Rekindle home cooking to get on the prevention path!
It’s very difficult to eat fresh foods or minimize your intake of processed foods when you’re eating out a lot, ordering in, or eating microwave dinners.
Home cooking for the non-cook:
- Make foods ready-to-eat. When you make healthy food easy to grab during your busy week, you’re more likely to stay heart-healthy. When you come home from grocery shopping, cut up vegetables and fruits and store them in the fridge, ready for the next meal or when you are looking for a ready-to-eat snack.
- Use your freezer. Make healthy eating easier by freezing heart-healthy foods in individual portions. Freeze fruits such as bananas, grapes, and orange slices to make them more fun to eat for children. Be careful with portion sizes: the recommended serving of cooked meat is about the size of a deck of cards, while a serving of pasta should be about the size of a baseball.
- Make healthy substitutions. Choose substitutions like 1% or skimmed milk instead of whole milk, soft margarine for butter, and lean meats like chicken and fish in place of ribs or ground meat. These substitutions can save you an entire day’s worth of saturated fat.
Take over the kitchen and take control over you’re your health!
May I say, “it’s a no-brainer that when you prepare and cook meals at home, you have better control over the nutritional content and the overall healthfulness of the foods you eat.
A BONUS: you also save money!
- Create a library of healthy recipes. Stock up on heart-healthy cookbooks and recipes or check out the internet for food blogs and websites devoted to healthy cooking methods and recipes.
- Use healthy cooking methods. Just as important as choosing healthy foods at the grocery store is how you cook those foods into healthy meals. Use low-fat methods: you can bake, broil, microwave, roast, steam, poach, lightly stir fry, or sauté—using a small amount of vegetable or olive oil, reduced sodium broth, and spices.
- Cook just twice a week and make food for the whole week. When you’re cooking healthful meals, make extra helpings. Store as meals in reusable containers—or directly on plates—for easy reheating and ready-to-eat food the rest of the week. Cooking healthy food ahead this way is perhaps the most time-saving, money-saving, and heart-saving strategy available.
The 3rd part of the series will give you the specific foods that put out the fire of inflammation. If you have any burning nutrition questions, be sure to contact me today!
