Many soups are pretty high in fat and can still taste bland. Limit your salt additions to your soups… yes we all know soups usually taste better when they’re a little salty… but remember salt can wreak havoc on your heart.
Best advice I can give for making soups low in fat – cook your soups and stews the day before, store them in the fridge overnight and then the next day, skim off the layer of fat that floats on top of the soup or stew. You’ll find they won’t leave your lips lubricated by the fat. This is especially a good idea if you like to make your own chick stock etc as you would usually use chicken frames and pieces of chicken with the skin left on.

Everyone knows cookies are treats that should not be eaten as a staple food. They don’t really have much nutrients that the body can get a decent use out of.

I started cooking cookies a few months ago as both my partner and I had stopped drinking alcohol but still had the sugar cravings.  I took the normal recipe for cookies and substituted some things out of it.

Butter – you always have butter on the list of ingredients with cookies. I chose to replace half of the butter with skim milk which made my cookies a little bit less naughty. With butter, the cookies are supposed to have a more shapely appearance and better binding than milk and I found with the milk added as a low fat partial substitute, I found my cookies were a little more chewy than my previous batch (which I find a great thing) while still having a crunchy outer coating. A little like Subway cookies if you’ve ever had those.

So overall, using milk as a partial substitute or full substitute, the cookies still come out well but with a lower fat content!

Also, make your cookies more nutritious by adding half a cup or a cup of oat fiber/ whole oats to the dry mix when preparing the cookies (this still works really well with choc chip cookies if you like making those). This will also add a little crunchy texture to your naughty healthy cookies!

It’s easy to cut out a lot of the fats you have in your diet (remembering Omega 3 fats from fish are actually GOOD for you!) Here are a couple of suggestions on lowering your fat intake:

• Trim all visible fat from beef, pork and poultry and remove the skin from poultry before eating.
• Bake, broil, or roast meat dishes instead of deep-fat frying them. To reduce the risk of drying out, baste with a chicken, beef or vegetable broth or lemon juice.
• If pan or stir-frying, use small amounts of vegetable oils such as canola or safflower oil; or preferably olive oil
• Reduce the amount of butter you use in cooking.
• Check the packets’ ingredients for “partially hydrogenated” or “hydrogenated” oils and other products – these are essentially TRANS FATS which are incredibly bad for you (worse than saturated fats) and do no good for your systems (unlike minimal saturated fats help with cells).
• To cut down on whole-milk products, use skim or trim milk. Once you get yourself accustomed to lower fat milk, you’ll find it harder to go back up the chain and will eventually (even within a few weeks) find full cream too rich. Also look for reduced fat cheeses!
• Compare the saturated fat and carbohydrate/sugar levels in ice creams if you want to keep eating ice cream. Overall, saturated fat should be considered more important if you’re tossing up between two containers (ie one with less fat/more sugar vs more fat/less sugar), however getting the lower of both is recommended. If you have yourself on a low fat carb diet, you should aim for the tub with less carbs (or just avoid ice cream).
• Cut the amount of oils, butters and fats mentioned in recipes by 1/3-1/2, and use polyunsaturated and monounsaturated oils rather than saturated and “animal fats” like lard.
• Avoid nuts that are high in saturated fats, such as coconuts and macadamia nuts.

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Let’s face the real facts here, you need to have fat in your diet and you need to have carbs in your diet. Your cells are made up of different fats and carbohydrates and in proper doses can keep you healthy. It’s over eating these types of food that is unhealthy.

So I guess what I’m saying is completely cutting out all carbs and fats is going to end up being bad for you. What you need to concentrate on is cutting out refined carbs like white sugar and white bread and limiting your saturated fats (and obviously trans fat should be next to 0)! You still need Omega 3 from fish, still need the other fats to help with your cells and carbs for energy etc.

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I’ve been exercising everyday but since I am usually very busy, I find it harder to get to the gym than I would like to. I have a personal office so I have come up with a scheme that’s been working quite well for me and has helped me with my weight loss.

Every time I go to the bathroom, I give myself an exercise regime. Ultimately, on my way back to my desk (in a hygeinic area) I do 20 pushups (all the way to the ground) and 20 situps. These situps sometimes alter to be 20 pilate type of horizontal bikeriding. It really works your stomach muscles! I find by the end of the work day I’ve done about 80 pushups and situps. The only downfall, I haven’t broken a sweat. However, remember the first step to losing weight is muscle mass. When you build up your muscle mass, you build up the rate of metabolism (ultimately, the more muscle mass you have, the faster you’ll burn fat!).

I have kept this up for the last 3 weeks and I have lost 5.5kg. I have had a mostly low carb diet but have still had the occasional carbs (which is healthier than leaving them out). I’ve combined the healthy eating and limited exercise with Proactol. While just healthy eating and exercise will make you lose weight, having proactol in the program too gives a big boost and headstart in the weightloss. I saw a lot better results while I was using proactol than when I wasn’t… hence, to me, it’s an essential component for getting faster, successful weight loss results!

See how proactol works. I thought it was a good concept, so I tried it and it turned out to work even better than I thought! If you want to lose weight, you’ve just got to try it! It’s clinically proven to bind to a lot of the fat you eat, so it actually doesn’t get absorbed into your bloodstream and end up on your hips, your belly and your arteries!

I just found this one out the ‘easy way’ lol. I had some bananas sitting on the bench. They were starting to go black so I brought out my blender, threw in all of them (5), some low fat milk and a tablespoon of malt energy drink powder (we call it Milo here). I forgot I had no ice cream left over but the bananas just had to be used anyway and I couldn’t think of a better way than milkshake! You don’t necessarily need ice cream (you can have a low fat and lower sugar milkshake this way anyway) as the bananas help to make it thicker than straight milk. I have been keeping to my low fat diet. The 5 bananas and about 4 cups of milk came to about 5 decent-sized glasses of milkshake. I had about 1 and a half and I was FULL!
I’d put that on par with a meal replacement. Best to have in the morning and there are no added fats, sugars or preservatives because you’re making it yourself.