Healthy Cooking by design

I was chatting with someone after a recent Lunch-N-Learn about healthy foods and she reminded me of a couple of tricks she uses to satisfy cravings in a healthier way.   I thought I’d share her tips and a few others.

• When wanting a late night snack, drink a glass of water because we often mistake thirst for hunger.
• When craving something sweet, brew some flavored coffee.  Often, the warmth and the sweet smell satisfies your craving.
• If craving chocolate, make a mug of hot cocoa using skim milk, cocoa, a little sugar, vanilla and a dash of cinnamon.
• Only stock your house with healthy sweets and snack options.
• Take a multi-vitamin and multi-mineral to make sure your body gets what it needs.

Here are a few other resources that bring an interesting perspective to the cravings discussion. The folks at Family Education have an article titled Healthy Eating: Hunger vs. Cravings to help us better understand our body signals. Nutritional Counselor, Stacey Morgenstern, has an article titled Deconstructing Cravings that even has four things for you to do to answer your craving.

Did you ever consider that your body might be craving a particular nutrient?  The folks at Naturopathyworks have.  They developed a chart with things like “If you crave bread, what your body needs is more nitrogen, and it will be satisfied if you eat more high protein foods like fish, meat, nuts, and beans.

Cravings aren’t good or bad.  They are just your body’s way of telling you what it wants right now.  How you answer it will determine what it becomes tomorrow.

I recently did a “Lunch and Learn” event using recipe “make-overs”.  We took several familiar recipes and gave them a healthy make-over by accentuating healthy ingredients, minimizing unhealthy ones, and strategically using others to our best advantage.  Our recipes lost hundreds of calories and significant amounts of fat.  For example, a Spinach Artichoke Dip appetizer from Chili’s, Ruby Tuesday’s, O’Charley’s, or Red Robin is between 905-1248 calories with 55-116% of your total recommended fat for the day.  Our make-over of that appetizer was 130 calories with 9% of your rda of fat.  While we were eating our great looking and tasting recipes, we learned how to apply the same tricks to give healthy “make-overs” to other recipes at home.

I think the saying “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down” is true.  I just tweak it slightly to be “a spoonful of something yummy makes the nutrition go down”.  At an event like that, people enjoy a healthy meal and realize that with a little knowledge of nutrition, some good ingredients, and a few tricks they can easily cook healthier at home.

If you have a group interested in having a Lunch and Learn event, feel free to contact me using the link in the sidebar or email me at healthycookingbydesign at gmail.com.