Lose Weight Recipes - Understand The Basics Of Low Calorie Cooking

It's hard to put a solid number on how many people are trying to shed a few extra pounds at any given moment, but it has to be a lot. Finding lose weight recipes is one way that people use to help them when dieting. Knowing how to find good recipes is important, as is understanding some of the basics of low-calorie cooking.

The internet is loaded with recipes that claim to help you lose weight, but how can you know for sure After all just about anybody can post recipes and tell you that they will help you to lose weight. Think about it. You could actually be gaining weight because somebody didn’t know how many calories were in their recipes. Therefore, it’s a good idea to find recipes that list the how many calories are in each serving.

While the internet is a good source for low-calorie recipes, there are also several printed cookbooks that feature such recipes. You can find cookbooks that cover a wide range of low-calorie dishes, or ones that focus on a certain type of recipe.

Of course there are times when it's not possible to find lose weight recipes that give you the information that you need. Luckily, there are a few other clues that you can look for to get an idea of whether or not a recipe will be able to help you lose weight.

The first step is to look at the ingredients. If it is loaded with saturated fat and sugar, then it's probably not the best recipe to follow. On the other hand, if it contains a lot of fresh ingredients and goes easy on the fat, then it's probably a good choice. There are a lot of variables, but it's fairly easy to learn how to tell if a recipe can help you to lose weight or not.

Sometimes there is a recipe that you simply must try, but you can't find a low-calorie version of it. All hope is not lost, because you can often make substitutions to make your own lose weight recipes. Modifying recipes properly takes practice. Once you get the hang of it, you will be able to enjoy all of your favorite foods without worrying about the damage they may be doing to your waistline. Here are just a few substitutions that you can try:

• Ground turkey for ground beef
• Apple sauce in place of oil (though not all of the oil should be substituted)
• Plain, non-fat yogurt for sour cream
• Acidic marinades instead of oily ones
• Egg whites for whole eggs

It's usually best to only try substituting one ingredient at a time; that way you will be able to tell if a certain substitution works or not. Over time, though, you should be able to drastically reduce the calories in just about any recipe.

Lose weight recipes not only help you to lose weight, but they make losing that weight an easy and enjoyable process.