At Lose Baby Weight we don’t want to be so strict on the foods you can eat that life becomes boring, too hard or annoying. So we have created a number of recipes for you to cook from but we 100% encourage your own creativity in the kitchen and for you to come up with more delicious recipes that will suit you and your family. Our program is meant to give you healthy living habits that you can live by after you have shed the weight and these recipes are ones that you should and can incorporate into your life for the long term. I am always coming up with new healthy recipes to lose weight and I just try and make my family’s meals as healthy and tasty as possible and throw in as many veggies as I can.
Things I can’t live without in my kitchen are:
- A blender for smoothies – this way you can throw any fruit, oats, wheat bran, yoghurts into your nutrition shake every day and have a healthy and tasty breakfast every morning
- A mini blender/chopper – this to me is a must have and God send as I use it every day. I use it for finely chopping up onion, garlic, carrots, veggies, herbs, spinach, making my own mince – just about everything! It means I can whip up tasty meals in no time and will little time, effort and washing up! My husband laughs at how much I use it but I really couldn’t be bothered cooking all the meals I do if I had to chop everything up etc!
- A big serving bowl – again it makes life so much easier when you have made a big tasty dinner then can throw it into a serving bowl – then call everyone to the table and they can help them selves to the food. It is a time saver, it looks good and it means you don’t have to dish all the plates up.
You will get a full selection of recipes as part of your plan but below are a few to get you started and I hope that you like these recipes and they inspire you to eat better and experiment with food. I haven’t put calories/kilojoules next to them as I believe life is too short to count calories and my focus is always healthy nutrition when cooking and making the right choices in the products you use – when you do this you don’t need to worry about calories as your metabolism will be naturally boosted with the foods you eat (providing of course you stay away from cooking with the badies like saturated fat, processed foods and fatty red meat).
A list of foods to avoid in your kitchen:
- Cakes, crisps and biscuits (if you LOVE biscuits buy some low fat/healthy ones for treats)
- Vegetable oil (Have lots of olive in instead)
- Table salt (buy sea salt)
- White bread, pasta, rice (buy wholegrain bread, pasta and rice)
- Ready made meals – they are loaded with salt, additives and preservatives – don’t do it!
- Ice creams (if you love ice cream buy low fat and vanilla which has less additives in)
- Milk chocolate (buy dark chocolate which is good for you – if the taste is too bitter buy one with a flavour in like mint or orange – you do get used to them and I actually don’t like milk chocolate anymore when I used to love it – you have to train your taste buds)
- Fizzy drinks
- Normal cereal (instead stick to oats, muesli, weetbix)
- Full fat milk (use skimmed or try Soy/Rice milk)
- Butter (try an olive oil spread instead)
- Fatty red meats (only buy lean cuts)
- Sausages – high in fat and preservatives
- Canned veg (use fresh or frozen)
A list of foods to stock up on:
- Lean meats
- Fish
- Vegetables – start using them as a major part of all your cooking and carrots are great to snack on during the day
- Fruit (I eat bucket loads of fruit and it is the perfect snack food – go crazy on it)
- Wholegrain bread, rice, pasta
- Rice noodles – super quick to bulk up main meals – they cook in 5 mins
- Olive oil
- Herbs – fresh are best but have dried too – my favourite to cook with are basil, parsley and coriander
- Onions and garlic
- Cous cous – so easy to use and cooks in 2 minutes
- Frozen peas – I throw these into everything
- Tomato paste and canned tomatoes
- Vegetable stock
- Chilli, ginger, mustard seeds, pepper
- Nuts – great for snacking on
- Tinned organic lentils and beans
