Great timing; this week my sweetie and I started a "clean eating" challenge to help reset our eyes and our stomachs. One of the small changes that's been a bit of a revelation to me is how many tasty substitutions there are for traditional fatty flavor enhancers. For example, the other day I mixed a bit of pesto into some nonfat plain yogurt and used it as a mayo substitute on my turkey BLT.

Another key has been portion control, which is largely enabled by healthy snacking throughout the day. I was surprised at how little dinner I needed to be satisfied, and owe it all to making sure I have small snacks of fruit and lean protein between meals so I never get ravenously hungry.

All of these are great ideas/suggestions that I also use to ensure hubby and I eat healthy despite our love of food. The biggest thing we do at our house is incorporate lots of in-season produce into our meals.

Plan, plan, plan. I don't just mean plan what you'll be eating all week long, but figure out when you will go to the market/grocery store, make lists of the ingredients you'll need for the recipes, know what you have on hand. It's so easy to call for takeout or pick something up on the way home, but if I went to the market Tuesday for my zucchini soup Thursday, I'm going to go home and cook instead. Planning saves money and calories.

Also, my big tip is popcorn as a snack--it's so much healthier than chips or cookies, and you can eat it slowly. Of course, that's assuming you're making it on the stove, not microwave, and that you don't drench it in butter. Just a little canola oil to facilitate the popping.

I think variety is really important so you don't feel deprived or bored with your food. It's easy to fall into a habit of eating the same vegetables over and over. And cooked the same way, too. Most homecooks can think of 20 different ways to eat chicken from memory, why not 20 ways to eat black beans?

When I'm not feeling like cream and heavy stuff I make a light broth and gently cook vegetable, meat and noodles.